Juxtabook

Book Buying Survey Results and other bits

Firstly the other bits...

A few books which I have been waiting for in paperback have made their appearance since Christmas. Firstly Alis Hawkins' Testament, which is well reviewed on Amazon. It came out in January and must be selling well as Amazon seem to be short of copies. There was a long gap between the hardback of Testament being sold out and the paperback publication, and now the paperback availability looks thin. I am aware that the Macmillan New Writers series is a bit lighter in terms of publicity and they were Alis' publishers for the hardback. The paperback is the Macmillan imprint Pan; are they (Pan/MNW) being a bit measly with their print runs I wonder? It would be interesting to hear from a MNW writer to see what they think.

The much awaited (in my mind at any rate) An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson came out in pb earlier this month. It is a very nice looking retro piece set in the 1930s in the classic murder vein, and starring, very cleverly, the author Jospehine Tey as one of the characters. I love Tey and I am looking forward to this novel and I so hope it does not disappoint.

Also much awaited after its blaze of blogosphere publicity last year, is the very inventive Daphne by Justine Picardie. It has a triple layered narrative following the life of the novelist Daphne du Maurier; the entirely fictional life of an unnamed modern heroine who is studying Daphne whilst her own life begins to echo that of Daphne's most famous novel Rebecca; and lastly, and for me, most interestingly, the novel also explores the shadowy world of Alex Symington, disgraced librarian, stealer of manuscripts and rare books and Daphne's contact as she works on a life of Branwell Bronte. I would imagine many people are drawn to Justine's work by the Daphne elements here but for me the truly outstanding sections of the work are those involving Symington. Yes my interest is partly personal (living locally to the Bronte area and working in the world of secondhand books), but it seems to me that Justine has really pulled off the character of Symington: a wonderful character both sinister and shambling, in love with the works he collects, and in part with their writers, but also predatory, a pest and a destroyer of literary heritage. If you haven't read it yet the paperback is out on 2nd March.

Lastly ...

Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey this week. Unsurprisingly Amazon received the most 'ticks' followed by Abebooks and then EBay. Antiqbook and Ibooknet had one each and the other sites that I asked about (Biblio, Ukbookworld and ZVAB) received no positives. In the context of last week's discussion on the effect of flat rate postage imposed on dealers (rather than set by them) and how that rate affects the books we might stock, then what is most interesting here is that Amazon and EBay account for just short of 60% of the sales. So, from our admittedly tiny survey, most used book sales take place on sites with the flat postage rate. This bears out my experience with my own sales, which are led by Amazon and my EBay shop followed by my own site and Antiqbook. Over time this pattern is going to affect which books we sell, especially if they are worth under £10 or even £20. This in turn of course affects which books you are able to buy. Interesting times.

Sylvia - film review

I had heard that the 2003 film Sylvia, based on the life of Sylvia Plath was poor, but watching a borrowed DVD of it, I was pleasantly surprised.

Sylvia stars the well, if predictably, cast Gwyneth Paltrow as the American poet and Daniel Craig as her husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes. It begins with their meeting in Cambridge and ends with Plath's death in 1963, so it essentially follows the course of their relationship, Plath's struggle to write and with the break-up of their marriage, Plath's original but tortured out-pourings, breakdown and death.

Paltrow is a wonderful Sylvia. This a role that would be easy to over-play but she manages the charismatic, intelligent but unstable beauty wonderfully. She is both touching and a little bit scary.

The time scale covered follows the length of Ted and Sylvia's relationship but this is very much her film and Daniel Craig, though well cast physically, is left with rather a tatty little bit of a part involving few smiles, much flashing of his blue eyes, and laconically prowling around pretty women. The warning I guess is that it is not called Sylvia and Ted, just Sylvia, but this being the case I would have liked more of her earlier life and the extensive time she serves as an apprentice writer in the States before her scholarship to Cambridge, and the history of her mental state pre-Ted. Apart from glancing references to her relationship with her father and his death when she was eight, and a rather unreal scene early in their relationship when she tells Ted about her attempted suicide, dwelling at length on the physical details but with no mention of why or how she recovered, Plath's instability seems in the film to rest entirely with Ted's philandering. Ted's behaviour did not help but he was not responsible for a mental state over twenty years in the brewing. The screenplay over focuses on her domestic drudgery and not enough on her intellect; a glib and easy explanation of superficial unhappiness but lacking a real examination of her confessional style and its links with her death.

I might quibble over some lapses in content, but Paltrow's performance carries what substance there is, and the result is perfectly watchable. Immaculate sets and a real feeling of 1950s Britain provide a crisp backdrop to Paltrow's portrait painting; the overall effect is ultimately two dimensional but still an acceptable and attractive period vision. One suspects a few decades' distance will produce a sensational remake, as the twining of these two creative lives is a tale well worth the telling. Still, this version is an engaging watch if you are interested in either of the poets.

Book Buying Survey

Chatting with fellow booksellers Jane and Jackie in the comments to the last post has made me think about the dominance of Amazon and Ebay. I was wondering to what extent most readers used the less well known bookselling websites. I attempted to create a poll but realised that I need a 'survey' in order for you to be able to check more than one choice at once. Surveys fit less well onto blogs! The link to open the survey is on the left there and appears in a pop-up I'm afraid. It is just one question and takes all of 30 seconds to complete, even allowing for you to take a couple of swigs of coffee whilst you contemplate your answer. It doesn't show the results as you vote but I will give you the summary next weekend. If you have an RSS reader you can subscribe to the results of this survey by RSS. Simply copy the link below into your RSS reader.

http://polldaddy.com/surveyRSS.aspx?id=FF7B04D647DA6168

Thank you!

(...and if anyone can recommend a better way of presenting a question to which multiple answers are permitted I would be grateful if you'd let me know!)

Edited to add...

If you can't get the link in the side bar to work to get to the survey question then please try this:

http://www.polldaddy.com/s/FF7B04D647DA6168/

Losing weight

One of the problems of selling books by mail order, be it catalogue, website, or phone, is that the book has to be posted. When your customer realises that a two volume set (600 pages per volume) cannot just be bunged in a padded envelope 2nd class for a couple of quid there is not a problem. Books can be properly packed using bubble wrap and a box, and sent by the most appropriate method; the customer expects to pay cost plus a few pence for the quality packaging. This is what usually happens when I sell a book by phone or to an existing customer or via my own website. Customers are usually very happy. One gentleman in the USA sent me an additional £30 because he was so impressed with the way I packaged his (expensive) three volume set.

I like to pack all books well even if they are cheap so the limit on the postage on some websites is frustrating; it is increasingly difficult to look after heavy books properly. I have actually sourced some lighter, cheaper packaging just to use on Amazon. My feedback is still far better than most sellers on there so my cheap packets are still doing a job, but they are cheaper and thinner, and I still feel that there it is a chance for potential damage that, when postage costs allow, I would rather not take.

Amazon charge the customer £2.75 per volume regardless, and curiously EBay have just imposed a limit for books at, wait for it, £2.75. Obviously a flat rate might even out over time. The chances are though, with books, that you will stock a lot of substantial tomes, and that it will not, in the end, be very comfortable for you using the flat rate postage. 

The end result of all is this is the sad sight of dealers selling off their heavy books at car boot sales and the cheaper end of the book fair market. These are books that are physically sound, reasonably attractive and still either useful, entertaining or intellectually stimulating. There is nothing wrong with them, they are just big. Soon online sellers won't stock them and because online sellers (guilty as charged!) are knocking the stuffing out of the brick-and-mortar bookshop, then these big beauties will not be available there either.

So what to do? Well my solution for the present is to take a small unit in an antiques centre where my big books, duplicate copies, paperback classics (available on Amazon for £2.76 being 1p plus the flat rate postage), and other doddery types for online selling can reside in peace until properly re-homed. So part of half-term was spent shelf-stocking and otherwise settling some old friends into their new unit. When I say old friends some of these have been with me from the first week of trading. I  repriced and sent out to grass stock number 0007 (seventh ever book) with some chagrin, I can tell you.

Anyway, here they are settling in, with me getting backache from all the boxes, and not bending my knees like I should:

 

And just for reference the kind of volume that is increasingly hard to sell (profitably) online include these inoffensive types:

   

 

 

It is difficult to see exactly how the dominance of the bigger book outlets online will affect the market as years go by, but I am sure that the nature of the secondhand bookstock of this country will be altered.

I have had to give up on certain types of book but I will always try to stock standard critical texts regardless of the prevailing price on Amazon. Books like F. R. Leavis' critical works in paperback and Basil Willey's wonderful background volumes (Nineteenth century Studies, The Eighteenth Century Background and the daringly named companion volume The Seventeenth Century Background) will always find a home here. I know other specialist dealers do the same with key texts in their areas, but even online the specialist dealer is being swamped by the pile 'em, high sell 'em cheaper megalister who desrcibes books as "may" have some wear, "may" be ex-library, "may" have a remainder mark and presumably, "may" be a book or "may" be a kangaroo because the item is obviously not in front of them when they are cataloguing.

What will the fall out be in the end, I don't know? What are customer's experiences of postage charges, and levels of service, or other sellers' thoughts on these matters?

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, like The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield suffers from the blogosphere enthusiasm that precedes it. The quotes on the front, 'terrific', Ian Rankin, and 'absolutely riveting', Sarah Waters, don't help either. The build up makes you approach it like a traditional whodunit, and of course it is not. It is a piece of non-fiction, and as such it is excellent. But as non-fiction it has the 'and then' quality of a bald narrative of events. This is not 'riveting' in itself though the 'story' is certainly readable and keeps the attention. Shardlake it is not. But then why should it be; it is not the same thing at all.

So what is it? The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a true story of a horrific murder of a small boy and the subsequent investigation. The detective force based at Scotland Yard is in its infancy; there are just eight detective inspectors of which one is Mr Whicher. Once the investigation starts there are faults and failures throughout in the collecting and retaining of evidence. The local force and the London police do not work overly well together and we wonder how things can be brought together. But Mr Whicher and Kate Summerscale eventually do shed light on the events of 1860.

In the introduction Kate Summerscale points out the sociological implications of the murder. We know far more about this family, their possessions, how they lived their lives, because of the murder. What we discover is important not just for the dramatic aspects, the solution of the murder, but for the mundane and the everyday aspects. The social history is incredibly detailed:

Everything we know about Road Hill House is determined by the murder that took place there on 30th June 1860. The police and magistrates turned up hundreds of details of the building's interior - handles, latches, footprints, nightclothes, carpets, hotplates - and its inhabitants' habits.

The second important aspect of this murder is in its place in literary history. The murder and the initial lack of a solution was a sensation and was reported in great detail in both the local and national press. Members of the public pontificated in letters pages of major newspapers and in private missives to the detectives involved, and even to the home secretary. As the weeks wore on the instalments of Wilkie Collins' sensational page turner The Woman in White continued their timely serialisation and parallels are drawn throughout by Kate Summerscale. What is really superb about The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is the high quality literary criticism as Summerscale locates aspects of the murder and investigation in the embryonic British and European crime fiction genre. The murder at Road Hill House is the real forerunner of the countryhouse mystery, and with Summerscale's careful handling of the material we can see exactly why both in terms of literary antecedents and contexts, and in terms of the likely reception of such works with the Victorian public:

A Victorian detective was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest. In a newly uncertain world, he offered science, conviction, stories that could organise chaos.

Once I had realised that this was not the fictionalised version of a true story but instead a thorough work of non-fiction, then I was away. It is very readable and you do want a dénouement but of course, in real life, the dénouement is not as satisfying as the ones offered by fiction. Whatever the truth after all, a little boy lost his life at the hands of nurse or relative, at the hands of someone in whom he should have had complete trust. Dorothy L. Sayers can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand-up with the shadow of gallows behind her investigations, but this real murder takes that feeling so much further.

On all levels then, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is to be recommended. If you are interested in the literary history of the detective story then a great place to start is The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan which as a read is a nice balance between scholarship and pleasure. There is also the more studious Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel by Sally Rowena Munt. Both are feminist critiques unsurprisingly as crime fiction lends itself well to that approach.

********************

Edited to add:

Kristen made a comment which I think is well worth bumping up into the main text of this post: She recommends, "The Beautiful Cigar Girl about the real life murder of Mary Rogers, the formation of the NY police force and Edgar Allan Poe's attempts to write his own solution to the murder. I reviewed this and a fiction written about the same topic here."

 

Reading round-up

Getting behind with the to-be-reviewed pile again I thought I would compress some book thoughts into one post. Bookdealing is a surprisingly time consuming job. I work many more hours than I did as a teacher, and I worked long hours then (no, teachers don't knock-off at 3.30pm!), but this is my job, my business and I enjoy it. I have been tied up, and indeed bogged down, with end of year accounts  this last week and I have two large batches of books that were bought just before Christmas still waiting to be counted, checked, added to my stock list, photographed and catalogued. For a great summary of a bookdealer's day you could do worse than read this.

Back to the reading of books rather than the selling...

I have been rattling through the next two Shardlake installments by C. J. Sansom: Dark Fire and Sovereign . Wonderful reads, both of them. I preferred the very first, Dissolution, but only by a whisker and because I like the puzzle of the closed community murder.

Dark Fire involves another assignment from the arch-plotterThomas Cromwell. With time pressing Shardlake has to solve the murder of a small boy whose orphaned cousin, the present accused, is to suffer the horrendous fate of being pressed to death if the culprit is not found. Meanwhile Cromwell himself is in trouble: Henry VIII is not pleased with his new queen, Anne of Cleeves, whom he married at Cromwell's behest. Instead Henry's eye has been taken by the pretty Catherine Howard, niece of the religious conservative Duke of Norfolk. If Anne is divorced and Henry marries Catherine, Cromwell might well fall allowing the spectre of Rome and the Howard family to hover over Cromwell's Reformation. Cromwell thinks he might save his skin if he can demonstrate something called dark fire or Greek Fire to the weapon loving King. Cromwell thought he had a source for it but the creators are playing hard to get; he wants Shardlake to find the men and the dark fire in time.

The dual plot is absolutely gripping as a weary Shardlake tries to solve both puzzles simultaneously with the march of time pacing him all the way. By way of human interest, Cromwell's action of putting his own 'fixer' Jack Barak at Shardlake's disposal and to keep an eye on him, makes for an interesting double act as, in the way of the best detective pairs, the two very different mean learn to work together. The blurb warns you you won't be able to put it down and for me the combination of history and mystery is a winner.

Sovereign is largely set in York. Henry VIII and his new young wife are making a Progress through the north to accept the renewal of oaths of the gentry after yet another rising. The ghost of Robert Aske, and the ruthless methods used to deal with traitors hangs over the proceedings as Aske's bones hang over the town. It is difficult to say more without giving away some of the plot of Dark Fire as well as Sovereign. Shardlake again finds himself with several tasks to juggle. He wants a quiet life but his curiosity can't leave well alone and when he opens a box containing treasonous papers the shadow of Aske and the Tower loom large.

Sovereign is as pacy as the other works but I wonder if having a bit more knowledge of Tudor politics helps the reader here as the background is quite tangled. Mr J. teaches the Pilgrimage of Grace and the other rebellions for A level. As the wife of a fisherman or a football fanatic finds she knows more about trout or Spurs than she wants to, I find I know about Tudor rebellions by a weird process of osmosis. He has even had me, 7 months pregnant in the hottest month of 2003 I might add, scampering about next to a busy road in Norfolk looking for Kett's Oak to photograph.

Back to the works of Sansom. As with the other Shardlakes I read Sovereign far too late into the night as I wanted to KNOW! And that's all you ask of a crime novel really.

I have also recently read and much enjoyed J L Carr's A Month in the Country. I was poised to review it (honest!) but then Karen announced it as one of Cornflower's Book club choices and I felt a review at the moment would be badly timed as many of you read Cornflower's blog too. So I will just say: it's lovely; read it; and perhaps join Cornflower on Saturday 14th March.

Last up Is Footsteps in the Dark by Georgette Heyer. This was a wonderful piece of escapism whilst I was being driven crackers by paperwork and my accounts. I have reviewed it on the ibooknet blog here.

Juxtabook revealed ...

I am delighted to have been interviewed by Mark Thwaite of the Book Depository and Ready Steady Book. You can see the interview here.

Snow closed schools

After two days off in many cases (because of a bit of snow) there's a right old fuss about schools closing with people citing everything from childcare problems,to how writers remember the winter of '63  and following the snow plough to school, to comments on how we'll be bringing them up to life long weakness and failure if we let kids stay home because of snow, as reasons why schools should be open regardless. See the BBC here, and the Independent here for just a couple of examples.

Setting aside for a moment the idea that schools should be regarded as childcare (they should not), I am amazed by the number of online comments that say things like teachers should live near school, or councils should keep essential staff like teachers in hotels near schools (do teachers not have families that need them at home in the evenings then?) when bad weather is forecast. Amazing.

Ok, if you teach really well behaved 6 year olds you might risk living in the catchment area, but what teacher in their right mind wants to live near their teenage charges? The few that do tend to be either near retirement age and probably moved in before so many kids (not all I know) ran rings round their parents and every other adult, or they are very young, newly qualified and financially challenged.

When young, newly qualified and financially challenged, we lived in the catchment area of my husband's school for 9 months. Amongst other delights we had fireworks thrown at the house (very scary I can assure you) and kids knocking on the door on a Sunday demanding help with homework or the return of confiscated items. My husband had to repeatedly change the routes by which he walked the dogs to avoid malevolent gangs of disaffected history students, and, to this day, nine years after leaving that school, there are pubs in his old catchment area he wouldn't go in for fear of meeting certain ex-pupils. We lived in his catchment area rather than mine because his was the 'nicer' one. This is why most teachers do not live near their school! This is a news story from my catchment area around the time we started teaching. Would you live there?

I always knew that the kids thought we weren't human and that we lived on the premises and the caretaker went down to the cellar every morning to wake us from our coffins, but it amazes me that parents, adults, have so little empathy.

On a rather more praiseworthy note Scott Pack on twitter notes:

Look, it is pointless spending a fortune so that we are prepared for a snowstorm that comes once a decade or so. Just enjoy it.

AND

Nation of fat children? More snow is the answer. The fat buggers are running about all over the place out there.

Hear, hear!

And talking of twitter, you can now follow Juxtabook on twitter too.

The Letters by Fiona Robyn

The Letters is a debut novel by Fiona Robyn. It is a startling work: like a flower that needs staking in the wind it wavers at base before Robyn's work bursts forth in the most beautiful living prose.

Violet is a fifty-one year old divorcee and mother of four adult children, a son and three daughters. She has moved to the Sussex coast to start again, and the book opens with Violet, in a terrible temper, leaving her lover Tom. Violet's reminiscences about her life, and how she has got to where she is, are interspersed with letters. These letters are mysterious objects out of time. A complete series dated in the 1950s, they arrive periodically and spook Violet as she tries to come to terms with the woman she has become post-divorce.

Initially not enough is made of the mysterious letters, they just appear, and much of the early story is made up of family reminiscence. The flow initially falters a little without a prime plot driver, and the characters are a little over explained. However, the early pages are leavened by Violet's relationship with her son Guy which is neatly done and very real, and some early shoots of good prose amongst the drier leaves of description. Then suddenly, part way into the novel, Violet steps off the page and really starts to live, with prose that is light and fast and utterly convincing, and by the end we have an absolute little cracker of a book.

This is a hard book to review without spoilers, because of a sudden twist in the plot, so brevity here is necessary. By the end of the novel, however, the initially disparate aspects have been skillfully brought together under the control of the writer's now very strong pen. In truth, at the beginning, this feels very much like a first novel. By the end it is much more than that; it feels like a good first novel at the start of a very good career.

Fiona Robyn's excellent blog Planting Words is an insight into her writing. In one post she says of finishing the first draft of another novel 'Joe in Amsterdam', that it is very satisfying because:

Now I know what happens to Joe at the end of the story.

It seems a little strange to me (OK quite a lot strange) that I don't know how my own story finishes before I get there, but hey - that's how it works. Who am I to question? I am only the typist.

And to be honest I think this lack of initial direction is the key to the slight shakiness at the beginning of The Letters, that together with the plot twist which means we all start the book by seeing the plot with only half-opened eyes. To some extent it is to Robyn and Snowbooks' credit that the first, less polished half has been allowed to stand. Some modern fiction feels edited to death compared with eighteenth and nineteenth century works. Are there slow bits in Jane Eyre? You bet. Do I want to slap George Eliot's hand and tell her to stop letting Dorothea off the hook? Of course I do. Does Dickens over use the impossible coincidence? Yep! Would we love him as much if he didn't? I don't think so. With this, Robyn's first novel, what we get is a real writer, not a London literati clone, finding her own place on the page, and it is fascinating to watch. If it was a rock album we'd be calling it raw urbanity interspersed with lyrically-creative highs, or some such. (I am glad I don't review rock albums.)

Seriously, this is an ultimately enchanting first step on what will no doubt be a fascinating path for Fiona Robyn, and I am sure many readers will follow her work closely.