Who knew? Another door, another window…
I’m reluctant to pepper you with announcements, having just yesterday advised you about the new low price on Tanner’s Tiger in hardcover, but this one’s a steal, and it won’t last. HarperCollins has opened a window for us all, dropping the price of the first Bernie Rhodenbarr book, Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, to a cool 99¢.
Click away: Kindle Nook Kobo Apple
That’s our window, but it won’t stay open long. June 11 is the day Choosers pumpkins up to $4.99, and takes all my other HarperCollins eBooks along for the ride. (In the meantime, they’re just $3.99—and that’s all the Tanners, all the Scudders, all the Kellers, and all the Burglars.)
And the closing door? That would be The Sins of the Fathers, the first Matthew Scudder book, which HarperCollins has priced at 99¢ for a few weeks now. It’s officially $3.99 now, but Kindle’s been slow to get the memo; if you act fast, you might be able to pick it up right here for 99¢. (But don’t let on who told you…)
A door closes, a window opens…
Just last week we offered first-edition copies of several Evan Tanner paperbacks. Tanner’s Tiger sold out almost immediately. (In fact we sold one more copy than we had, embarrassingly enough.)
If that’s the door, here’s the window: We have a good stock of the Subterranean Press first hardcover edition. Here’s the description from the eBay listing:
TANNER’S TIGER. The Subterranean Press first hardcover edition of Tanner #5. The trade edition, identical to the slipcased-numbered-limited edition except (duh) it’s not numbered, has no limitation sheet, and isn’t slipcased. But it’s signed, of course, and fresh out of the box, a fine example of Sub Press’s high standards. And the price is different, too; because LB got paid in copies, and because we still have a lot of them, we’re putting this on special at $9.99.
What we haven’t mentioned is that the cover illustration is by Phil Parks, and the book takes Tanner to his most exotic destination yet—Canada, where there’s a plot to blow up the Queen of England. Now you know.
While you’re climbing through that open window, you might want to look at what we’ve added. There’s a batch of one-copy-only anthologies with an LB story or intro, all priced at $9.99 or less. And, of course, the auction started last night, and the bidding’s barely gotten underway.
-David Trevor for LB
I wrote about this in a newsletter that went out yesterday, but not all of you will have received it. So I’ll just tell you briefly that I’ve put up eleven items for auction on eBay. The listings go live at 9pm Eastern Time tonight (that’s Tuesday, May 29) and the five-day auction closes at 9pm, Sunday, June 3.
You’ll find full descriptions and photos in the individual eBay listings. Here’s what’s on offer:
A Stab in the Dark, Arbor House first edition.
A Stab in the Dark, author’s original manuscript.
The Triumph of Evil, UK hardcover first.
The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian, UK hardcover first.
Me Tanner, You Jane, Macmillan US first edition.
In the Midst of Death, Dell PBO first edition.
The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, Random House first edition.
Ariel, Arbor House bookplate first edition.
Not Comin Home to You, UK hardcover first.
Such Men Are Dangerous, Macmillan US first edition.
and a big box of 14 audiobooks on cassette.
As always, all lots open at 99¢, and there are no reserves. And we’re now able to ship anywhere in the world. Have fun!
LB
Buy a one-book series for $4.99!
In 1969, Fawcett Gold Medal published The Specialists as a paperback original. In 1996, James Cahill printed a first hardcover edition, and after a few years I bought the remainder stock from him and have been selling it—sometimes at $25, sometimes at $20. When I opened the eBay store last week I dropped the price a penny, to $19.99.
It’s sold nicely over the years, a good steady item for us. Then yesterday my capable if occasionally caustic assistant, David Trevor, pointed out that, at the present rate of sale, we’d still have copies on hand in 2045.
So we’ve reduced the price to $4.99. I don’t know that we’ll keep it that low forever, so you might want to strike while the iron is hot.
Or would you prefer to look before you leap?
The book’s afterword begins below. But first I should tell you something about shipping costs, because they can be confusing. For domestic orders, we charge $3.99 for the first item, $1.99 for each additional item. We’d like that combined shipping rate to extend over an entire order, but it can be tricky to program, at least for us, at least for now. If you order four different books, and if eBay asks that you pay $3.99 shipping for each of them, click the button to REQUEST INVOICE FROM SELLER. Then we’ll invoice you at the combined-shipping rate, and THEN you can pay, and we’ll ship your books.
If you buy multiple copies of a single title, you should get the low shipping price automatically. Thus an order for 11 copies of THE SPECIALISTS would come to $49.90 plus $3.99 plus $19.90, for a total of $73.99. (It would also solve your gift-buying problems for a while, and earn you the undying gratitude of young David Trevor.)
For non-US orders, we ship by USPS Priority Mail; you pay the actual shipping cost plus $1.99 per item handling fee. Again, if the eBay auto-invoice seems not to reflect this, REQUEST INVOICE FROM SELLER.
Now back to The Specialists. Here’s a taste of the afterword:
I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m most often identified as the creator of series characters. My two active series, concerning a bookselling burglar named Rhodenbarr and a sober drunk named Scudder, are the ones people are most likely to know about. Readers with a wider range may be familiar as well with a series of seven novels about an insomniac named Tanner, and another of four novels about a horny kid named Harrison.
A relative handful will have followed the adventures in short–story form of two other gents, an attorney called Ehrengraf and a killer named Keller. But that’s about as far as it goes. Hardly anybody, asked to name all of my series, would come up with The Specialists.
A fat lot they know. As far as I’m concerned, The Specialists is unequivocally a series novel. As it happens, the series is only one book long. But I figure it’s a series just the same.
What on earth is he talking about, Maude?
Easy, there. I can explain.
In the spring of 1966 I moved into a big old house on a small old lot smack in the middle of New Brunswick, New Jersey. I set up an office for myself on the third floor. I had a massive old desk, and the movers couldn’t get the thing up the last flight of stairs. It wouldn’t fit. Most desks of that vintage disassemble, but not this sucker. They had to cut the back legs off it. I propped up the back of the desk with two short stacks of paperback novels, plopped a typewriter on top of it, and went to work.
Three and a half years later, when we moved to a place in the country, I left the desk right there, and I left the books to keep it from tilting. By that time the desk didn’t owe me a dime, because I’d sat at it and written a whole slew of books. I’d already written the first Tanner book in Racine, Wisconsin, but I wrote the other six in New Brunswick, along with After the First Death and Such Men Are Dangerous and more pseudonymous work than I’ll admit to at the moment. (I wrote No Score, the first Chip Harrison novel, in that house, but not on that desk. I moved downstairs to the first floor and wrote it on the breakfast–room table. I can’t remember why.)
I also wrote The Specialists at that desk…
Want more? The afterword appears in full in Afterthoughts, my 99¢ piecemeal eMemoir. Or you can read it for free at the LB’s Afterthoughts page. And do I have to say that the very best place to find it—and have it and hold it forever— is in your own personal autographed copy of The Specialists?
You talked us into it…
NEW POLICY—LB’S BOOKSTORE CAN NOW FILL INTERNATIONAL ORDERS!
Maybe I got sick of disappointing people. Maybe I grew tired of apologizing.
Or could be it’s just pure and simple greed. Always hard to rule that out…
Whatever it is, we’re now taking and filling orders from anywhere on the planet. We ship international orders by USPS Priority Mail, and the costs aren’t low, and there are time-consuming forms for us to fill out. But if you’ve got the money, honey, we’ve got the time.
All of this is a result of our closing the old website store and opening anew on eBay, where LB’s Bookstore is better equipped than ever to serve you. The new store gives us a flexibility we never had at our old website location, and we’ve responded by adding items every day. At last count, we had 91 different books for sale. We put After Hours: Conversations with Lawrence Block on special for $4.99 and sold 22 copies at last count. We’ve included quite a few books where our stock is only one or two copies—anthologies with one of my stories, collections for which I wrote an introduction. Most are priced low, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.
The three new Scudder trade paperbacks are available individually—or as a set with a special price of $49.99 postpaid. There’s no end of hardcover first editions featuring Matthew Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Evan Tanner, and a chap named Keller. And, yes, they’re all signed. If LB wrote it and LB’s selling it, LB can damn well sign it.
(The genuinely rare stuff, the manuscripts and high-ticket firsts, will be offered up at auction from time to time. There’s nothing on offer right now, but when there is, you’ll find it in the eBay store, along with the fixed-price items.)
The stock is ever-changing, and there are two ways to find what you want. The most obvious is to go straight to the eBay store and browse, but you might find it a good deal simple to visit the LB’s Bookstore page on my WordPress blog, where everything’s listed in some semblance of order, and it’s easy to see at a glance just what’s on offer and how it’s priced. Each book listed has a link that’ll take you right to the eBay listing.
Click click click. What a world, huh?
And whatever portion of it you inhabit, we’ve got books for you…
LB
Two things:
I have two things to tell you, and the first is one you may well have already heard. The news broke around noon, and word of mouth got a big helping hand from the social media.
The second, not so much.
(1) A Walk Among the Tombstones, the tenth book in the Matthew Scudder series, is scheduled to begin filming in February. Scott Frank, who wrote the screen adaptation, will direct; the extraordinary Liam Neeson will star as Matthew Scudder.
I couldn’t be happier. Neeson as Scudder struck me as a wonderful idea back when I saw him portray Michael Collins in the eponymous film. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see in the role.
(2) If you’ll look at the top of your screen, where each of the various pages of this blog site gets its own tab, you’ll see one that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s LB’s Bookstore, and I’m pleased to call it to your attention despite the fact that it’s very much a work in progress. For years I’ve had an online bookstore at my website, and a cumbersome thing it’s been; I’ve decided to replace it with an eBay store, and the brand-new shelves of LB’s eBay Bookstore are already stocked with 25 titles. (And there may be more by the time you read this.)
There’s a link on the blogsite page that goes straight to an eBay master list, and there are individual links on the blog’s LB’s Bookstore page for each of the individual items on eBay. I can see already that it will make my end of every transaction much simpler, and I believe it will do the same for you. Just find what you liked and click on it, and eBay and PayPal will see to the rest.
That’s (1) and (2), and what better way to tie them all together than to point out two fine editions of A Walk Among the Tombstones in the new bookstore? There’s Orion’s UK hardcover first edition, hard to find on either side of the ocean, and there’s the brand-new Telemachus Press trade paperback.
I just thought of (3), but that’s enough for now. It’ll be in a newsletter which I plan on getting out tomorrow. (And a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com, with LB-Newsletter in the subject line, will get you on the mailing list.) Meanwhile, though, why not come on over to the store and peek in the window?
Thanks!
LB
Good seats going fast!
May 11, 2012
Good Seats Going Fast!
I’ve been a boxing fan ever since my dad took me to Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium to watch Willie Pep take apart an inoffensive chap named Walter Kolby. It was April of 1946, and I was coming up on my eighth birthday. Willie was 23, and at the time he’d been fighting for six years and would go on for another twenty. The ref stopped it after five rounds, and that was a mercy for Buffalo’s own Walter Kolby, who hung up his gloves in 1952 and took a ten-count forty years after that.
Truth to tell, my Frequent Companion is twice the fight fan I am. So we watch a lot of pay-for-view bouts. A while back she reported proudly that she’d booked the show coming up in two weeks. Why so early? Quoth Herself: “I wanted to make sure we got good seats.”
All of which is preface to the news that Amazon is taking pre-orders for Hit Me, the fifth Keller novel coming from Mulholland in February. Yes, that’s nine months from now. But there are sound reasons to pre-order, even this far in advance—if there’s a price increase, you’re safe; if there’s a lower price, you’ll get it; if there’s a UPS strike, Jeff Bezos will deliver your copy in person. But I like Lynne’s reason the best. You’ll get really good seats…
Click here to read the rest of the post on the brand-new Keller’s Page
I’m telling everybody!
So this elderly gentleman is in the confessional, giving a richly detailed account of an affair he’s having with a twenty-two year old.
Priest: Excuse me, but from your accent I get the impression that you are Jewish.
Old dude: Yes, I am. So?
Priest: Well, uh, why are you telling me all this?
Old dude: I’m telling everybody!
What I’m telling everybody is that anyone with a Kindle can get the first Martin Ehrengraf story, The Ehrengraf Defense, absolutely free for the next forty-some hours. The deal lasts until 2:59 am on the morning of Thursday, May 10.
I’d understood—and initially reported—that the deal was US-only. But UK and Australian readers tell me they’re having no trouble downloading the story, so here’s a link to amazon.co.uk
And will this work in France? In Germany? In Spain? In Italy? Try it and see!
And, if it works, don’t keep it to yourself. Spread the word. Forward this post to anyone who might be interested. There’s no catch, beyond the possibility that you might like the story enough to read others in the series. So take a cue from the old fellow in the confessional. Tell everybody!
New on eBay: 5 books and 5 manuscripts
It’s getting late, and I just want to let you know what’s newly available:
1. Sweet Little Hands – a short story manuscript.
2. One Night Stands & Lost Weekends – the publisher’s Advance Review Copy.
3. A Moment of Wrong Thinking – A Matthew Scudder short story manuscript.
4. Like A Lamb to Slaughter – a signed first edition.
5. This Keller For Hire – a short story manuscript, with its working title.
6. Ariel – the very uncommon UK first edition.
7. A Drop of the Hard Stuff – the copy-edited manuscript, all marked up by editor and writer, of the most recent Matthew Scudder novel.
8. Lawrence Block 1993 Bibliography – one of 420 copies, signed in gold ink by five different contributors.
9. By the Dawn’s Early Light – the revised draft of an unpublished and unproduced and entirely forgotten TV movie, with the award-winning story adapted and Scudder replaced by a new protagonist.
10. Not Comin’ Home to You – the third Paul Kavanagh novel, and arguably my rarest book.
The links will get you there. Every items is listed to open at 99¢ with no reserve. The eBay auctions close Sunday, May 13. Have fun!
LB
Reading LB all around the world
The international readership my work has gained is one of the great satisfactions of my writing life. My books have been widely translated, and of course many overseas readers are able to enjoy them in English.
But they’re not always easy to find. Here are some links to make it a little easier; they’ll take you to pages with a wide selection of my books and short stories, in English and in translation, in eBook and in printed form and audio. Click on any of them to see what’s available:
For convenience, you can find these links at any time at the bottom of the long list of links at the righthand side of every blog page.
Have fun! And I wish you all the best, in the language of your choice…
LB
