Sunday Morning Book Thread 10-10-2021

Library of Otto Penzer, Owner, Mysterious Bookshop, NYC

Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, crétins sans pantalon (who are technically breaking the rules). Welcome once again to the stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, a weekly compendium of reviews, observations, snark, witty repartee, hilarious bon mots, and a continuing conversation on books, reading, spending way too much money on books, writing books, and publishing books by escaped oafs and oafettes who follow words with their fingers and whose lips move as they read. Unlike other AoSHQ comment threads, the Sunday Morning Book Thread is so hoity-toity, pants are required. Even if it's these pants, worn by this guy who looks like a newly-minted grievance studies graduate going to his first job interview. He'll be hired by one of the social media behemoths and put in charge of the department that decides what is and what is not allowed to be said.

Pic Note:

Need a house to hold all of your books? Well then, build your own:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good 60,000 books must be in want of a very big house.

At some point in the mid-1980s, Otto Penzler, the indefatigable founder and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop, the Manhattan store specializing in fictitious tales of crime and espionage and whodunits of a high order, could no longer ignore the evidence: His personal collection of first editions had outgrown his office, and cartons containing the overflow were stashed in a pal’s garage. They needed a room of their own.

So Penzler built his own house in Connecticut to his his ginormous book stash. Took him over a decade, burned through a ton of cash, and two wives, but he finally finished it.

But then:

Three years ago, Mr. Penzler put his collection up for auction. All that remain are reference books, copies of the anthologies he has edited and a small cache of rare books.

Yes, Mr. Penzler has discovered that indeed, all is vanity.

He is the editor of numerous mystery anthologies, and the latest one is due out on Oct 19th, The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries:

This collection brings together incredible stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Guy de Maupassant among other legendary writers of the grand era of the British Empire. So brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.

The Kindle edition is $14.99, and for a price like that, I have to wonder how much of the material is in the public domain. There's no Amazon preview, so I have no idea. Other Penzler anthologies include The Best American Noir of the Century and The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.

Need More Pulp In Your Diet?

This link has been open in my browser for a number of weeks and I am just now getting to it. Welcome to the Pulp Magazine Project:

The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access digital archive dedicated to the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century's most influential literary & artistic forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The Project also provides information on the history of this important but long neglected medium, along with biographies of pulp authors, artists, and their publishers. The site launched in July 2011, and has received over 1,500,000 page views from 192 countries around the world.

At the heart of the Project's mission is the archive itself. In July 2011, it began with a modest library of five representative first-generation titles from the early 1900s. As of March 2017, this number had grown to include over 400 individual issues, representing 85 different titles from the United States, England, and Australia. Over time, the archive will continue to expand, as new magazines are digitized, and new contextual materials added. Eventually, it will feature a broad range of pre-1923 titles, post-1923 titles where copyright has lapsed, and full volume runs of select titles from 1896 to 1946.

Here is the main archive, and it's packed full with pulpy goodness.

I've also been made aware of Travelyn Publishing, whose digital offerings "comprise both new original books written specifically for Travelyn Publishing, and old public domain books... primarily the latter."

Travelyn is very proud of the quality of its digital reproductions:

Our motivation for getting into this business was seeing so many poorly-formatted eBooks for sale. Even large, established publishers seem to consider digital books to be little more than afterthoughts, hardly worth their time and effort—for many publishers there seems to be no attempt to strive for quality...It’s like they don’t care. We care. We embrace the digital revolution and think eBooks are the cat’s meow.

Converting old books comes with its own issues and techniques. We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison. Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book. However, while remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes. That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.

For example, I looked at the preview for Marching On: From the Rapidan to Cold Harbor: A Story of the Terrible Battles of the Wilderness, a Civil War novelette originally published in the 1880s, and it's not a photocopy or a poor quality OCR scan as many public-domain books are. It looks like somebody just typed the original text in a modern font. Or maybe it was OCRed in and then meticulously corrected. Whatever the case, it looks pretty good. And it's only $2.45 on Kindle.

Travelyn publishes a number of genres, including fiction, non fiction, pulp fiction, young adult ("youth") and more. And most every item seems to be less than $5.00.

Even if you don't buy anything, it's probably worth bookmarking.

Who Dis:

Moron Recommendations

75 I read this about 20 years ago, but am re-reading it now because it's such an excellent book. Written by Robert Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra chronicles the last Tsar, Nicholas Romanov, and the end to the Romanov dynasty during the Russian Revolution of 1917. A fascinating, and harrowing, true account of the private family life of the Romanovs, their children and the devastating influence of Rasputin on Alexandra amidst the upheaval of one of the most explosive events in the 20th century, imo. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Posted by: Lady in Black at October 03, 2021 08:38 AM (O+I8R)

This is actually the 3rd book in Massie's 'Romanovs' series. The first one was Peter the Great: His Life and World, then Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, and series concluded with The Romanovs: The Final Chapter.

So Lady in Black read Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, which is

The story of the love that ended an empire.

In this commanding book, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of Imperial Russia to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble.

I kind of want to read the whole series myself now. The Kindle edition is $7.99.

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128 The other WWII book I read is called Nazi Millionaires The Search for Hidden SS Gold by Kenneth Alford and Theodore Savas. This book goes into details of the how the SS stole all sorts of things, especially gold. It also covers the Nazi counterfeit operations. It covers the movements of several SS officers in the last days of the war. Most of the stories take place in Southern Germany and Austria. Definitely would recommend, I mean, who doesn't like Nazi gold?

Posted by: prophet of the group W bench at September 19, 2021 08:45 AM (s37kI)

Good question. The book definitely sounds like a ripping good yarn:

During the final days of World War II, German SS officers crammed trains, cars, and trucks full of gold, currency, and jewels, and headed for the mountains of Austria. Fearful of arrest and determined to keep the stolen loot out of Allied hands, they concealed their treasures and fled. Most of these men were eventually apprehended, but many managed to evade capture. The intensive postwar Allied investigation that followed recovered only a sliver of this mountain of gold. What happened to the rest of it, and what fate befell these men?

Indeed. Where's Indiana Jones when we need him? I'll bet he could solve these mysteries. And recover all of the stolen artifacts to boot.

Actually, I thought most of it all ended up in South America.

The Kindle edition is $7.39.

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132 After 3 weeks of not being able to find a book that I wanted to read, I picked up Michael Chrichton's Pirate Latitudes.

I've mentioned before that some books grab you by the lapels and PULL you in.

Pirate Latitudes is such a book.

Posted by: JT at October 03, 2021 09:11 AM (arJlL)

I wish I had known about Pirate Latitudes last month so I could've pimped it up on "Talk Like a Pirate" Day. Dang. Oh, well. Anyway, the USA Today review says "Pirate Latitudes has the loot: Gore, sex, action", so you know it has to be a great book. The NY Times calls it "an irresistable tale of swashbuckling pirates in the New World—a classic story of treasure and betrayal."

The Caribbean, 1665. A remote colony of the English Crown, the island of Jamaica holds out against the vast supremacy of the Spanish empire. Port Royal, its capital, is a cutthroat town of taverns, grog shops, and bawdy houses. In this steamy climate there’s a living to be made, a living that can end swiftly by disease—or by dagger. For Captain Charles Hunter, gold in Spanish hands is gold for the taking, and the law of the land rests with those ruthless enough to make it. Word in port is that a galleon, fresh from New Spain, is awaiting repairs in a nearby harbor...

Well, shiver me timbers! The Kindle edition is $9.99.

Aarrrhhh!

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It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®

Books By Morons

A lurking moron author has just released what appears to be his first novel, Peculiar Activities, the story of a young detective that finds an old conspiracy:

Junior Detective Henry Ike Pierce is hired to reassess cold-case killings. On the third day of his new job, a dismembered body appears in a local park. The corpse's desecration is like slayings from over two decades ago, and his boss assigns Henry to his first investigation. He must uncover the present-day killer while his boss pushes him to resolve crimes from the past. Henry seeks a killer within a community of rival ethnic groups, refugees from the 1990s Balkan wars. Rumors point to a killer called 'the hooded one.' As his investigation unfolds, the young man from western Virginia's coal country discovers that 'trust' has a flexible definition.

The Kindle edition is $5.99.

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So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, insults, threats, ugly pants pics and moron library submissions may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.

posted by OregonMuse at 09:00 AM

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