If it’s kosher for the goddamn NYRB to have contributors review books, why not blessed First of the Month? So I give you the (primarily) visual artist Michael Brod (We have never met) on “Bob on Bob”: “(A) brilliant collection of essays… a smorgasbord of pithy observations and freewheeling narrative… Every page is tasty.””
Copies available ($15, including postage) from Spruce Hill Press. POB 9492. Berkeley 94709.
Perception
https://www.firstofthemonth.org/perception/
My latest mini is up at First of the Month.
It begins:
The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.
My latest mini is up at First of the Month.
It begins:
The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.
Last Ten Books Read — xxviii
Last 10 Books Read – xxviii
(In order of completion – and at three lines apiece.)
1. Donal Ryan. “The Queen of Dirt Island.” My cousin Elizabeth said if I liked Claire Keegan, I would like this. I had and I did. I told Adele the same thing and she liked it too. Lives and deaths flow through it in captivating two page chapters, their uniformity enhancing its variety.
2. Joseph Mitchell. “My Ears are Bent.” I thought I might have already read this, but Moe’s had marked it down to $5, and you can never have too much Mitchell in your life. (I had read it, it turned out, but, like. 30 years ago, so almost all of it seemed new.)
3. Angela Lam. “Red Eggs and Good Luck.” I swapped books with a romance novel/memoirist. I like memoirs more than romance novels, but I don’t like either much, and this one, while containing an interesting character or two, did not raise my estimation of the genre.
4. Percival Everett. “Trees.” Everett is successful and well-regarded, but this comic-grotesque about lynching struck me as of no interest to anyone not extremely mad at white people. The characters are shallow; the plot simplistic; the “humor” juvenile, the thought/complexity scanty.
5. Han Kang. “Human Acts.” If you want a novel about disproportionate brutality inflected upon innocent people, this is a better choice. You need know nothing about the actual historic events at its center of it to be cowed and awed. Inventively structured and immaculately composed
6. Muriel Spark. “A Far Cry from Kensington.” Thoroughly enjoyable. Fun characters. Engaging story. Smartly written. One is delighted to be in such an adept presence. This is the third Spark I have read and I will seek more.
7. Han Kang “The White Book.” The third of her five novels translated into English I have read in the last couple months. (Two to go.) The slimmest and, in a sense, most ephemeral but no less harrowing or gripping or engaged by the tragedies of life.
8. Nikhil Krishnan. “A Terribly Serious Adventure.” A history of philosophy at Oxford (1900 – 1960). The philosophers were a colorful bunch, but the philosophy was difficult to digest. And the question of why bother with what it bothered with remained elusive throughout.
9. Leila Slimani. “Lullaby.” Page one informs the reader that a nanny has killed the two children under her care. Things do not become much sunnier. It won the Prix Goncourt, but be warned if you decide to venture into it. And what is wrong with the French anyway?
10. Lawrence Wright. “The Looming Tower.” I am late getting to this since it won a Pulitzer in 2011, but it is the best journalistic history I have read in a while. A thoroughly researched look into the origins of Al-Queda and the turf wars in US national security that let 9/11 happen.
(In order of completion – and at three lines apiece.)
1. Donal Ryan. “The Queen of Dirt Island.” My cousin Elizabeth said if I liked Claire Keegan, I would like this. I had and I did. I told Adele the same thing and she liked it too. Lives and deaths flow through it in captivating two page chapters, their uniformity enhancing its variety.
2. Joseph Mitchell. “My Ears are Bent.” I thought I might have already read this, but Moe’s had marked it down to $5, and you can never have too much Mitchell in your life. (I had read it, it turned out, but, like. 30 years ago, so almost all of it seemed new.)
3. Angela Lam. “Red Eggs and Good Luck.” I swapped books with a romance novel/memoirist. I like memoirs more than romance novels, but I don’t like either much, and this one, while containing an interesting character or two, did not raise my estimation of the genre.
4. Percival Everett. “Trees.” Everett is successful and well-regarded, but this comic-grotesque about lynching struck me as of no interest to anyone not extremely mad at white people. The characters are shallow; the plot simplistic; the “humor” juvenile, the thought/complexity scanty.
5. Han Kang. “Human Acts.” If you want a novel about disproportionate brutality inflected upon innocent people, this is a better choice. You need know nothing about the actual historic events at its center of it to be cowed and awed. Inventively structured and immaculately composed
6. Muriel Spark. “A Far Cry from Kensington.” Thoroughly enjoyable. Fun characters. Engaging story. Smartly written. One is delighted to be in such an adept presence. This is the third Spark I have read and I will seek more.
7. Han Kang “The White Book.” The third of her five novels translated into English I have read in the last couple months. (Two to go.) The slimmest and, in a sense, most ephemeral but no less harrowing or gripping or engaged by the tragedies of life.
8. Nikhil Krishnan. “A Terribly Serious Adventure.” A history of philosophy at Oxford (1900 – 1960). The philosophers were a colorful bunch, but the philosophy was difficult to digest. And the question of why bother with what it bothered with remained elusive throughout.
9. Leila Slimani. “Lullaby.” Page one informs the reader that a nanny has killed the two children under her care. Things do not become much sunnier. It won the Prix Goncourt, but be warned if you decide to venture into it. And what is wrong with the French anyway?
10. Lawrence Wright. “The Looming Tower.” I am late getting to this since it won a Pulitzer in 2011, but it is the best journalistic history I have read in a while. A thoroughly researched look into the origins of Al-Queda and the turf wars in US national security that let 9/11 happen.
Adventures in Marketing: Weeks 465 – 466
No sales.
One notable almost-transaction though.
I’ve seen Jules around for years. Sometimes he is in one café, sometimes another. Sometimes he’s in the copy shop, sometimes the laundromat. Usually he is thickly bearded, black with grey. Sometimes he is shaved. He always has bags and backpacks and blankets and sleeping bag with him which he piles next to where he is sitting and that, after a time, cause the manager of his place of choice to ask him to transfer his allegiance. Usually, he sleeps in a shed on the grounds of a synagogue where he views himself as providing “security.” A few months ago, he was granted SSI and now sometimes sleeps at the Y.
Nick knows a lot about jazz. The other day I learned he’d been a fine tenor player. When I mentioned this, he said, “Average. But I could fake it.” This led to a discussion – well, monologue – about his playing in clubs in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Dexter Gordon was mentioned. Sonny Simmons. A group of Jewish, Ivy League – he was specific about this – Yale, Brown, Princeton – reed players of New Music, with whom he’d gigged in Berkeley in the ‘80s. Then there was a beating he’d received when his horn was stolen, and, after which, he never played again.
He asked which was my newest book.
I pointed to “Bob on Bob.”
He said he had read parts of “Best Ride.” “But something was wrong with how it was printed.”
I had never heard that complaint before.
“Where was your head at when you wrote it?”
I had never been asked that either.
I told him the genre in which I’d seen myself working. I mentioned the stylists by whom I’d felt influenced. This led no further into matters of literature so I offered him “Bob” as a gift.
He insisted on paying.
“$10,then. Or $5. $2. Whatever you can afford. I also take trade.” He’d mentioned tapes of his playing.
“A poem?”
“I’ve done poetry.”
He spoke four words, two rhyming.
“I wasn’t thinking oral. But okay.”
Now Nick had reconsidered. He proposed we meet at an outdoor café he had discovered in which the owner was friendly to him. I accepted – but he could not remember the street it was on and didn’t have a phone on which I could call him when he found out. We agreed that he would come by my café and we would walk down together.
In other news…
“Messiahs,” my publisher advises, will be released in June. Because it’s a limited edition, promotion will be slim. Distribution will be taken care of. Amazon, book databases, and social media. If I want a reading, it will see what it can do.
I’m not big on readings, but I’d probably okay any invitation that comes my way. My main event will be the launch party I am planning for the café. Meanwhile, copies can be ordered by sending $30, (plus $5 for mailing if you don’t plan to pick it up in person) to POB 9492, Berkeley 94709. The book will also be available at my web site (www.theboblevin.com), but it’s not there yet.
Remember, “limited” edition. Act quick and don’t get left out.
One notable almost-transaction though.
I’ve seen Jules around for years. Sometimes he is in one café, sometimes another. Sometimes he’s in the copy shop, sometimes the laundromat. Usually he is thickly bearded, black with grey. Sometimes he is shaved. He always has bags and backpacks and blankets and sleeping bag with him which he piles next to where he is sitting and that, after a time, cause the manager of his place of choice to ask him to transfer his allegiance. Usually, he sleeps in a shed on the grounds of a synagogue where he views himself as providing “security.” A few months ago, he was granted SSI and now sometimes sleeps at the Y.
Nick knows a lot about jazz. The other day I learned he’d been a fine tenor player. When I mentioned this, he said, “Average. But I could fake it.” This led to a discussion – well, monologue – about his playing in clubs in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Dexter Gordon was mentioned. Sonny Simmons. A group of Jewish, Ivy League – he was specific about this – Yale, Brown, Princeton – reed players of New Music, with whom he’d gigged in Berkeley in the ‘80s. Then there was a beating he’d received when his horn was stolen, and, after which, he never played again.
He asked which was my newest book.
I pointed to “Bob on Bob.”
He said he had read parts of “Best Ride.” “But something was wrong with how it was printed.”
I had never heard that complaint before.
“Where was your head at when you wrote it?”
I had never been asked that either.
I told him the genre in which I’d seen myself working. I mentioned the stylists by whom I’d felt influenced. This led no further into matters of literature so I offered him “Bob” as a gift.
He insisted on paying.
“$10,then. Or $5. $2. Whatever you can afford. I also take trade.” He’d mentioned tapes of his playing.
“A poem?”
“I’ve done poetry.”
He spoke four words, two rhyming.
“I wasn’t thinking oral. But okay.”
Now Nick had reconsidered. He proposed we meet at an outdoor café he had discovered in which the owner was friendly to him. I accepted – but he could not remember the street it was on and didn’t have a phone on which I could call him when he found out. We agreed that he would come by my café and we would walk down together.
In other news…
“Messiahs,” my publisher advises, will be released in June. Because it’s a limited edition, promotion will be slim. Distribution will be taken care of. Amazon, book databases, and social media. If I want a reading, it will see what it can do.
I’m not big on readings, but I’d probably okay any invitation that comes my way. My main event will be the launch party I am planning for the café. Meanwhile, copies can be ordered by sending $30, (plus $5 for mailing if you don’t plan to pick it up in person) to POB 9492, Berkeley 94709. The book will also be available at my web site (www.theboblevin.com), but it’s not there yet.
Remember, “limited” edition. Act quick and don’t get left out.
Adventures in Marketing — Weeks 461 -464
Conversations with a female butcher (“The Schiz”) and a male mixed-media artist (“Bob on Bob”) produced words of interest and promises of follow-up – but sales of zero. I gave away one book (“Outlaws, Rebels…)” though, through a web of café connectives.
It reached Z, an author/publisher; but before we get to him, we must pass through the authors Y and X and W, another author/publisher. As I was headed to the rest room, X stopped me to say Y had been looking for me. When I speculated he probably wanted to know if I had read his latest book, which he had given me two weeks earlier which I have had trouble reading (but am about a third through), X asked who had published it. I said it seemed to be an Austrian company, which could do books in English but had no distribution in the US, o its business bona fides seemed questionable. I then asked how X’s own book was coming along. He said Y’s company had it, which, as he described it, seemed to have devolved from a non-profit dependant on grants to a hybrid that charged authors for services. It had Y’s book for six months and was still demanding revisions he disagreed with. X was asking about my book when Z arrived.
Now Z and I have a strained relationship. Usually we ignore each other but once we’d exchanged words of a nature most uncharacteristic of me, who is generally as serene as ‘enry ‘iggins at his most mannerly. Not long ago, as what I took to be a conciliatory gesture, Z had given me his new book (published by his company), which I have been unable to read and have spent much time considering how to rid myself of. But he now seemed sufficiently interested in and impressed by my forthcoming publication that I gave him what I did.
Which, I am sure, he won’t read and will have to figure out what to do with.
Meanwhile, we have resumed ignoring each other.
In other news…
1.) I received a FB “Message” from a woman who had somehow gotten hold of a “Goshkin.” “A much needed, desperately wonderful transfusion,” she wrote, “poignant and lovely…” What a delightful surprise!
2.) And my publisher confirms “Messiahs…” went to the printer’s Friday. (Or, if it didn’t, it will go today.) Furthermore, my copy for the web site announcing the availability of pre-publication orders has been approved. Once it is up, I will let all know.
It reached Z, an author/publisher; but before we get to him, we must pass through the authors Y and X and W, another author/publisher. As I was headed to the rest room, X stopped me to say Y had been looking for me. When I speculated he probably wanted to know if I had read his latest book, which he had given me two weeks earlier which I have had trouble reading (but am about a third through), X asked who had published it. I said it seemed to be an Austrian company, which could do books in English but had no distribution in the US, o its business bona fides seemed questionable. I then asked how X’s own book was coming along. He said Y’s company had it, which, as he described it, seemed to have devolved from a non-profit dependant on grants to a hybrid that charged authors for services. It had Y’s book for six months and was still demanding revisions he disagreed with. X was asking about my book when Z arrived.
Now Z and I have a strained relationship. Usually we ignore each other but once we’d exchanged words of a nature most uncharacteristic of me, who is generally as serene as ‘enry ‘iggins at his most mannerly. Not long ago, as what I took to be a conciliatory gesture, Z had given me his new book (published by his company), which I have been unable to read and have spent much time considering how to rid myself of. But he now seemed sufficiently interested in and impressed by my forthcoming publication that I gave him what I did.
Which, I am sure, he won’t read and will have to figure out what to do with.
Meanwhile, we have resumed ignoring each other.
In other news…
1.) I received a FB “Message” from a woman who had somehow gotten hold of a “Goshkin.” “A much needed, desperately wonderful transfusion,” she wrote, “poignant and lovely…” What a delightful surprise!
2.) And my publisher confirms “Messiahs…” went to the printer’s Friday. (Or, if it didn’t, it will go today.) Furthermore, my copy for the web site announcing the availability of pre-publication orders has been approved. Once it is up, I will let all know.
Adventures in Marketing — Week 460
PayPal notified me someone had bought “Most Outrageous” through my web site. I hadn’t sold a book there in months – and anyone who buys a MO always makes me curious, but when I asked the buyer for his address, he wondered if I could sell him a signed “Pirates/Mouse” and “Outlaws/Rebels” too, so I figured he was a regular – or irregular – comix guy and relaxed. (He was, he later clarified, a Bronx-based sound/writing/ drawing artist, who loved the “radical spirit and energy” behind comix. And visiting his web site revealed hm to be probably around 70 and someone of substance and acclaim.)
Since OR and PM are out-of-print, I can only replenish my supply on-line. Because anyone can do this, I feel bad about marking up the price to make a profit (and if not for profit, why sell them). After explaining this, I asked if my signature was worth a 10% add-on. It was, so I went shopping. I found best-available copies, figured in tax, shipping (dealer-to-me, me-to-buyer), and weighted this by what my royalties if the books had sold new. We struck a deal, and rather than making him wait for me to receive the books before sending them, I shipped two of at least comparable quality ones from my stock on hand.
I next asked how he had heard of me. He turned out to be the “partner” of the artist who had picked up an OR a couple of years ago at an art museum book store in Harrisburg and had emailed me because of how it had affected her. She had been after him to read it since, he said, plus “Your name kept coming up in conversation with other artists.”
That’s “artists,” plural. Which is more than among whom my name comes up in my home café. I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks it’s a matter of forests and trees. The trees are that I write about comix and cartoonists, and most people’s reflective thinking keeps them from seeing the wondrous forest I’ve created doing this in the past 30 years. (I concede there is some of the “obscene, perverse and tasteless” I’ve been called out for in these woods, which can me a turn-off.)
In other news…
Faithful readers will recall (See “Adventures” 459) my racing to replace “Messiahs…” lost Author’s Note. Mission accomplished – but I have not heard from the publisher since. (Yes, I inquired.) Perhaps, like Berkeley’s hallowed Cheeseboard Collective, he has taken off the post-New Year’s week. I will follow up once I have judged I am past being annoying and his guilt has built up.
Since OR and PM are out-of-print, I can only replenish my supply on-line. Because anyone can do this, I feel bad about marking up the price to make a profit (and if not for profit, why sell them). After explaining this, I asked if my signature was worth a 10% add-on. It was, so I went shopping. I found best-available copies, figured in tax, shipping (dealer-to-me, me-to-buyer), and weighted this by what my royalties if the books had sold new. We struck a deal, and rather than making him wait for me to receive the books before sending them, I shipped two of at least comparable quality ones from my stock on hand.
I next asked how he had heard of me. He turned out to be the “partner” of the artist who had picked up an OR a couple of years ago at an art museum book store in Harrisburg and had emailed me because of how it had affected her. She had been after him to read it since, he said, plus “Your name kept coming up in conversation with other artists.”
That’s “artists,” plural. Which is more than among whom my name comes up in my home café. I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks it’s a matter of forests and trees. The trees are that I write about comix and cartoonists, and most people’s reflective thinking keeps them from seeing the wondrous forest I’ve created doing this in the past 30 years. (I concede there is some of the “obscene, perverse and tasteless” I’ve been called out for in these woods, which can me a turn-off.)
In other news…
Faithful readers will recall (See “Adventures” 459) my racing to replace “Messiahs…” lost Author’s Note. Mission accomplished – but I have not heard from the publisher since. (Yes, I inquired.) Perhaps, like Berkeley’s hallowed Cheeseboard Collective, he has taken off the post-New Year’s week. I will follow up once I have judged I am past being annoying and his guilt has built up.
Latest
https://www.firstofthemonth.org/imperfection/
Adele and I have a joint mini-capsule film review up in the rew FOM. (I’d quote the opening but it is too mini-.) This seems an issue loaded with good stuff by many of my favorite contributors, featuring a number of Bob Dylan-related pieces, some original and some reprints, like my seminal “The Man, the Moment, the Italian Meats Sandwich,” my most reprinted piece, (twice, not including once by me), still the best thing about Bob ever written..
Adele and I have a joint mini-capsule film review up in the rew FOM. (I’d quote the opening but it is too mini-.) This seems an issue loaded with good stuff by many of my favorite contributors, featuring a number of Bob Dylan-related pieces, some original and some reprints, like my seminal “The Man, the Moment, the Italian Meats Sandwich,” my most reprinted piece, (twice, not including once by me), still the best thing about Bob ever written..
Adventures in Marketing — Week 459
A friend in NYC told me that an on-line discussion group in which she devotedly participates recently spent an hour on Bob Dylan. After she mentioned my book, several people, including the leader, said they would buy it. She provided my POB, but, so far, no checks have arrived. However I sold a “Bob” at the café to a professionally well-credentialed French horn player who had eyed my several of books previously without purchasing. But having seen the new movie, he took the plunge.
The movie has sparked a lot of Dylan chatter at the café. I have mainly stayed clear and an unlikely to see the film. I see no point to it. I liked the Todd Haynes movie for its imagination, and I liked the Coen brothers recapitulation of the scene, but I was “there.” I lived through it and have my own Dylan in place. Why watch some fictionalized bio-pic and ponder why and where “Judas!” was screamed? I read the book on which it’s based and don’t recall taking much away from it – unlike, say “Positively Fourth Street,” which I thought dishonest crap.
I take it one question on people’s minds is to what extent was Dylan a scheming, back-stabbing, success-hungry opportunist? I don’t credit this line of thinking much. In 1964/65, I doubt anyone was thinking, Hmmm, if I add some amps and symbolist imagery to folk music, I bet I’ll be bigger than Trini Lopez.
In other news…
The “Messiah…” covers are done! Knock-outs! Ready to go. Except my first footnote to my introductory Author’s Note, in which I thanked my proofreaders had disappeared. Then when I re-drafted it for inclusion, the entire Note couldn’t be found.
I’m on it.
The movie has sparked a lot of Dylan chatter at the café. I have mainly stayed clear and an unlikely to see the film. I see no point to it. I liked the Todd Haynes movie for its imagination, and I liked the Coen brothers recapitulation of the scene, but I was “there.” I lived through it and have my own Dylan in place. Why watch some fictionalized bio-pic and ponder why and where “Judas!” was screamed? I read the book on which it’s based and don’t recall taking much away from it – unlike, say “Positively Fourth Street,” which I thought dishonest crap.
I take it one question on people’s minds is to what extent was Dylan a scheming, back-stabbing, success-hungry opportunist? I don’t credit this line of thinking much. In 1964/65, I doubt anyone was thinking, Hmmm, if I add some amps and symbolist imagery to folk music, I bet I’ll be bigger than Trini Lopez.
In other news…
The “Messiah…” covers are done! Knock-outs! Ready to go. Except my first footnote to my introductory Author’s Note, in which I thanked my proofreaders had disappeared. Then when I re-drafted it for inclusion, the entire Note couldn’t be found.
I’m on it.
Adventures in Marketing — Weeks 447 – 458
Phillip has chronic health problems (lungs) and, as far as I knew, had not left his house since Covid. I had thought of calling him but, I explained when he walked into the café, “The longer it went and I didn’t, the less I wanted to…” “Because you thought I was dead,” he finished for me. “I thought the same about you.” We had a good laugh.
Phillip’s thinning hair seemed to have gone months without trimming. Patches of grey beard splotched his cheeks and jaw line. He has lived for extended periods in Paris, where he has a publisher who, in an arrangement I do not understand – and about which I do not inquire – releases his books in English; but distribution is entirely Phillip’s responsibility. He keeps a mental log of local stores which will not even take his work on consignment.
He had been among a group of promising young writers in S. F. in the early ‘70s, centered around North Beach’s Intersection for the Arts, most of whom had eclipsed him. His conversation is full of references to men by whom he was betrayed him and women who have rejected him for others. I sometimes thinks he tolerates me only because he views my literary career as not having as risen as far from the launch pad as even his before exploding.
Through it all, Phillip has kept writing. He has written four books since we were last in touch, and he gave me the most recent, a seemingly autobiographical 550-page novel about failed relationships. In return, I gave him a “Bob on Bob” and the café journal in which I appeared, the only books I had with me he did not already have.
Phillip’s prose is crammed with ideas and attitude. It does not make the slightest concession toward commerce or affability. His work has my respect without being something I look forward to grabbing off the bedside table. Any White Whale he has landed will not be easily consumed.
In other news…
“Messiahs…” is at the point of minor fixes and preparing back cover copy. My editor/ publisher says, due to the printer being in China, it will not be available for five or six months, but pre-publication orders will be solicited in two. It will be 350-pages, 6″ X 9″, retailing for $25 or $30, depending on the printer’s charges (and maybe Trump’s tariffs). I am thrilled.
And Phillip was “…jealous.”
Adventures in Marketing — Weeks 455-456
Sold a “Pirates and the Mouse.”
Faithful readers will recall the gentleman (See “Adventure” 454) to whom I had promised to sell a copy for $10, half my former asking price, because he could pick one up on-line, used, for about $8. He had never reappeared, but a café friend/customer had spotted it and said she would buy it once she had the cash on hand.
That moment having arrived, she handed me a $20. But I felt I should give her the same deal as the other guy, so I gave her back $10. However, when I checked on-line, I learned that the least expensive copy available now cost $15. (Had the scoundrel – see above bought it himself?) My friend gave me another $5. Then I saw I had neglected to figure in the sales tax, so I returned the $5 to her and she the $20 to me.
Business has been slow. Not only am I selling few books, I am attracting few interesting conversationalists. Not that the café has been interesting conversation-free. It is that generally they do not directly involve me, often by my choice.
Take the fellow who caught my ear by telling the barista he had been dropping by the café for decades (though not recently), and was startled to learn it shared space with a hotel, which it had since the 1980s. He had many questions, including the cost of a room ($175), whether he could see them (no), where the entrance was (same as the café’s), how many people were on duty at night (one), whether it would be a good place for he and his girl to spend a “night of passion.” I didn’t know whether he was planning a hoist or was just out of his mind.
He then reported a memorable morning when he had arrived and seen a dead body lying in the street with no one around it. He must have been first upon the scene and the most striking thing he recalled was that the victim was shoeless and wore blue socks.
In other news…
Much progress on “Messiahs…” Gary (the publisher) sent me the revised pdf (interior pages only). I caught one minor problem (I can live with it) and a significant one I had pointed out before, which didn’t seem to have been addressed. (An illustration had been selected for a chapter which didn’t seem to be from the book under discussion.) However, a terrific illustration had been selected for a chapter, replacing one which had been a mere space-holder.)
Also I would like to see the covers. Given that one misspelled my name and another omitted a key word from the title this is not a minor matter.
But otherwise, we are ready to ship to the printer. Which is thrilling and exciting.
Faithful readers will recall the gentleman (See “Adventure” 454) to whom I had promised to sell a copy for $10, half my former asking price, because he could pick one up on-line, used, for about $8. He had never reappeared, but a café friend/customer had spotted it and said she would buy it once she had the cash on hand.
That moment having arrived, she handed me a $20. But I felt I should give her the same deal as the other guy, so I gave her back $10. However, when I checked on-line, I learned that the least expensive copy available now cost $15. (Had the scoundrel – see above bought it himself?) My friend gave me another $5. Then I saw I had neglected to figure in the sales tax, so I returned the $5 to her and she the $20 to me.
Business has been slow. Not only am I selling few books, I am attracting few interesting conversationalists. Not that the café has been interesting conversation-free. It is that generally they do not directly involve me, often by my choice.
Take the fellow who caught my ear by telling the barista he had been dropping by the café for decades (though not recently), and was startled to learn it shared space with a hotel, which it had since the 1980s. He had many questions, including the cost of a room ($175), whether he could see them (no), where the entrance was (same as the café’s), how many people were on duty at night (one), whether it would be a good place for he and his girl to spend a “night of passion.” I didn’t know whether he was planning a hoist or was just out of his mind.
He then reported a memorable morning when he had arrived and seen a dead body lying in the street with no one around it. He must have been first upon the scene and the most striking thing he recalled was that the victim was shoeless and wore blue socks.
In other news…
Much progress on “Messiahs…” Gary (the publisher) sent me the revised pdf (interior pages only). I caught one minor problem (I can live with it) and a significant one I had pointed out before, which didn’t seem to have been addressed. (An illustration had been selected for a chapter which didn’t seem to be from the book under discussion.) However, a terrific illustration had been selected for a chapter, replacing one which had been a mere space-holder.)
Also I would like to see the covers. Given that one misspelled my name and another omitted a key word from the title this is not a minor matter.
But otherwise, we are ready to ship to the printer. Which is thrilling and exciting.