Juxtabook

... a reminder

...for those who were interested in the Twilight special edition paperbacks in white - only available in certain countries including the UK - these are now published and available.

You can remind yourself of my thoughts on the collectability or otherwise of special edtion paperbacks here.

And a reminder of the links as they are so hard to find on sales websites. Also as they are not available in the USA non-UK residents might like The Book Depository with its free world wide delivery:

Twilight

New Moon

Eclipse

Breaking Dawn

Searching on Amazon

I am not convinced that Amazon extending the searched material in 'Books' to include the 'excerpts' is a good idea. I was looking for a copy of T.S.Eliot's Social Criticism by Roger Kojecky which is in Amazon's catalogue but searching was not very successful. As it is a older academic book it has of course been quoted quite a lot in subsequent books on T. S. Eliot or on modernism. So instead of offering me copies of the book I am looking for, I am confronted with a list of books that quote Roger Kojecky's volume. Just look what you get searching for T.S.Eliot's Social Criticism by Roger Kojecky . Poor old Kojecky doesn't appear until items 9 and 10. Now the first time this happened you might scroll or even look on the second page of listings but if you're searching for a lot of items having to burrow through recent books that quote the one you're looking for is a serious pain.

Having said that, I am very taken with the one that appears first on the list Print for Victory: Book Publishing in Britain 1939-1945  by Valerie Holman so maybe as a sales technique it has some points!

Edited to add: that searching for The Poetry of T. S. Eliot by Maxwell is even worse as the excerpts triggering appearances in the search result are only there because they contain the words 'Eliot' and 'poetry'. Seriously, just look! That's really going to narrow the field! Back to my frustrating searching. 
 

New old books and Green Metropolis

I have had a look at Green Metropolis a few times but never used it. It is a book recycling site where anyone can list books very easily. From their site:

We are a company dedicated to encouraging our members to recycle their books, therefore whether it’s a latest release or last year’s bestseller, all paperbacks, hardbacks and audio books all cost just £3.75 to buy (and include free delivery on all standard sized paperbacks). Plus we donate 5p from the sale of each book to the UK’s leading woodland conservation charity the Woodland Trust, to support Woodland Creation. However heavier books such as hardbacks or large format paperbacks may incur a small delivery charge, in order to help cover the extra postage costs. Delivery charges are tailored to individual books but usual range from 50p to £4.50 depending upon the books size and weight.

Most books are £3.75 which includes postage for most paperbacks. Green Metropolis take 75p from each sale. Sellers can discount their books by a set amount of pence or by offering 3 for 2 and they can add extra postage for heavy books. Bearing in mind that even if the seller is offering books for a penny of Amazon (the bane of my life, penny books, as you can imagine) you're paying £2.76 including postage then Green Metropolis offers a good deal especially with the 3 for 2 offers.

Feeling the need for a few new paperbacks to refresh the TBR pile I took the plunge and made an order on  Monday. This was my choice:

Cross Channel by Julian Barnes, The Comfort of Strangers By Ian McEwan (one of the few of his I haven't read) and my next Brenda and Effie Something Borrowed by Paul Magrs.

I was impressed by the price and by the condition and by the speed of postage. The packaging was fine too - often not the case with amateur sellers or even professional ones. The seller I bought from has a very good selection on 3 for 2 and as good service deserves a recommendation I hope this link will take you to his/her pages but you might need to be logged in, if not you'll need to search for member 53717. Meanwhile, as Pooh says of honey, I think I might take Something Borrowed into a corner and make sure no-one disturbs it.

The books that don't exist on Amazon

If like Cornflower you have noticed some weird book details on Amazon recently you might like to read this.

New Book Buying

A few months a go I registered on Bookrabbit, the new social networking/online bookshop site that I first heard about from Juliet on Musings From a Muddy Island. In the last week I finally got around to making a purchase. For obvious reasons I don't buy that many new books, but with a spate of birthdays coming up I had some shopping to do. The ordering process on Bookrabbit was quick and easy and I opted for the free standard posting. One of the books was indicated as being sent directly from the supplier and the others were marked as being in stock at Bookrabbit. All three had a reasonable discount on the RRP.

All three books arrived within 2 days as though they had been sent 1st class. Very efficient for free posting. Rather cutely the invoice came with pictorial instructions on the back for turning it into an origami rabbit. Daughter will enjoy that at any rate.

The only downsides to my Bookrabbit buys where that the search process is not quite as good as some other online bookshops and the book packaging was a bit basic, though the books where certainly ok on arrival.

With the searches it is best if you know exactly what you are looking for (ie have the ISBN number) or if you want to hit the serendipitous jackpot by browsing other readers bookshelves, and this last surely is Bookrabbit's key feature.

Bookrabbit's packing was a padded bag, a jiffy style thing. In my experience these do the job about 80% of the time but they aren't brilliant if you want to be absolutely sure a book is going to arrive in pristine condition. I don't use them in my own business for that reason plus they are hard to recycle.

My first purchases there however were definitely a success and I will no doubt return for Christmas shopping purposes soon. I do recommend signing up and adding some books to your profile though you can make purchases without doing the networking thing. Browsing the shelves of like minded readers is very useful, and great for present ideas.

Josephine Tey's Biggest Crime

Both Cornflower and Becca and Bella have mentioned Josephine Tey in recent days; a good thing too as she is a wonderful, much under-read author. However this made me think back to my first Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time. It is a remarkable version of a crime novel. The crime is the murder of the princes in the tower always reputed to have been perpetrated by Richard III. In her novel Tey has her detective laid up with a broken back solve the riddle from his hospital bed (a plot mechanism also used by Colin Dexter in The Wench is Dead ). Historians were not amused. This reminds me very much of 'proper' literary critics not being amused by the presence of blog reviewers.

Now, I am a sceptical kind of girl and take nothing as fact just on the reading of one book, but Tey does make a convincing case from the facts as she presents them. When I started to read the book I thought some of her points so pertinent I read them out loud. My husband teaches the War of the Roses at A level. All I got initially were grunts of derision, followed by single word expressions of dis-satisfaction, but as the book went on and I read more and more out, the noises changed. I was now getting, "Just read that bit out again", and "Can I read that bit again to myself", and eventually, "What's happening now?" Which was the point when I knew he was hooked.

We then spent an afternoon with proper history books from his proper history teaching shelf in the study, checking and rechecking the facts on which Tey hangs her premisses. On an afternoon's work with purely secondary sources my husband conceded Tey has some good points. Ha! I thought. Hurrah. I am not on a crusade to prove Tey is right I just want acknowledgement that, amateur though she is, she might be right and sensible points warrant sensible answers.

What is telling however is a remark in the standard A level text book Lancastrians to Tudors: England , 1450-1509 by Andrew Pickering: "It has been suggested, most colourfully perhaps in Josephine Tey's detective 'docu-novel', The Daughter of Time, that the princes survived Richard's reign but were dispatched at the start of Henry's. The evidence is flimsy to say the least." But Pickering does not go on to address any of Tey's points.

It is obviously likely that Tey has not used original sources, and very possible that she has been overly selective with the secondary ones that she has used. But why the derision? Why the sniffing? Why has no -one thought it worth while to give a sensible rebuttal of points instead of saying in effect, "Novelist? Amateur? Beneath us!" Clearly the one thing that any seasoned novelist has is good understanding of human motivations: they would be a bad writer without, and Tey is not a bad novelist. Perhaps, even accidentally, Tey has hit upon some feature of the case, maybe more psychological than factual but that nonetheless merit further thought. Just because the Richard III Society think Tey is nearly worth a sainthood doesn't mean she is automatically wrong in every respect.

It would seem that 'proper' historians aren't willing to do the kind of thinking necessary to be in an historians' universe that includes Tey, and others, as well as themselves. Just like some 'proper reviewers' aren't willing to consider what it is about modern reviews in the traditional media that is failing so much that readers, if not other critics, are now more reliant on blog reviews for their purchasing tips. Twenty years ago D. J. Taylor in his A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s warned that book reviewing was not doing its job properly and that the reading pubic, and authors themselves were ill-served by what was going. In 1989 he could not have foreseen blogging but blogging reviewers are the natural consequence of the problems he identifies. As are the gentile fisticuffs due at the Oxford literary Festival when Dovegreyreader meets professional critics John Carey and John Mullan on 31st March. Historians be warned: the democracy of the internet could do the same for your quiet coterie. It'll be worse than Time Team!