News You Can Bruise for 2007 March 21 (entry 0)

(2) Wed Mar 21 2007 23:45 Stranded: I dislike the Strand bookstore in Manhattan for a number of reasons. As pointed out in John Henry Days, New York media people are always getting review copies of books and upon receipt they immediately trot over to Strand to sell the review copies for a couple bucks. Strand has whole aisles of review copies in the basement, fifteen copies of every lame-ass nonfiction book from the past two years. Who buys them? I suspect the only buyers are the other, scraggly-looking used bookstores in the New York area who are the scavengers to the Strand's primary carnivore.

The Strand staff run the bookstore according to "Customer Relations Secrets of the TSA". It has a very tiny science fiction section that's about 1/5 Tolkien, and a generic-fiction section so huge it makes me not want to try to find anything. But when I went today with Evan and Rachel there was a pretty good SF selection, so my dislike was mollified. I picked up three books from the yellow Gollancz "collector's edition" series, which series I really like. I don't know if these are books that went out of print and are being revived, or what, but everything I've read from that series has been excellent. Eric Frank Russell's Next of Kin sticks in my mind.

Today's Gollancz catch was two John Sladek (The Reproductive System and Tik-Tok), and Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland, which I'd never heard of before but which looks good. The concept, I mean. The book itself looks like a facsimile of an original printing that used too heavy a font. When I was staying with Avedon and Rob I was painfully aware that they read all these books in the 70s and I'm behind the curve. Did I live through the 70s? Let me check. The answer is no!

Comments:

Posted by Bill Humphries at Thu Mar 22 2007 02:46

You know Avedon and Rob? This is a small world. You should come to WisCon this year or next.

Posted by Leonard at Thu Mar 22 2007 23:45

Wiscon would be cool. I've never been to a convention and I think I'd be very shy and uncomfortable, but I know that the cons are full of people like that.