The Dusty Bookcase

20 February 2012

On Lovingly Hand-Selected Recommendations

That they pretend to know me irritates. I write here of Alibris, the self-described "premier online marketplace for independent sellers of new and used books". For four years now they've pestered, prodded, poked and pushed, peppering my inbox with books they know I'll want. "We've lovingly hand-selected the following recommendations just for you", I'm told (emphasis theirs).

Here's one of their most recent picks:

Here's another that was chosen with me in mind:

Alibris add insult, describing this classic as a book I thought I'd never find:

And finally, there's this "book", which is actually a DVD:

Now, to be fair, the folks at Alibris have very little to go on. Our only contact took place back in 2008 when I purchased The Authentic Confessions of Harriet Marwood, an English Governess through their site. Faux-Victorian erotica penned by Montreal poet John Glassco, it says a great deal about Alibris that not a single Canadian title has figured in their four years of lovingly hand-selected recommendations. No poetry or porn, either.

Photo by Mary Elam

All this brings me to the Word Bookstore in Montreal, which launched its own website just last week. I've been a patron for nearly thirty years, first darkening the doorway as a fresh-faced university student.

These are just four of the many books owner Adrian King-Edwards has put in my hands over the years:

Memoirs of Montparnasse
John Glassco
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970

Inscribed and annotated by the author. Ex-libris Frank and Marian Scott.

Œuvres Illustrées de Balzac, volume 3
Honoré de Balzac
Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867

Ex-libris John Glassco

The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald
London: Grey Walls, 1950

The Watching Cat
Pamela Fry
London: Davies, 1960

Inscribed by the author.

Every one purchased. The only times I've ever passed on a recommendation – a rare event – was when I already owned a copy of the book in question.

The good souls at the Word know me; they don't insult, they don't waste my time... and they're very generous with bookmarks.

17 February 2012

Remembering the Woman Who Couldn't Die

Arthur Stringer's The Woman Who Couldn't Die might not be one for the ages, but it does linger. The novel has stayed with me these past couple of years, due largely to the mystery surrounding heroine Thera. A Viking Princess and true ice queen, it's never quite clear that she isn't dead. I don't see that anyone has really tried to tackle this question; but then The Woman Who Couldn't Die isn't exactly a well-known work. The 1929 Bobbs-Merrill first edition was printed only once. How the novel came to be resurrected in this October 1950 edition Famous Fantastic Mysteries I do not know.

I probably make too much of the fact that Stringer died in September 1950, but I'm hoping that he might have seen the magazine before the end came. Rafael de Soto's cover image may be garish, silly and nonsensical, but the interior illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay are worthy of applause.

(Cliquez pour agrandir.)

Related post:

That's Entertainment!

15 February 2012

Arthur Stringer's Recipe for Commercial Success

"I write my fiction as you do advertising copy – to make a living at it. But I have tried to save enough of myself out of the hurly-burly to do the stuff that counts in the end."

Arthur Stringer loved letters and somehow figured out a way to make them pay. A journalist, poet, novelist, and short story writer, he produced sixty books in his seventy-six years. "Stringer was no mere formula writer of commercial fiction," Clarence Karr notes. "Refusing to be typecast, he varied his genres and the settings, and at times, pushed the frontiers of literature beyond the point of easy acceptance for publishers and editors." Stringer was also one of Hollywood's earliest screenwriters, demonstrating such ease and adaptability that friend and fellow Ontarian Mary Pickford called him "Chameleon".

We've forgotten the man, his talent, and the fact that he was an extremely generous gent. Here he shares a priceless formula with 1904 readers of The Bookman: