Pixel Scroll 7/22

An auction, eight stories and a tease in today’s Scroll.

(1) Attention collectors! Somebody’s flipping Ray Bradbury’s original caricature from the Brown Derby Restaurant today on eBay. Jack Lane’s portrait once hung on the wall at the famed Hollywood & Vine tourist trap with hundreds more of the artist’s sketches of Hollywood stars.

Ray Bradbury by Jack Lane. Once displayed at the Brown Derby.

Ray Bradbury by Jack Lane. Once displayed at the Brown Derby.

(2) The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis will hold three special events next month celebrate Ray Bradbury’s 95th birthday, which is on August 22.

From Aug. 3 to 28, the center will present a free exhibit, “Miracles of Rare Device: Treasures of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies,” in the Cultural Arts Gallery on the first floor of the IUPUI Campus Center…. The exhibit will feature art, artifacts, books and rare magazines from Bradbury’s own collection, gifted to the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI in 2013 by the Bradbury Estate and by Donn Albright, Bradbury’s close friend and bibliographer.

Two related public events will coincide with the exhibition’s run.

On August 19, Jonathan R. Eller, Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies will deliver the Second Annual Ray Bradbury Memorial Lecture in the Riley Meeting Room at Indianapolis Public Library’s Central Library.

The lecture, “Ray Bradbury’s October Country,” reveals the timeless creativity and somewhat controversial publishing history of one of Bradbury’s most popular story collections on the 60th anniversary of its original publication.

On August 27, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies will host a reception followed by another Eller lecture, on the collection’s amazing journey from California to IUPUI and the importance of Bradbury’s legacy in the 21st century. Both the lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

(3) James Artimus Owen is offering for sale his illustrations for Diana Pavlac Glyer’s forthcoming book about the Inklings, Bandersnatch, and has posted the images on Facebook. [Note: Despite being set to “Public”, the material can only be viewed if you have a Facebook account.]

Each illustration is drawn on 11″ x 14″ Bristol board, and includes an appearance by the Bandersnatch somewhere in the picture. Prices are as listed, ranging from $450 to $750, although I am willing to entertain offers from people I like. First request, first choice. Message me to reserve your favorite and to arrange payment and shipping.

Sharkado 3

(4) Everybody knows Sharknado 3 airs today on SyFy. But it came as a surprise for me to read that George R.R. Martin plans to show the movie at his Jean Cocteau Theatre in August.

“Check it out,” writes Martin. “Next year’s Hugo favorite, for sure.”

William Reichard says in honor of that crack, the movie should be renamed, “Snarknado 3.”

(5) SF Signal’s latest Mind Meld proposes this interesting premise —

A recent Guardian article about Tokyo awarding Japanese Citzenship to Godzilla got me to wondering: If you could pick a genre fictional character, from any media, and offer them honorary citizenship and residence in your city, county, state, country, who would it be, and why?

Responses from — Kelly Robson, Jenny Goloboy, Galen Dara, Anne Leonard, Patrick Tomlinson, Julie Czerneda, Alyx Dellamonica, Django Wexler, Jesse Willis, Diana Pharoah Francis, Mikaela Lind, Rhonda Eudaly, Gillian Philip, Ardi Alspach, and Laura Anne Gilman.

(6) Interested in stories read aloud? Open Culture has found another seam of the motherlode, 88 hours of free audio fiction original aired on Wisconsin public radio.

Listen to enough episodes of Mind Webs, and you may get hooked on the voice and reading style of its host Michael Hanson, a fixture on Wisconsin public radio for something like forty years. Back in 2001, just after wrapping up his career in that sector, Hanson wrote in to the New York Times lamenting the state of public radio, especially its program directors turned into “sycophantic bean counters” and a “pronounced dumbing down of program content.” Mind Webs, which kept on going from the 70s through the 90s, came from a time before all that, and now its smart storytelling has come available for all of us to enjoy.

The playlist above will let you stream all of the stories — roughly 88 hours worth — from start to finish. Or you can access the audio at Archive.org here.

(7) Of course they knew those comic books were stolen! The Verge has the goods on the great Texas comic book heist.

Whoever was after the Sub-Mariners and All Star Comics at the Heritage Auction wasn’t a collector. Their bids were too erratic, they didn’t know the market, and chances were, they weren’t terribly smart. It was also clear that they had a lot of money on their hands — too much money, maybe — and they were eager to spend it. Through months of interviews and hundreds of pages of public documents, The Verge reconstructed what they were seeing: a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme that would ensnare a crooked lawyer, a multinational corporation, and some of the most sought-out comics in the world….

$40,000 split between nine checks. The investigator said he was going through a nasty divorce, and was worried his ex-wife might raise trouble over any checks for more than $10,000.

But what about that foxing? When the buyers took their comics home, they noticed something strange: the All Star #3 that had sold in February had the same imperfections. In fact, it was the same book. But that book was slabbed — it had a barcode and provenance, sold to a private buyer who wouldn’t have deslabbed it without a reason. Had they bought stolen property?

It was worse. They had bought stolen evidence. The book had come direct from Chiofalo’s storage unit, smuggled out under the nose of the Harris County DA — and according to prosecutors, Blevins and Deutsch worked together to smuggle them out. More than $150,000 in comics had disappeared from the storage unit, and Blevins had spent the summer selling them at comics conventions across the country. The books were deslabbed to throw investigators off the trail, but even without the barcode, the cover gave it away. Collectors search for flawless comics, but it’s the imperfections that give them an identity, and this imperfection placed Blevins at the scene of a crime.

(8) Did Tolkien visit the Bouzincourt caves while on Army service during the Battle of the Somme?

In 1916, a 24-year-old British soldier named J.R.R. Tolkien went off to fight in World War I. He was stationed near the village of Bouzincourt, took part in the nearby Battle of the Somme and writes about the area in his diaries.

Jeff Gusky, an explorer and photographer who maintains a site called “The Hidden World of World War I,” believes Tolkien may have visited Bouzincourt’s caves, places where hundreds of soldiers took refuge during the Somme — and that some of his impressions ended up in “The Lord of the Rings.”

“I feel that this is the place,” Gusky said. “It’s so raw and unchanged from a hundred years ago.”

Tolkien scholar John Garth isn’t so sure.

“On the Somme, he certainly spent time in deep trench dugouts, and he would have been aware of the subterranean world of the army tunnelers — all of which would, I believe, have given his descriptions of Moria and other Middle-earth underworlds some of their vitality,” Garth, the author of “Tolkien and the Great War,” wrote in an email….

Regardless of whether Tolkien knew of the caves, there’s no question that the author’s experience at the Somme influenced “The Lord of the Rings.”

“The Dead marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme,” he wrote in a letter, according to a story on the Green Books portion of TheOneRing.net.

(9) “Stick a fork in the pup’s Tor boycott because their hushpuppy is done” says Jason Sanford.

Earlier this month I tracked the sales of a sample of ten book titles published by Tor Books. My desire was to see if the puppies’ boycott of Tor was having any effect on the publisher’s sales.

You can see the titles I tracked, and how I tracked the sales, in my original post or by looking at the endnote below.

But the flaw in my analysis was that I could only present two weeks of sales data since the boycott began on June 19. As a result, some people rightly said it was too early to tell if the boycott was failing or succeeding.

After examining two additional weeks of sales data it appears my initial analysis was correct. This new data shows that for the five weeks prior to the boycott starting on June 19, the weekly sales average for these Tor titles was 1652 books sold per week. For those same Tor titles, their weekly average sales for the last four weeks of the boycott has been 1679 books sold per week.

So on average, Tor’s sales for these titles are up slightly since the boycott started.

(10) Vox Day’s “Hugo Recommendations: Best Professional Artist” post is up. Don’t try and kid me, you know you want to read it.

[Thanks for these stories goes out to Dave Doering, Michael J. Walsh, William Reichard, Jim Meadows and John King Tarpinian as the Beaver.]

329 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/22

  1. Lackey strikes me as more popular than excellent, but I’d certainly be willing to see her show up in the competition. But … while she was published as for adults, the Golden Age of Lackey seems to be 13-15. Would that mean she’d be better placed in the not-adult category, or are books built for YA a bit too old?

    (still have fond memories of being in her fan club and writing to pen pals because of it. Though these days, a newsletter fan club and snail mail pen pals makes me feel like I sound so old…)

  2. Dunsany might also need to be cut … do people still read The King of Elfland’s Daughter?

  3. I think that:

    1. We should add P.C. Hodgell’s Godstalker Chronicles to the seeding, plus Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth books.
    2. Mike has not kept up with the revaluation of Ulysses S. Grant’s two careers as soldier and President.
    3. It would be fun to treat Kyra’s list as a prompt, and build the fantasy bracket list the same way we did the SF list – via nominations from the commentariat. It might also be fun to do seeding right from the jump this time.
    4. I love The Book of the New Sun, but it is science fiction and ineligible here.

  4. I am rather tempted to suggest Simon R. Green’s Shadows Fall (1994) for the fantasy bracket. Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape would most likely lose to Stoker’s version of events, though.

    Oh, and SF final bracket: Shelley, if the voting’s still open.

  5. Mike: Yes, the very conscious comparison of TH to _Alice in Wonderland_ was emphasized throughout: for those interested in the writing, publishing, and some of the marketing history of TH, I can highly recommend Douglas Anderson’s _The Annotated Hobbit_ and John Rateliff’s _The History of the Hobbit_>

    Anderson

    Rateliff.

    But the big question is WHY that comparison (as others have noted, there were other fantasy/fantastic publications even in the 30s)–it sometimes comes across in the marketing and PR materials as “look, Oxford dons write this weird stuff.”

    And one couldn’t compare LOTR to _Alice in Wonderland_.

  6. *helpfully rants offstage*

    “Waterloo isn’t a feudal engagement! The United Kingdom of the Netherlands didn’t perform valid enfiefments! Remember the allods!”

  7. @Bruce: There were actual Knights at Waterloo, though. Sir This and Sir That and all. Plus, at least one author indicates that dragons were employed, even if their use has been suppressed in the official histories.

  8. Mary Stewart being left off is probably *worse* than leaving off Bujold (says the raving Bujold fan).

    Jo Walton doesn’t have a novel before The King’s Peace in 2000.

    The Fortress Series by C J Cherryh.

    Agree Deerskin and Sunshine are adult while Blue Sword & Hero and Crown are YA.

    I agree with these authors, with the change for McDonald noted below. I don’t necessarily DISagree with the ones I’ve left off, but definitely agree with these.
    The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
    The City Watch Sequence, Terry Pratchett
    Dracula, Bram Stoker
    Lud-In-The-Mist, Hope Mirrlees
    The Once and Future King, T. H. White
    Phantastes, George MacDonald
    I’d go with the Princess and Curdie. It was not a YA book when published, I don’t think.
    The Princess Bride, William Goldman
    Riddle of Stars, Patricia McKillip
    Sunshine, Robin McKinley
    Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
    Watership Down, Richard Adams

  9. I’m working on a revised list. If people want to use these as a prompt, that would be great. (Or if people want to come out with their own bracket list or lists. I’m not really running anything here. The reason I ended up doing the SF bracket is I ended up being the one to say, sure why not.)

  10. @Kyra:

    I’m not really running anything here. The reason I ended up doing the SF bracket is I ended up being the one to say, sure why not.)

    But but – I thought you were in charge of the Sekrit Cabal!

    @Mike: 🙂

  11. Names that weren’t on my original tentative list that I would probably seriously consider putting on at this point include: Tanith Lee (pretty definitely), C. L Moore, Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Meredith Ann Pierce, Anne Rice, Mary Stewart, Pamela Dean, Mercedes Lackey, Stephen Brust, Robert Asprin, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter, Mikhael Bulgakov, G. K. Chesterton, L. Sprague de Camp, Neil Gaiman, P. C. Hodgell, Katharine Kerr, Katherine Kurtz, and Clark Ashton Smith. (Lois McMaster Bujold doesn’t have fantasy early enough to make my (arbitrary) cutoff, or she would be on, too, as would several others).

    From the original list, I could probably be convinced to take off Gene Wolfe (because of the not-fantasy thing). There are a number of authors I worry are not widely read by enough people (MacDonald, Mirrlees, Dunsany). I think Poe needs to be on but I’m having trouble thinking of the right work to use. I wish I didn’t think Stoker needed to be on.

  12. Gene Wolfe still belongs on the list: there’s Peace, and Soldier in the Mist, and like that.

  13. Jim Henley on July 24, 2015 at 4:26 pm said:

    @Bruce: There were actual Knights at Waterloo, though. Sir This and Sir That and all. Plus, at least one author indicates that dragons were employed, even if their use has been suppressed in the official histories.

    Dragoons auto-corrected by history

  14. Soldier in the Mist is brilliant! Soldier of Areté is amazing! Soldier of Sidon is a book too!

    Two out of three ain’t bad. That said, the first book is sufficiently its own thing that it can stand as a one-book nominee.

  15. I can’t agree with Kyra’s contention that Paula Dean should be on the list at all.

    Wait what?

    @Camestros: Sure. “Dragoons.” Wake up, Sheeple!

  16. Oh, Meredith Ann Pierce. More people should read her, she’s brilliant.

    Definitely Mirlees. Lud in the Mist is not as widely known as it should be but it’s really influential.

    I’d add Gaiman’s American Gods.

    And something by James Branch Cabal.

  17. Bujold’s The Spirit Ring was mid-1990s, I think, and is definitely fantasy–I suspect a lot of people here would not have read it, though, and her later fantasy is far more widely known. (Deservedly, too, in my opinion, though The Spirit Ring is solid work.)

  18. “And something by James Branch Cabal.”

    Cabal? He’s the one secretly manipulating the Hugos! Will no-one think of the Puppies?

  19. JIm Henley: “LOTR is not fantasy”

    I was a bit jetlagged, tired, and hot (damn heat pump broke), but I don’t think I said that–I talked about a medieval historian’s lecture on *alternate* and *layered* genre issues relating to Tolkien, about how what people today define as genre fantasy was originated by Tolkien’s work (influencing a huge number of people who became fantasy authors because of Tolkien–and encouraging publishers/evil marketing departments to create a publishing category), and how it wasn’t necessarily appropriate to use what 20th/21st century people define as “fantasy” to categorize Shakespeare, and a bunch of earlier works that were produced in different cultural contexts (myth, etc.). I could add that allegory is not automatically fantasy either (and fantasy is not automatically allegory, though a lot of people conflate the two terms!). I also talked about how (SOME!) readers, especially critics of the time did not have a ‘category’ for Tolkien’s LOTR (they did for TH: children’s stories, which since the Victorian and throughout the Edwardian age had been designated for “children” — which Tolkien wrote at length about as a problematic thing), and thus designated it as weird/bad/notliterature.

    And I agreed with one person that yes it was fantasy–but NOT ONLY fantasy. (Depending on how you define “fantasy”!).

    All preceded by “academic blather” disclaimer! on top of it all.

    So, well, eh, my main concern right now is surviving until the lovely lovely air conditioner man gets the heat pump from Garland tomorrow and installs it (without charging us extra for Saturday work because we’re regular customers).

  20. Mary Frances: I read BUjold’s Spirit Ring when it first came out–was a “buy anything Bujold publishes” reader from the time I picked up the first Cordelia novel…..but I didn’t much like it, read it once or maybe twice, and tucked it away without re-reading, thinking that fantasy wasn’t really her thing.

    Damn, the Five Gods novels blew me awy–so much so I went back and reread SR which I liked more than I had before–but again, not all that much. It sort of falls into the bottom rung of the hierarchy, i.e. my least favorite Bujold (still better than a lot of other stuff though).

  21. Oh, wow, yes, Manley Wade Wellman really, really belongs on the fantasy list.

  22. Kyra: (E.g., is Gulliver’s Travels a fantasy novel? It’s clearly intended to be taken as fiction, but when you realize that The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was probably still considered to be a plausible account at the time …)

    Obligatory academic disclaimer: SO not my period!

    That said, I would agree with this teacher on categorizing it was a “satire on human nature and a parody of the “travellers’ tales” literary sub-genre.” I gather to those informed on the social and political issue of Swift’s day (and his writing), there are a great many pointed comments on those issues (the debate over large end/small end of egg down in egg cup being one I remember being discussed at length by one of my 18th century friends.

    Of course, satire and parody can exist within “fantasy” — and it’s possible to argue that literary academic elitists “rescue” the respectable sub-genres of allegory and dystopia and satire from the “ghetto” of popular/genre publishing –so there may be an argument for GT as “fantasy” (by some definitions).

    I wouldn’t consider it genre fantasy (which was several people pointed out is different from fantasy/the fantastic) in the contemporary sense.

    My main experience with Swift is the traumatic requirement as a beginning TA that we teach “A Modest Proposal” in first-year comp classes as a “model essay,” and having to try to work with first term college students through it back in the late 1970s. Scarred me for life, I tell you (I blame the ridiculous composition theory of the time which was “give these young minds the Great Classics Of the Essay, and they will Learn to Write,” by the way–luckily most comp theory has moved away from that ridiculous stance.

  23. @rrede: I am the furthest thing from anti-academic. But I do think it’s fair to read

    she has a really excellent lecture about how she does not consider Tolkien’s work fantasy (while acknowledging that it originated the genre fantasy publishing category against all odds)

    and take “lecture about how she does not consider Tolkien’s work fantasy” as indicating the lecture was about how she does not consider Tolkien’s work fantasy. That’s got nothing to do with “layers.” I don’t consider this fantasy and here’s why is a poor way to argue that Of course it’s fantasy, but also consider this and this and this.

    I believe the standard polite term for your colleague’s claim is “ingenious.”

    Also, the “against all odds” part of her acknowledgement seems spectacularly unsupported. If we believed that LOTR did originate fantasy as a genre publishing category (admittedly, others have pointed out it did no such thing), why would we consider that an odds-beating phenomenon? Guy writes book lots of people love. Other people try to write more books like it. It’s the odds-on likely thing to happen.

  24. ingenuous, not ingenious?

    For Gaiman, the single obvious worthy pre 2000 candidate is Sandman, though. Do we want to cope with that big a difference in format?

  25. Throwing in another nomination for Stephen Brust in the fantasy bracket. I’m not sure Freedom and Necessity is the right book though (even if it is my favorite Brust). It could really be argued whether it actually qualifies as fantasy or more as a historical novel. The fantastic elements in it are really low key. If we’re aiming for best author it’s also a co-written work (my favorite Bull too!) which muddies the water. I’d suggest Phoenix Guards but it is so derivative of Dumas (intentionally) I don’t think it could survive the early rounds. Any other ideas?

    Another one that probably should be on the short list: The Worm Ouroboros by ER Eddison. Same generation as Tolkien and Lewis but very different. Personally it also shows my tastes changing over time. I tried to read it back in high school and never made it out of the first chapter. I tried again this last summer and loved it. A lot of that has to do with the patience to get past the framing device the first chapter sets up (which was pretty much unnecessary, so why?). Then again I’m not sure it has enough modern readership to be competitive.

  26. @Lenora Rose: Nope. “Ingenious” is the word that gets used here. The usage, which does not originate with me, indicates a kind of effortful cleverness gone awry.

  27. Ah, an unfamiliar usage of the word. Always good to learn more of these.

    The Phoenix Guards being a riff on Dumas doesn’t feel to me like something that should cause it to be downvoted, at least early on. And yet I’d be astonished if it made it to the finals, in general, and I’m trying to figure out why.

  28. If Sandman is not allowed (and I would think it’s different enough in form from the rest that this would be reasonable), the pre-2000 choices for Gaiman are pretty much Neverwhere and Stardust (and Good Omens, but Pratchett is certainly already going to be on the ballot for something else.)

    Of the two, I think Stardust is the superior work, and I honestly I think it’s a bit underrated. On the other hand “a bit underrated” does not speak well to its ability to survive in a bracket like this.

    It may be best to simply leave Gaiman off on the grounds that his best pre-2000 work wasn’t in the medium we’re judging. There’s nothing wrong with that; we’re not putting movies or plays on the ballot either.

  29. Not happy with mixing horror stories with fantasy. If Dracula, Poe and Lovecraft is in, then there’s a lot of horror books I want in on the ballot. Possibly they would take over. Chelsea Quinn Yabro, Anne Rice and so on.

    Otherwise, missing The Good Fairies of New York. Also missing Anne Bishop. Weirded out otherwise with this Young Adult that I don’t even understand what it means apart from some kind of marketing strategy. Is Feists Magician YA or not?

  30. Oh, and Robin Hobb, YA or not? Assassins Apprentice is great stuff. I guess if it is categorized as YA, we will have to wait for the next competition until we get to the good stuff.

  31. For Robin Hobb, I’d suggest Wizard of the Pigeons, which also adds to the urban fantasy representation.

  32. Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, Last Call, Expiration Date…

  33. @Hampus Eckerman:

    Weirded out otherwise with this Young Adult that I don’t even understand what it means apart from some kind of marketing strategy.

    Yes, it really is exactly that simple. The amount of resistance to this concept blows my mind. Just as “Science fiction is what I am pointing at when I am talking about science fiction,” Young Adult is what is marketed as Young Adult.

  34. Jim Henley:

    The difference is that Science Fiction is what I and ordinary fans are pointing at. YA is what was pointed at by some people at marketing during the time of publishing. Not the same.

    It irritates me that I can’t say if works are YA or not just because I have no idea how they were marketed. Or perhaps how some people think they should have been marketed now.

  35. I think this is also culture thing. In sweden, we don’t have a category called “young adult”. We have youth litterature. Young adult would imply people 18-25 or 18-30. So the category seems strange when used for everywhere from 12 to 25.

    Also, english isn’t our first language. I myself didn’t start to read in english until I was around 15 I guess. Most people a few years later. That meant that more or less no SF or Fantasy in english was marketed for youth when I grew up. I think there has been a difference in the last 10-20 years as the new generation is better at english.

    But for me, YA is a made up category for the american market. Nothing I am familiar with.

  36. Re YA:

    The more I think about it, the more disenchanted I am with the idea of keeping YA fantasy books out of this bracket. I think there is a solid argument to be made for children’s fantasy books being in a different bracket — that is arguably a separate genre with its own traditions and giants. But I cannot help but think that EarthSea and The Hero and the Crown belong in the same tradition and The Lord of the Rings and not in the same tradition as Alice in Wonderland. Singling out YA as a category (whether it is a marketing category or a recognizable stylistic one, or some combination of both) just to keep the list to a manageable level seems unfair. I will probably make changes to the next iteration of my list to reflect this.

    Re Horror:

    Horror fantasy is also arguably a separate genre with its own traditions and giants. But if so, I think there are some crossover works that comfortably sit in both, sometimes referred to as “dark fantasy”. Lovecraft, especially, is often read by fantasy genre readers as a fantasy genre author. Bram Stoker is hugely influential in both traditions (and believe me, if I thought I could use “he’s really a horror writer” to kick Stoker off the list, I would.) I’m on the fence about Poe.

  37. Freedom & Necessity is my favorite Brust as well, but I’d consider To Reign in Hell for this purpose. (Anyone unfamiliar with it would only have to read the first sentence for an insta-vote.)

    Picking a de Lint is going to be a massive challenge, too. I’d argue for a short story collection as being most representative, and of those I’m personally most partial to Moonlight & Vines.

    Did anyone yet mention Steven Erikson as just barely being eligible, and totally deserving? (1999 for Gardens of the Moon, and 2000 (is that in or out?) for arguably the strongest or the series, Deadhouse Gates.)

    Also consider C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy. It seems to have faded from collective consciousness lately, but I remember everyone in the 90s falling over themselves about it.

  38. @Hampus:

    I think this is also culture thing. In sweden, we don’t have a category called “young adult”. We have youth litterature. Young adult would imply people 18-25 or 18-30. So the category seems strange when used for everywhere from 12 to 25.

    There you go. Think of “Young Adult” in American bookselling English as “youth literature” in your Swedish tongue. Don’t be confused by trying to do a literal translation of the phrase outside of its context. Idioms exist. Done.

  39. Meanwhile, I note that book marketing is a profession. It’s a thing that people do all day, at least five days a week for up to 50 weeks a year depending on tenure. They are not just throwing darts over their shoulder at a board. They are working diligently to get books in front of the people most likely to want to read them, within all the limits attendant on that effort, because that is how everybody gets paid. Even in our totally awesome and surely unprecedented and undoubtedly “disruptive” era of self-publishing and crowdfunding and online this and crossover that, somebody is working to get the book in question in front of its most receptive audience. This is not “arbitrary” but considered.

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