Tag Archives: Sherlock Holmes

“There Is a Seat for Every Ass”

2 Replies

P.T. Barnum is supposed to have said that in reference to filling up his Circus’s Big Tent with paying customers. Or so I’ve been led to believe for many years because I’ve used this quote in the past. But when I go to famous quotes websites I find no attribute to Barnum or anyone else.

Oh well. I still like it because the same could be said for antiquarian books. For every old book there is buyer. Somewhere. I bring this up because that’s what I’ve been thinking as I sort through the 3,000 plus volumes Birchwood Books acquired last month. It’s been full-stop on the novel-in-progress, Knock Softly (working title), while I get this inventory sorted. So far, the oldest book dates to 1631, is in Latin, was printed in France and is about a Spanish Governor. The newest dates to 2001. I’m only about two-thirds of the way through the initial sorting.

To sort, I separate the books into four primary categories: keep; next; too low for online; and donate. Keep means this is a book I’d still like to find on my shelf tomorrow morning, so it will be among the last books to be listed for sale. I’ve found a couple hundred of these. The largest category is next, and that is sub-divided into older and newer books. Newer being post-1960 in this case, and that’s what most of this collection is. The books that are too low for online will be sold, hopefully, in bulk to other bookstores for a few dollars each.

So far, we have donated over 400 books to the John Dingle V.A. Hospital in Detroit and to our local library. Why would you donate a collectable book? Because the market has changed over the past 30 years and these are books that do not have any true collector appeal anymore, mostly due to their condition. Today’s collector, that person who will take out their wallet for a title they really want, is only interested in good looking material. No doubt, there is a seat for this ass (the donated book), but the time and effort it would take to find makes it a losing proposition in today’s market. All collectable books fluctuate in value but they don’t always increase. With the addition of Amazon and eBay, there are more choices for any given title than ever and that has driven the market down sharply over the past decade. Better to take the donation value now and let someone else have the fun of owning it and taking a little profit years later if/when the market rebounds. If it takes another thirty years, I’ll be in my nineties, or my grave. Folks will find some great stories in these books. But in truth, nobody is collecting Christopher Morley these days, or Patrick O’Brian, McPhee, Harte or Haycraft. Their stars my rise again, but with shelf space at a premium around here, I have to be as careful with what I keep as I am with what I donate.

There is a fifth section to the sort; it’s called 2018. As in, do not open this box until 2018. There are only about 75 of these so far. They are all good, collectable books but there’s just too much competition right now. Think Ann Rice, Norman Mailer and John Updike. All shinning-star authors, all first edition books in fine or near fine condition, but only saleable at around fifteen to twenty dollars in today’s market. Their future looks brighter so we’ll hang on to them. You don’t get in the antiquarian book business for quick turnarounds and profits. Some books, many in fact, we’ve held for a decade or longer.

What’s the best thing I’ve pulled out of a box so far? On a personal note, that would be A. Conan Doyle’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes in true first edition. I’ve been looking for an affordable copy for over 30 years and I literally dance around holding the book over my head after I pulled it from the box. But from a collector standpoint, it has to be Thomas Payne’s 1791 Rights of Man. A fine example of the first edition, second printing, in the original paper wraps. It appears unread all these years. America was fifteen years old when Payne wrote this book. Born British, Payne also penned Common Sense – the book that sparked the American Revolution. For Rights of Man, England convicted Payne in absentia for “seditious libel” and issued a standing order for his arrest if he ever stepped foot on British soil again. Now, that’s a book with impact!

Special callout here to friends and fellow Author, Tony and Bonnie Virag (Stove Pipe). It was Tony who told me about this collection last September. Thank you, and, Bonnie, I understand Stove Pipe is in its second printing now! That’s the only sign of success in this business, and you did it! Congratulations. If you haven’t read her book, it’s a terribly gripping story.

Next month, we’ll get back to Knock Softly.

Read on, friends.

And Now, The 2050 POE Prize Winner For…

3 Replies

By the middle of this century, the successful fiction novel is going to involve a lot more than just words-on-the-page. Already, graphic novels are becoming animated and eBooks are reading the stories aloud. It won’t be long before Harry Potter flies out of our tablet in a hologram while J. K. Rowling sits on our digital screen and read to us, her universal audience of one.

Actual printed matter — the stuff of ink and paper — in the future novel is going to be strictly cover art and internal illustrations suitable for framing. The Author’s contribution to this piece of art will be a caption of the very essence of the image itself; the words that created it. But, sadly, that’s the only text of the author’s we will read in 2050 ink. “Limited Edition” will lose all meaning, right along with “Remainder Bin.” Soon, “Deluxe Edition” will mean that very same artwork only signed by the author and/or illustrator(s), and also the animator(s), holograph artists and voice artists who will help produce the POE Prize (Pulitzer-Oscar-Emmy) winners in 2050. Print versions, where they exist at all, will be expensive pre-ordered Collector Editions bound in (by then) genuine Corinthian Naugahyde, or they will be biodegradable, print-on-demand paperbacks that, in a pinch, can double as toilet paper.

All of these added features take talents beyond what most of today’s writers possess, or want to possess. But collaboration of such talents will be the keys to the kingdom within a few years.

Why? Because it’s more entertaining! You can get a glimpse of the future now. Anomaly, has an app that produces short, holographic animations that jump off the pages of the printed book. It’s surreal. It’s half way to the future.

Unlike biographers and historians, fiction writers are strictly in the entertainment business. We don’t seek to teach or preach to a known audience, we must create our own. The better we entertain, the bigger the audience. Simple as that. Biographers and historians have no such concerns, but then, they don’t have their readers sitting on the edge of their chair, either.

Funny, if we look back in time we can clearly see our future. One hundred years ago, new fiction writers got their stories serialized in magazines first. Readers had to wait until the next issue for the next installment. The author was tasked with keeping their audience in suspense and caring enough about what happens next to buy the next issue. Both Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs got their start this way, among many others. The complete novel version would come out the following year, or not, depending on magazine sales. Only successful novels were then followed by a movie or play adaptation.

First you’d get a little and like, then you’d get a lot and love it, then you’d get it all in-your-face but sometimes want to spit.

Blogs, tablets, home theater. Same play, different stage. Today, if we want the wider audience to swallow our story and feel satisfied, we have to write to resonate in every format, else what the author sees is not what the wider audience gets.

And that’s the rub. Often, the audio and visual versions of novels do not resonate with those who have already read the book. The author has to take control of his/her works before this point. Inflections can’t be out of place in tomorrow’s digital novel. Liberties can’t be allowed that change what the author intended for so-called creative license. Authors had little care in the matter 100 years ago, when fiction was still in its adolescence. By the time the movie or play adaptation came out, they’d long since moved on, high on their next novel.

Only a handful of authors thought of their works in terms of perpetuity. Edgar Rice Burroughs did. Arthur Conan Doyle did not. Both were hallmark visionaries, yet history tells their personal tales vastly different.

Some of Conan Doyle’s adaptations have been spectacular, like the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes series of several years ago that starred the late Jeremy Brett. Doyle would have been proud of that one. But most other renditions of the world’s first forensics sleuth — and there are many — do Doyle a disservice, or at least the author’s intent, leaving the viewer who hasn’t read the original stories to wonder what all the fuss was about 100 years ago. The original Sherlock Holmes was a bipedal bloodhound, everything Doyle wrote centered on that singular aspect. It was Holmes’ superior intellect and cunning methods of deduction that kept readers clamoring for more. Yet, modern adaptations brush Holmes’s methodical pace, his creative thinking, and sometimes even his flair for the dramatic ending under the carpet. For the last 50 years, contemporary stories have centered on Sherlock’s lack of love life (Irene Adler; The woman in A Scandal in Belgravia), or his fetish with cocaine–legal at the time– in (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution). If you’d only read or watch the newer versions you’d think Holmes was just an insensitive, bi-polar drug addict with sexual hang ups, and Doyle’s estate has been unable to stop any of it.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, on the other hand, controlled all aspects of his writing: creating, publishing, distribution, artwork, and adaptations into other formats, by mid-career. Tarzan hasn’t changed one iota. Burroughs was honored with a U.S. postal stamp to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Tarzan, and the ape-man was still as handsome as he was in 1912. Some adaptations have been laughable, true, but Tarzan has gone agelessly into a second life in the funny papers and on the silver screen, and license was sold by Burroughs and his estate for every one of these versions. His estate enjoys that foresight to this day with Andy Briggs’ “New Adventures” of Tarzan stories, and a new, subscriber-based, weekly online comic strip of the man who had a six pack long before Budweiser.

Will fiction authors have the vision to get collaboration right this time around?

Will the Author — the Creator of the very essence of the story itself — finally get to conduct the orchestra in this land of digital perpetuity? Or just continue to play first violin?

Depends on what tale we tell I suppose, and how well we show it to the widest audience.

April’s Blog: Show Don’t Tell. It’s the first rule any new novelist learns, but it means more than just opening up the reader’s eyes. Next month, we’ll look at how writing to the reader’s other senses can often paint a more vivid picture than the eyes can see, and how that raises the temperature of today’s suspense novels.