Back Again

Well, that was fun. To some of you it may seem as though I haven't been doing much. To some of you it may seem as though I never do much.
This is not true, well it's partially true, I haven't won the queen's award for industry yet (and this is the book trade, we're not short of queens)!
In the last few months I have been selling books, attempting to amass the best collection of Polidori's "The Vampyre" that the world will never see, trying to memorise small, charming rural bookshops so that they will still exist somewhere, even if just inside my crowded little head, and trying to distract my wife from the fact that she doesn't have a garden, or a puppy or even a house yet (the other day I told her I had a surprise for her and she immediately said: "Is there a baby sea-lion in the bathroom? I was left lamely offering risotto, which she likes, just not as much as baby sealions).

I attended the New York Antiquarian Book Fair which was gorgeous, laden and creaking with good books and enthusiastic collectors and really nice gawkers, I met Yoko Ono (which was odd, but strangely fun). I sold a really nice bit of Bram Stoker to two of the nicest people I've ever sold Stoker to and I went to an incredibly posh party where I watched a man wearing a suit that cost more than my whole life lick hors d'oeuvres when no-one was looking and then replace them on the trays with a secret smirk of pure glee.

Apropos of nothing:

On the second day of the fair a very beautiful young woman with a sad face that could only really be accurately portrayed by an extremely gay renaissance painter came up to me and asked if she could sit down on our stand.
I of course said yes and, in the manner of a Victorian explorer's valet (which I had been practising, only to find that I lamentably lack gravitas) asked if I could be of any assistance. She replied that I couldn't help, although it was very kind of me to ask, she was only sitting there because it gave her a good view of the beautiful young man on the stand across the way whom she suspected she had fallen in love with and she needed a little while to build up the courage to go speak to him.
I resisted the urge to blubber uncontrollably like the mealy-mouthed coward in a public school novel and simply assured her she could sit there as long as she liked. When I turned around fifteen minutes later, she had gone.

I thought about her and her potential romance (which was already more romantic in my head than reality can usually attain) on and off for the rest of the day.

The next evening as I was leaving the fair in a small but persistent shower of New York rain she was standing outside the front doors, underneath an umbrella, holding a flower. She saw me and smiled with what, to my untrained eye, appeared to be just enough happiness to scorch my retinas and knock twenty years off my age.
"So that went well then?" I said as I walked past.
"Oh, yes." She said, paused, and then repeated with a slow nod.
"Oh, yes."
I continued towards my gin and tonic, she waited in the rain. The world was a better place for both of us.

Flowers of evil! Sit! No dinner for you!

http://coilhouse.net/

Les Fleurs du Mal As

Illustrated By Carlo Farneti

mmmmm....pretty.

http://www.geekologie.com/2010/02/disney_princesses_letting_it_a.php

Also sort of pretty, and more than a bit scary; it's like I'm confronting something I always knew about myself but wasn't keen on admitting...apparently I have fetishes even I didn't know about!

http://coilhouse.net/2007/12/baby-dee-look-what-the-wind-blew-in/

Very cool, but my favourite part is the first comment below the post: "This is happy discover for me!"

I want a happy discover every day!

And how is this for strange: An entire country (and not a small one) has been suspended from using Paypal!

The Boats on The Borderland

Past me,

as you are undoubtedly recovering from what I remember to have been an extremely unwise weekend (I seem to recall it's the one where the woman you loved went away and you decided to neck every pollutant in the building in an attempt to fast forward through to her return; I also seem to remember that you ate those little squares of paper you'd hidden in that briefcase under your bed. It was the alien baby weekend wasn't it? The one where you couldn't make tea because your hands were luminous! Twat.), I shall keep this short.

William Hope Hodgson is some sort of god! From A Tropical Horror to that letter he wrote from the Somme before getting prematurely marmalised...he is the great green Sargasso God of all things creepy. We all love Lovecraft, and Lovecraft loved him.

That's a sentence I didn't think I'd be writing when I woke up this morning. It sounds like it should be a mnemonic, albeit one for something with many, many L's.

I am currently putting together the only leather bound set of his complete works. my biggest worry is that I won't be able to have on for myself and will have to sell them to the undeserving. By undeserving I mean anyone who picks up a book of inconceivable loveliness and says: "Let's talk about future profitability."

It's Galileo, you weapons grade cretin! In the future people will say he invented the past! Get out of my shop and go buy pork bellies!

Oh, and one other thing: you won't have heard of her yet, past me, but you will and she's super!

Miss Suzanne Gerber is looking for a few good men and women to shoo some flies away from little village below the border... no sorry, she's looking for scruffy, gifted artistic types to collaborate on some space. I take this to mean that she wants to create a haven of all things artistic in the glorious rookery that is East London, not that she wants help building a singularity in her living room, although I wouldn't put it past her.

Fiction-Powered Chrono-Navigation

Dearest fons et origio ( Fonzie for short?)

You are currently (to me not to you) sitting in a room filled to the ceiling with Strand Magazines

We love Strand Magazines; they are a bit like a rehydrate-able nineteenth century, a freeze-dried British Empire. The first issue dates from 1891, and it ran in various formats until 1950. It was responsible for the release into the wild of Sherlock Holmes (duh!), Raffles (accomplished gentleman thief and, to my mind, entertaining pervert), a bit of Jules Verne, a spot of Agatha Christie, a tiny shred of William Hope Hodgson, a metric shit-tonne of H.G.Wells, E Phillips Oppenheim, G.K. Chesterton and a myriad others. It nurtured, entertained and critiqued us through two world wars and nearly made it to four monarchs.

It made Conan Doyle a household name and introduced us to roller skating to the South Coast, stilt racing across France, the memoirs of Sara Bernhardt, the sky-train of the future and the ins and outs of the Kaiser's fleet. It was also packed to the straining covers with advertisements for all manner of products; from Bile Beans to shorthand courses to build your own Edison Phonograph to which shotgun you should take with you up the Zambezi. It is also a must for anyone with a corsetry fetish (and who doesn't have one of those?) and a secret predilection for sock suspenders. They are things of beauty every one and the closest that we, with our lack of arcane technological knowledge, will come to time-travel.

Unless...we get this man a working reproduction of Babbage's Difference Engine, couple it up to something James Cameron might use to make home movies; plug the whole thing into a Large Hadron Collider (I have one here somewhere, where is it...ah, under the first edition Story of O and the Gorey Dracula Theatre) and then I stand next to the whole wobbling, steaming contraption in a top hat feeding random pages from the Strand into it until it gives birth to a giant replica nineteenth century which we can then visit on holiday and possibly rent out to people for weddings, funerals and orgies.

I think we're on to something...if I can just stop reading them, stroking them and rolling naked in heaps of them I could make millions!

ahem...

Geekgasm

http://www.geekologie.com/2010/01/yow_yow_sexy_star_wars_burlesq.php

Yes, that's right future me; when you finally get here you will find that radios no longer use valves, Texan chocolate bars no longer exist...and that desperately wanting to have sex with someone dressed as Boba Fett is actually kind of mainstream. This is what we in the interweb age refer to as a definite sign of progress. No longer must legions of overweight, facially haired, shame filled men (arise my legions! I am Spartacus!) lurk in dank apartments fearful of discovery. Now we can come into the light.

But not you, because you're busy screwing up my youth right now.

Love

You

Amor Vincit Turpitudinis

Dear past me,

you will be pleased to hear that in the midst of many unpleasant happenings and whilst lashing yourself to the wheel of your stricken ship you were momentarily distracted and delighted by the information that Mr. Neil Gaiman is marrying Miss Amanda Palmer! This lovely news warmed the cockles of your leathery little heart and caused you to cease self flagellating, which is quite tricky when one is lashed to a wheel.

Your only concern was that some sort of critical mass of cleverness and pretty might be reached resulting in a rift in the fabric of known space. You speculated on the spontaneous creation of a Gaiman-Palmer Bridge which would open into a dimension of small, glowing ideas of tyrannical insistence flitting about taking their clothes off, worshipping cats and singing the eisbar song in a voice that would melt the rivets out of a paddle steamer.

Then a lady phoned up asking if we had a red leather book she could put a lamp on top of, shortly followed by an amiable gentleman who looked around the shop and asked me if you'd read all these books...at which point you thought it best just to say congratulations and get back to the whipping.

Best Wishes

You

They were stringy and indigestible.

Dear past me,
By the time you get here you will have an iPhone, this will enable you to make inane comments available to anyone from anywhere!


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Location:Matto grosso