Obscure Publications for Sophisticates

I found a few pieces of naughty book trade ephemera that I thought I’d share.

First this set of bookstore tickets / trade labels from The Coffee N’ Culture Book Shop in Corydon, Indiana. Both were pasted into a 1964 Grove Press paperback of City of Night by John Rechy.
The upper label seems fairly above board, and even community oriented, since they produced the town’s local paper.

Below that though is another label–same typeface, same border–offering “Obscure Publications for Sophisticates – Adults Only” with a PO Box in Denver, Colorado. I’m guessing the Indiana obscenity laws were strict and this bookseller had a little something on the side out of state and used this second label to inform worldly readers who were browsing things like the Grove Press.

Next this bound in subscription card “inaugurat[ing the] happy American exile”of the Olympia Press, found in a Bee-Line release of The Demon’s Feast by Louise Walbrook in the Traveller’s Companion Series:

(click for larger version)

I just listed a tall stack of the New York Ophelias and Traveller’s Companions. Check them out if you’re feeling sophisticated.

Ipad Apps for the Anglophile

I was looking up a few references in Rob Chapman’s excellent Syd Barret bio A Very Irregular Head and came across these Ipad apps for the Anglophile in us all.

First off, this digital version of the classic Pollock’s Toy Theatre which lets you produce Monty Python-style, cut-out theatrical productions with authentic Victorian-era graphics.

The app is available here.

Next The Sun’s App displays their famous “Page 3” girls in full 360 glory…and I think they give you a wink and a smile.

This put’s Hot Metal‘s “Wobble-vision” to shame.

Here’s The Sun page promoting the App (not sure about U.S. availability). Ironic that the Page 3 girls are now probably the most innocent part of the Murdoch media empire.

I’m sadly padless and haven’t tried either of these, but between these and the upcoming BBC Iplayer App, I’m sorely tempted.

Classic Games as Classic Paperbacks

U.K. artist A.J. Hately has been designing covers for alternate video game manuals inspired by classic British paperbacks. It’s a stunning series. Here are a few from some of my favorite games:

Katamari Damacy:


Super Mario Land


Shadow of the Colossus


The series continues on her Tumblr site, Wilderness as a Girl, and she has prints available.

I love that most of the books take their titles from literary-sounding game locations, characters or lines (and that the Katamari book has an intro by Myth of Sisyphus author Albert Camus).

Going to keep an eye on the series and spend some time picking out a print or two.

Link via Joystiq.

Paperback Review: The King in Yellow

So it’s been a long, long time since I last checked in. Between malaise, time consuming freelance gigs, and attention drift to lower maintenance social media (and subsequent exhaustion with those), I’ve barely been able to moderate the comment spam without being paralyzed by guilt.

My schedule has opened up though and–now that I have something to link promote with my spanky new ecommerce site: hangfirebooks.com–it’s time to dip the toes back in.

I’m going to start slow and just try to read and review one vintage paperback every one to two weeks.

My first:

The King in Yellow


The King in Yellow is a collection of short fiction published in 1895 by Brooklyn-born writer, Robert W. Chambers. The first four stories (“The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask”, “In the Court of the Dragon”, and “The Yellow Sign”) are linked by the recurring appearance of a notorious, suppressed play entitled “The King in Yellow,” the second act of which will drive an impressionable reader insane.

This fictional work plays a varying role in each of the four stories. In “The Repairer of Reputations,” the narrator–after a brain-scrambling fall from a horse–works with a mutilated dwarf to bring about the Imperial Dynasty in America and the reign of the King in Yellow. In a later story, the book merely sits on a shelf and is noticed with a shudder. Each successive mention of the book adds to a sinister alternate history that forms the backdrop to this collection.

Robert W. Chambers, a bestselling author in his time, is today remembered primarily for his influence on H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft discussed Chambers in his Supernatural Horror in Literature, paid tribute to Chamber’s use of the book within a book with his Necronomicon, and directly integrated The King in Yellow–and his lost cities of Hastur and Carcosa–into the Cthulhu mythos.

Chambers’ influence also seems clear in the work of Daphne Du Maurier, particularly “Don’t Look Now” and her time travel romance The House on the Strand.

Chambers’ style, in the four linked stories, is vivid and evocative. His writing feels less dated than Lovecraft’s though the stories do have somewhat trite and predictable outcomes (or perhaps they have since become horror cliches). I keep emphasizing the first four stories because the remaining tales in the collection have no real connection to The King in Yellow. Two stories–“The Demoiselle D’Ys,” and “The Street of Four Winds” are passable supernatural tales but with excessively romantic endings. The remainder I struggled with, finally flipping ahead to see if they became interesting but that didn’t seem to be the case.

Reading this left me with several questions that Google and Wikipedia don’t want to answer. Maybe there’s a Chambers aficionado out there who can help me out?

1.) Was this originally published in book form? I see the 1895 first edition but I don’t see any reference to earlier serial publication. It seems a very peculiar structure for a work conceived as a book. I did find one web reference to the non-KIY related stories being being added later but it wasn’t sourced.

2.) Was this book a bestseller? I know a number Chambers’ later romances became bestsellers but not sure about KIY.

3.) Are there earlier occurences of books within books that are haunted or drive the reader insane? The only thing that comes to mind is Don Quixote but it took a whole library of books on chivalry to drive him mad (and most of the name-checked titles were real). I feel like there must be something in Kaidan Japanese ghost stories at least.

4.) Lastly, where did Chambers live in Brooklyn? I always like to check out dead author haunts.

The edition I read was an Ace paperback (M-132) from 1965 with a cover painting by Jack Gaughan (based on Chamber’s own design for the first edition).


Photo Catch-up

In my state of blogging lethargy, I’ve accumulated a number of miscellaneous photos that haven’t found a post of their own. Here’s a big photo-dump to bring myself up to date.

One for my Book CSI series analysing book abuse, neglect…and here just ineffectual good intentions:

This message was jotted–with the enthusiasm of a 10-year-old girl–on the outside of a package that was folded in half in my mail box. You can’t rile a postman like that. In the time it took to write this cutesy and pathetic plea, the seller could have cut a piece of cardboard and reinforced the book so that it would actually be inconvenient to pound it into taco shape.

Here’s one of my favorite grafitti tags (after “Neckface” and “Backfat”) that appeared near my subway stop on the Q train:


An edifying message, diluted a bit by the appearance of the classic “upsk*rt”, but still I’d like to see this one go city-wide. Really curious what kind of crap this building is stuffed with. Didn’t notice the mountain of clutter until I processed the photo.

My folk art, big rig toy chest in its new home:

That’s Mego Spock riding shotgun, with Scotty at the wheel. I found this at a stoop sale back in June and I couldn’t part with it. I think I’ll use the trailer as my time capsule for stashing hi-grade books that’ll be rare in 10 years.

Jug City:

We pass this establishment every year on the way to camp. I love a “Postal Outlet” with signage like an off-brand Hooters. Last time I saw Jug City, some other–relatively jugless–business had taken over the space but thankfully they kept the name. One day I hope to retire to Canada and open “Jug City Books” and the window display at least will be up to snuff.

…keeping to the theme. My favorite bad break (one of the quiet joys of proofreading) in recent memory:

Amazon suggested this “pay phrase” to my demure wife (“…embly” was after the break). She passed on that one for some reason. Previous to this my favorite BB I discovered in a book catalog I was proofing was:

The most feared weapon in Hitler’s arse-
nal

And lastly a haul from a month or so back that I forgot to post:

All from the GOB sale of an estate/storage liquidator. My best one-time cartridge score until the World’s Largest Garage Sale earlier this month. This photo is part of the “Junk in Your Trunk” photoset on Flickr documenting garage sale and thrift finds.

All right, caught up. And until I replace my scanner the Hang Fire Blog will likely be a bit image light. So does anyone have any particular aspect of bookselling, pulp fiction (or whatever) they’d like to see me write on? The brain is a bit scattered lately and I wouldn’t mind some outside imposed direction.

World’s Largest Garage Sale Haul, 2010

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Junk in My Trunk: October 3, 20010, originally uploaded by Hang Fire Books.

My epic haul from the annual World’s Largest Garage Sale in Warrensburgh, NY. Not a bad last hurrah for the 2010 garage sale season.

Favorite moment from the sale: Receiving a text message from the wife saying “This booth has Sega games AND machetes.”

As usual you can see this photo with notes/annotations in the Junk in Your Trunk pool on Flickr.

Maker Faire

I’ve found that I’m fairly terrible at event coverage so here’s a simple list of the cool things I caught at the New York Maker Faire hosted this past weekend at the New York Hall of Science.

FRC: First Robotics Competition
High school students participating in the FRC (“A varsity sport for the mind”) showed off robots from the recent 2010 challenge, which was to build a soccer-playing robot. These students were among the most excited and outgoing presenters at the fair and managed to pull off the–inconceivable in my generation–coup of being in high school, a science geek and cool simultaneously. There will be a scrimmage this Saturday (October 2nd) at the Francis Lewis High School in Queens. Check it out if you’re in the NYC area.

Frank DeFreitas of Holoworld demonstrated his approx $100 DIY garage kit for creating holograms; using a laser pointer, metal pipe, some bulldog clips, and a lens. Frank has been creating holograms and teaching the process since 1983. His website has details on his workshops and updates on new developments in the art.

Mustafa Bagdatli explained his high tech, interactive mood ring project called “Poker Face” which uses “a heart rate monitor and galvanic skin response” to provide real time and highly visible readings of a user’s emotional state (mood changes are displayed via a color changing medallion). The coolest feature of this project to me was the ability to sync this data with something like Google calender so you can track exactly who/what makes you happy and edit your life accordingly. It also made me imagine the potentially amusing conversations with spouses when they ask something like “Why were you so happy between 1:30 and 1:35 last Tuesday afternoon?”

Well above my understanding level, but incredibly cool is the Orbotix hardware/software platform for turning your mobile phone into a remote control unit to command killer robots.

Proteus Gowanus (543 Union Street in Brooklyn) hosts a “Fixers’ Collective” every Thursday night. A “social experiment in improvisational fixing and mending”, participants bring in broken objects and the accumulated expertise and brain power of the room tries to diagnose and fix them. Looking forward to attending a few of these this winter. Unfortunately most of my broken electronics were sent off to the “Deconstruction Lab” organized by my lovely wife for one of NYHOS’s own Maker Faire workshops. Guess I will have to break more things.

Lastly a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture by Brad Litwin:

The piece shown at the fair was even more complex than this as the entire sculpture spun and the balls were catapulted through small holes in two spinning sheets of plexiglass. I could have stared at this thing for days.

Also noteworthy the 3D printer pavilion, life-size Mousetrap, the Rubiks solving robot, and lots more.

All-in-all a great time. Check it out if it comes to your town.

Testimonial

Jim Linderman posted a fine testimonial to my store over on his Vintage Sleaze Blog:

He is a “value-added” bookseller…that is, he knows his material and he willingly shares the information. If a book like one of those above was written by a hungry REAL writer with a pseudonym, he’ll tell you who he was. If a title affects him in a particular way, he will take the time while cataloging it for sale to tell you why.

William leans towards the unusual and curious, as any serious book hound should. His prices are low. His service is high. He will reasonably repair and restore your rare paperbacks…He has a fabulous set of links. He is honest and entertaining and his website/blog/bookstore is the same.

[Blushing] I must cop to the fact that I’m not as nice or as helpful as Jim describes but this at least gives me something to shoot for.

We may get stuck in a Mexican standoff of mutual appreciation but Mr. Linderman is an outstanding image-archaeologist who has compiled a shelf-ful of worthy and unique photographic histories. A few highlights:

Camera Club Girls captures the–somewhat–innocent early days of private pinup photography through the work of one artist who meticulously and beautifully hand-tinted his photos.

In Situ: American Folk Art in Place presents a beautiful collection of outsider art and roadside attractions mostly through the vanished medium of the real photo postcard.

And his Vintage Sleaze Blog regularly presents art and ephemera that is totally new to me and gets me salivating with acquisitiveness. Witness this Charles Mingus 7″ with art by sleaze grandmaster Gene Bilbrew from his most recent post:

You can find a catalog of his book and blog projects here.

Thanks for the shoutout Jim!