Terry Pratchett and B-Space I-Space S-Space a bit of a Zoom-in about modern first editions.

Zoom in on the planet, pretty much any country will do as long as the language there is the same as one you can read.

This is a critical path story, sorry, the story of the Critical Path. The path leads to a book by Terry Pratchett. A first edition? Maybe.

Now if it wasn’t for a series of unfortunate events I would still be running a new independent bookshop and not the secondhand bookshop that I am running now.

Let’s for a moment step down a different trouser leg of time where Terry is still alive and writing and has a new book coming out about gnomes and steam ships called "Abaft the Beam" and priced at £20.

In this leg I am a billionaire and have decided to carry on running the small chain of independent new bookshops in Hertfordshire, my brother running the one in St
Albans, my father running the one in Stevenage and me running the ones in Welwyn-Garden-City and Hitchin. This was roughly what was happening thirty five years ago.

So the new book comes out priced £20 the bookseller makes his money out of the discount he or she gets and buys it from a wholesaler who also makes their money from the discount.

The publisher sells it to the wholesaler for £8 who sells it to the bookseller to £12 who sells it to the reader for £20, I am a billionaire so the business of the publisher selling it to Amazon for £8 who sells it to the reader for £12 including postage, doesn’t worry me. Sorry this is no good.

Anyway down a different trouser leg zoom in on the planet, we shall call it Earth, zoom in on the country, we shall call it England, zoom in on the town, we shall call it Ramsgate, Zoom in on the bookshop, we shall call it Michael’s.

L-Space as Pratchett readers will know is the dimension that connects all libraries in every known dimension. Here in England the libraries used to primarily be repositories for books, however having tried to compete with Blockbuster and then various internet cafés, they really don’t have so many books anymore. L-Space on Earth has had to mutate because of this, there are lots of books on the internet, but I-Space didn’t work. When the test daemons finally emerge from the wiring and into the earpiece we can only hope it will be in the call centre that tried to steal our password. B-Space and W-Space has made some inroads into Waterstones but mostly seems to fizzle out around the coffee machines in Nero’s – possibly N-space.

S-Space however has always existed in secondhand bookshops – where the truly wild books are. There was a falling out, a severance over rubber-stamps and finally sellotape, but there are doors – probably portals, so zoom in on the fiction.

Not the children’s fiction that’s just juvenile you will get nomes not gnomes in Broeliad.

Zoom in on the fiction

 zoom in on the fantasy fiction

adult fantasy fiction is not called phantasy

which you will find up another passageway

in the S-Space of the bookshop

for this particular quest.

Are you holding onto you string in the maze?

You need hardback fantasy fiction

where the modern first editions are to be found not the valuable ones

this is a different matter think inclusive, think anoraks, think pins, think stamp collecting but also think of a decent sewed copy that will last for numerous reads and will look attractive on the shelves. Although everything falls apart around Unseen Academicals where the UK first edition was perfect bound. What? Far from perfect.

So consider the pictures of Monstrous Regiment, which one is the first edition? They both are, the one on the left is the UK first printing the one on the right the US first edition.

Or consider the two copies of Snuff both UK first editions, one for Waterstones and one for everyone else.

 In this case the first revised edition of The Carpet people 1992, worth about £6 as opposed to the 1971 Colin Symthe edition worth about £700 but around £200 if it has been through L-Space, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0900675497/ref=tmm_hrd_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used&qid=1460476809&sr=8-1  

Back in the day the stuff you would look for - not to be there - was Second Impression, Third Impression. this means it's a third impression of the first edition, sometimes called a first edition thus. What? Not a first edition. 

 Now look carefully at the numbers in the little red box I have drawn on the photo to highlight them, this time it's the other way around, something isn't there making this not a first edition. What? 135 42

Staying with Tiff for a Mo look at the numbers on this one, which is a first edition.

Making Money crops up in this sort of thing, what’s it worth? Not much with these very modern firsts after around 2000 AD that is. A fine copy (like new) about £7, if it’s a bit scruffy – has someone’s name written on it – has the price clipped off the jacket, well about £2.50.

But in years to come, when there are very few fine copies about and people are trying to complete sets of fine first editions, probably quite a bit. Why would anyone collect pins? Not for the money.    

I don’t know if you have ever heard of the card game Solo Whist there is a bid called Misère Ouverte, where the idea is to win no tricks with your hand placed face up on the table after the first trick is complete.

In the bookselling business I have played my first trick and am now playing with my hand face up on the table, hence the blog with the photos of the books going on the shelves in my bookshop every day at http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/

I guess if independent bookselling in the UK has to be Misère then there isn’t much reason why secondhand bookselling in the UK can’t be Ouverte but not over.

Terry Pratchett and a slip in my reading, wading towards bookseller reviews, a ramble from the bookshop.

When it comes to the English comic novel and LOL or anything else for that matter my favourites are Terry Pratchett, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe, P G Wodehouse and Richmal Crompton, also because of Good Omens, Neil Gaiman has to come in somewhere too.

Back in the days before the internet and out of town shopping, we, my family that is, had four independent bookshops in Hertfordshire and one of our jobs, my brother, father, stepmother and me did was to chose what we thought were the best new books for these bookshops.

Easy with established writers, but with new writers the only way to decide if you are going to buy a lot or a little of a title was to read the proofs, which we did, back in the day – that is. Back then having bought fifty copies of Watership Down – or whatever it was – basically we then told the customers how good it was, or had red faces and a lot of unsold books.

Nowadays I am a secondhand bookseller living in the world of the internet, so of course if I rabbit on about rabbits, I can’t just order fifty copies, but it occurs to me that in some way I am a professional reader, if not a dear reader, and so I am going to start doing some blog posts in the form of something approaching a book review.

Not only am I a reseller but I am a rereader pretty much all of Terry’s books have been reread by me, the exceptions being Unseen Academicals and Strata neither of which did it for me. Perhaps one of these days, a reread and they will.

Anyway I am halfway through A Slip of the Keyboard inasmuch as I have read the Neil Gaiman forward and The Scribbling Intruder, not sure how I missed reading it before, but I did.

I think it’s a must read for every Pratchett fan, but it is also a book with more about signing sessions in bookshops than I have ever come across before, making it a must read for booksellers.

Back in the day I have been involved in signing sessions as a bookseller, from signing sessions with half mile queues, to signing sessions where major literary figures sat at a desk in a busy town centre bookshop and the only people who approached them asked the questions like, where are the cookery books.    

I Think it was the chapter headed, “Advice to Booksellers” that did it, inspired me to start on this journey which I hope will lead to some book – reviewing isn’t quite the word I am looking for here – but some sort of extension of something I have done for the last forty years, which is help my customers along to the next book.

What I can’t do is ask the first question that I would ask in the bookshop, which is. “What have you read that you enjoyed?” But I can say here, if you have read most of Terry’s novels then you will probably enjoy Slip of the Keyboard, which is as near to an autobiography as you are going to get.            

I can also say we haven’t got it in stock, the pictures are of some of the books by the authors mentioned in this blog that we have got in stock, that’s the way with secondhand bookshops.

But is does lead me on to wondering if there is anything that authors and secondhand booksellers can do together that could promote books and reading, we already have James Patterson Handing out grants to new bookshops and libraries.

At the moment all of it, new independent bookshops, libraries, secondhand bookshops and even the big chain booksellers have been severely reduced in numbers and the verity of available physical books.

For us in the book business this is a worrying trend, a particularly worrying aspect of which is finding a bookseller or librarian who is widely read. Going into a bookshop or library and asking for Terry Pratchett, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe, P G Wodehouse, Richmal Crompton or Neil Gaiman, isn’t likely to get too many “who”s as they are all authors who sell well at the moment, but the situation isn’t good out there.

The next step, which is going into the library or bookshop having read all of the Terry Pratchetts and finding someone there who has also read them all and with whom you can discuss what to read now/next with, is often a step too far.

It’s a completely different question to which authors are like Terry Pratchett? Which is easy to answer with. “None.” 

Making Love to the Dragon at Turner Contemporary and the racing at Crampton, an afternoon out in Broadstairs and Margate.

Look if you haven’t read Moving Pictures, click on the link https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gDnb8AlIMAUC&pg=PA100&lpg=PA100&dq=moving+pictures+pot+pellet+pratchett&source=bl&ots=P6qwiqyn2Y&sig=Zz4jMUqV46V_yRO2nWHRTrnBnaQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAGoVChMI0vebx4jwyAIVhCgeCh2RNQG6#v=onepage&q=moving%20pictures%20pot%20pellet%20pratchett&f=false 

And if you don’t know how it relates to Turner Contemporary and the “Risk” exhibition, read my post http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/risk-in-margate-at-turner-contemporary.html

Anyway when I got back here last time to write the post I couldn’t remember if it was dragons or elephants on the pot, no photography in the exhibition, see.

So first thing I does, actually first thing I does when I gets to the gallery is put my coat in a locker and go to the toilet – disabled one actually because I wanted to sing fairly loud and didn’t want to spoil anyone's aim in the gents. Yep first thing I does is go up into the gallery and ask for an adjustable gallery chair to sit on so I can sketch the pot.

Quick pen sketch of the seismograph, which the gallery have wrongly labelled a seismometer please note this is a sketch to remember the thing by and not a sketch of the thing.

One big problem about sketching anything not vegetable or mineral is that you tend to come away from the thing feeling a bit like you have made love to it, the dragon wouldn’t let me draw its teeth, as you can see.

If I was going to lecture a group of students about the relationship between art and science, I would say “There is no relationship between art and science.” and then spend the rest of the lecture sketching the students, and refusing to say anything else about the subject.

I was feel a bit burnt out after the dragon so went off to the gallery and drew some young people, as if the animal is human and alive there is a sort of return energy, so thanks.

On to Crampton Tower in Broadstairs where my children did “Slot Racing” and pressed buttons.

Here are my Photos