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Sunday, November 20, 2011

JACKET REQUIRED: My Bookman's Alley Take

"If I were a rich man, I would've left with quite a bit more" - to paraphrase Tevye.  But these days I really have to watch my spending.  Here's what I found to my liking among those that I were in my price range. There are lots and lots books still there. He has a first edition of John Irving's first book Setting Free the Bears, but at $1200 even a 30% off discount doesn't make it anywhere near affordable for me.  [...sigh...]

Only the wrap-around art pictures can be clicked on for larger views. The rest are already at full size

Artwork by William Barss
Artwork by Charles Geer, master of the Gothic and Romantic suspense DJ
(Click to enlarge)
Artwork by the fabulous Stanley Wood who created the immortal portrait of Dr. Nikola I use as my avatar.
Artwork by Artur Barbosa (1908-1995). He also did some well known
covers for Georgette Heyer's Regency novels
(Click to enlarge)

And a lone book without a jacket.  One of the most original impossible crime novels by the prolific and utterly forgotten American pulp magazine writer Isabel Ostrander whose work will be showcased here next year:


For more info about Bookman's Alley see my post here.

6 comments:

  1. Great covers, but when are you going to do another Left Inside? You haven't done one of those in ages!

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  2. Good heavens! You are absolutely right. It usually requires extensive research and I wasn't finding much interesting in that box and I think I gave up out of laziness more than anything. But I'll go digging through and see if I can find something nifty and cool. Stay tuned...

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  3. Very nice books. Do you rate Elizabeth Peters? I haven't read any of her many, many novels.

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  4. I've sampled a few of Peters' books in their entirety and several I started but abandoned well before the midpoint. Among those I finished were the first Amelia Peabody book which I liked, and two by "Barbara Michaels" -- Ammie, Come Home (very good) and Someone in the House, (not so good). The latter is a derivative haunted house story that is unevenly constructed, borrows heavily from Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House and, IMO, has an awful cop-out of an ending. Her early books from the 1970s I guess were somewhat groundbreaking for the romantic suspense genre, but they smack of 1970s hip women's lib kind of thinking which usually includes lot of man bashing jokes that reek of that era. Those books I attempted to read (the first few Vicky Bliss ones and one other I can't remember) were a big turn off to me. I closed the books and left them unfinished. I have no idea what her most recent Amelia Peabody books are like, but they continue to be very popular. I tend to buy up any early Elizabeth Peters book I find with the intention of reselling them and not reading them.

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  5. Would that I could have joined you. From the looks of your haul the store's stock was well reflected in its look. Must say, those chairs seem inviting.

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  6. Perhaps if Peters/Michaels had written twelve novels or even twenty novels, instead of churning out umpteen dozen, the end result would have been considerably better.

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