Nevermore – How it Started

Nevermore is a new line of signed limited editions published by Festa Publishing. It will contain books in German language that may be interesting for foreign collectors, too. Why? I will tell a little later.

It all started some years ago, in 2000. As a member of a German Science Fiction organization in Leipzig in the eastern part of Germany (former GDR), we organized our fifth convention “Elstercon.” The theme was “Of Coming Horrors” and we were interested in connections between Horror Fiction and Science Fiction. We did a great conbook, 350 pages, hardcover with lots of stories by our guests and a breathtaking cover, which sometimes fills me with real horror (have a look at it and don’t forget, it was done in 2000!). I was responsible for inviting guests and, with George R. R. Martin, Michael Bishop and Michael Marshall Smith, we had really great names. But of course as German authors should take part, too, we thought about who would match our theme. So we invited Frank Festa, a well-known German author who not only wrote some really weird stories but started to publish books in his own small press, Edition Metzengerstein. Some of the best works by famous authors of the genre were brought out here, like Ramsey Campbell, Brian Hodge, Dan Simmons and more. Frank was a very friendly and competent man and we stayed in contact.

Later Frank founded his own publishing house, Festa Verlag (http://www.festa-verlag.de), and now he’s one of the biggest publishing houses of fantastic literature–often called “The House of Horror.” Most of his books are published in paperback; hardbacks don’t sell very well in Germany for SF and Horror and don’t have a big tradition, at least in the FRG (in the GDR most books were hardbacks).

I like to collect finely done books and so I started to buy from Cemetery Dance, Subterranean Press and others although I needed to read them in English. There are only a handful of small presses for signed editions in Germany; the most famous may be Edition Phantasia.

When Frank and I talked on the phone about this, the idea of Nevermore was born. The concept should be: really good stories (collections don’t sell very well here, either) in beautiful illustrated editions, signed by all contributors. Soon we had the contents for the first book.

Punktown is the name of a dark strange city on the planet Oasis in a far future, often compared to Philip K. Dick’s Blade RunnerWorld. The stories are masterfully written and show the author’s heart and eye for human beings and their problems. We contacted author Jeffrey Thomas, an extremely kind man, and soon the contract was signed. The next question: How to illustrate a dark feverish city with humans, machines and aliens in symbiosis? Of course there is only one answer: H. R. Giger! The Swiss artist who created the film Alien and other wonderful pieces of art would be a hit. And the wonder happened– Frank Festa knows Giger, and he allowed us the use of one of his New York City paintings for the book cover and more for inside.

YES, AND HE WILL SIGN ALL 333 COPIES OF THE BOOK!!!

Please have a look at auctions or shops and see what you have to pay for a signed- by- Giger item. Our book will cost only Euro 39.00 (about US $45.00)! And that’s not all! We asked the great English writer Michael Marshall Smith to contribute, and he really did a beautiful special foreword to the book. And he will sign it, too. It was a dream coming true.

And number two will be as great as the first: Kim Newmans Seven Stars, a haunting story about a cursed jewel with mummies, murder, occult sects and more, is breathtaking adventure for all readers who loved Kim’s Anno Dracula. The Foreword will be by vampire lady P. N. Elrod, the art by Ugurcan Yüce.

We did a special website for Nevermore under http://www.festa-verlag.de/nevermore/index.html where you can find more information, or you could write me an e-mail to Dirk-Berger@gmx.de.

Next week we (Frank and I) will travel to Switzerland to meet Giger in person and to let him sign the signature sheets. He told us that he will show us his Museum he built up in an old castle with his collection of worldwide art and, of course, of his own works and then I will maybe know what the feeling it is to hold an Oscar/Academy Award (he got one for Alien). I’m afraid I will not sleep until then.

#publishers

Bookselling – Past And Present, On and Off Line

I was asked to write an article about the history of Internet bookselling and the interaction between on-line bookselling and a proper bookstore, what in internet parlance has been called a “bricks-and-mortar” store but what will always, in my mind, simply be called a bookstore.

To be honest, I am not sure what I am going to say.

I started scouting books when I was about 16, being lucky enough to meet a couple of professional booksellers who became good friends of mine and showed me how they made their living. There is a popular misconception that booksellers buy cheap and sell high, that the primary source for books is the garage and church sale. I’ve been to thousands of these sales over the years, and turned up maybe a hundred worthwhile books. Piles of useful stuff, but there’s only so many five-dollar books that you can buy for a quarter before you get sick of five-dollar books.

The best books I have ever bought I bought through bookstores–in fact, many of the best books I have ever bought came from high-end bookstores and not at high-end prices, either. Every bookseller has books that come to him by accident, or were on the periphery of a collection that he was focusing on the center of. That’s always a good way to buy books–an important dealer’s junk is usually way better than the best books in a low-end store. But I’ve just started to write this and already I feel that I am rambling.

The internet has changed the way we do business, and I am not so sure that it is for the better. Databases like ABE are operated on the “bigger is better” philosophy;­ the more books, the more booksellers, the better for the website. I disagree. ABE and many of the other on-line databases–­ Alibris, Amazon, even eBay (although it’s not a book database, it is an important aspect of on-line bookselling)–are full of five-dollar books for a reason:­ these books can be bought cheaply, by anyone, and the market to sell them exists. It used to be that if you wanted to open a bookstore, you had to invest a great deal of time and money, securing a location, buying stock, building shelves, buying reference books… the whole routine.

Nowadays, in order to become a bookseller you need to do none of this. You just need to go to a few good book sales, buy a bunch of stuff, get a computer, download a free book cataloguing program, type in a few ISBN numbers and off you go. It’s bookselling for dummies. A bookstore looks bad and has a hard time paying its bills when it’s loaded up with 5-dollar books. A computer can hold thousands of 5-dollar books at virtually no cost ­ and they don’t even need to be shelved; they can be piled up in boxes in your basement!

I published my first print catalogue in 1984, and I opened up my first bookshop in 1986. I’ve used a computer since about 1985. My first few catalogues were typewritten, but starting with Catalogue Seven, I used an old Morrow CPM computer with absolutely no memory. I’ve published over 25 printed catalogues over the years, mostly done on computer, and because I always had a computer on my desk (usually just to play tetris), and I hooked up to the internet in the earliest days. I have watched it go from a few of us selling books in the usenet groups and on the earliest of book lists – the Biblio list – from Interloc to the formation of the first online websites–The Virtual Bookstore–and I was there at the beginning when ABE first started up as an online version of Interloc. I welcomed these changes with open arms, as I was always looking for new ways to sell books, and for new ways to create new customers.

I never foresaw what would happen.

The simplification of bookselling is threatening our trade. As more and more bookstores listed their books on the internet databases, more and more bookshops closed their doors to walk-in trade. And as fewer and fewer bookshops exist, more and more customers are driven to the online world to buy their books. And what a world awaits them! Databases like ABE with millions and millions of books being offered from every greasy shack in North America. Professional booksellers with perfect copies of wonderful books listing beside auction-scroungers with lousy copies of the same books, ­inferior copies at inferior prices, misdescribed, hopelessly inadequate listings, prices from $5 to $500 for similar- sounding items. I’m a very experienced on-line buyer and I still recently bought a book online that turned out to be an undescribed ex-library copy. It turns me off, and I am sure that it turns many serious book buyers off. There are too many copies of too many books, and anybody who understands the laws of supply and demand will understand that there are more books being offered than there are customers to buy them. A proper bookseller understands what the book is and understands how he can try to sell it to the right customer. More and more, that means NOT listing it on the internet, in order to try to keep it as something even moderately special.

I recently pulled my books from ABE. I list on two on-line web sites, Biblio.com and ILAB-LILA.com. I sell books on eBay. I spent a year on ABE’s advisory board, being ignored. I quit the advisory board, and later I quit ABE. I was feeling guilty about cataloguing books and listing them on websites whose interests are self-serving. The ILAB website is owned and operated by the Antiquarian book trade. It’s not available to everyone;­ only members of the ABA, ABAA, ABAC, and other ILAB-affiliated organizations can join. But it is a website with the bookseller’s best interests in mind, rather than their own bottom line.

I will continue to sell books online. I use the internet as a tool, to effectively market books that I do not have any immediate customers for. I will not list my best books online in order to have them used as a free price-guide for those who don’t know book clubs from bat shit. Selling books on large databases is sort of like having a small bookstore in a 100-mile long strip mall;­ the chances of anyone even noticing you are very small. You might as well put the books in a box and hide it under your bed; you have as much hope of selling them there as on-line with everybody else’s copies. So I recently opened another bookstore, with high overhead, in a high traffic area, where customers can come and look at the books, touch the books, see the books, enjoy the books. Hopefully, my faith in the trade will pay off, and I will continue to sell enough books to make a fair living, and I will continue to be able to buy excellent books because of my presence in the community.

Abe has recently announced that they have 11,000 booksellers and 46 million books on their website. I am happy for them, and they are indeed an internet success story. Alibris and Amazon, along with Abe, are now considered “The Big Three.” I cannot fight the success of these websites, nor do I wish to. They are what they are, and they live in their own world. I use them when I have to – just today I bought two books off of Abe for which I had been searching for 2 years–the only available copies for a long time, and seriously underpriced to my mind. There are good things and bad things; the verdict is not yet in. But things are getting more and more distorted, and as time progresses, I feel much more safe and secure running my bookshop the way that I always have instead of becoming an unpaid data-entry employee of a big company whose interests are not the same as mine.

 Michael John Thompson mjt@mjtbooks.com

The Return of AB Bookman

T. S. Eliot, perhaps, described the end of AB Bookman best, it went out “… not with a bang, but a whimper.” For almost 50 years, it was the standard in the business. I was just talking to the current owner of its intellectual property, the owner of Bookman’s of Arizona, and he, like so many of us, began his career with the want lists in AB Bookman. Quietly, without even a notice to its subscribers, it slipped away into our yesterdays. No more Tuesdays in the book room with postcards. The world passed on by, without so much as a honk of the horn.

The challenge is to rebuild and reshape AB Bookman into a new modern format, without losing what made it unique. It just hit me that in doing this, I am the “prospective” third editor to head it since it crawled out of Publisher’s Weekly to slip inside its very own covers. I have had to think about how I could take what it was, and transform it, somehow, into something that fits modern bookselling. My approach will be on three fronts.

The first will be an auction format, similar to what is now done on flea market sites such as eBay and Amazon, but with some important differences. Books will be offered in much the same way, but with references to an online first edition guide or a printed standard. When you buy a first edition through AB Bookman, it won’t be a Grosset and Dunlap reprint. Grading standards will be online, with the freedom to link to a grading standard of the seller’s choice, so the buyer will know what the condition is. And the auctions will feature a “books wanted” auction working in reverse, where the prospective buyer can list a want, and dealers bid the price down, not up.

The second will be a database site, linking both an in-house database and want lists.

The third will be a homepage featuring articles and news of the trade as well as reprinting articles from the archives of the old AB Bookman.

The flea market sites have done many wonderful things. They have changed the way in which we trade in vintage and collectible items. Indeed, they’ve changed the way in which we look at them. More and more, however, I hear from collectors in many areas who are dissatisfied with the lack of information, the lack of any kind of authentication, on the flea market sites. Just yesterday, a rare coin collector mentioned to me that a rare coin auction site was sorely needed. By reviving AB Bookman as a book site, opening what it was to the general public, as a better place to bid on books, as a place to find that elusive title to complete a collection, with more information, reference material a click away, the hope is not to compete with the flea markets–they will always be a part of the scene–but rather to broaden and enhance the choices of both dealers and book buyers. Looking for a bargain will still tempt the buyer to take a chance on eBay or Amazon. Looking for the right book, to fill that empty space in the collection, is what AB Bookman will be for; at least that is the plan. Eventually, the auction format will have to move into specialty sites. Sites that are a part of a specific business, run by people who understand that business. The “policies” of the general audience “flea markets” can clash with the established book business, leading to such errors as the removal of an auction of Dick Gregory’s autobiography, “Up From Nigger,” on a major site due to the use of the term “Nigger.” The book trade has always been one of the prime movers in the fight against censorship of all kinds, and the general market auction sites are, in fact, censors. AB Bookman will be a booksellers site, and, we hope, a prime mover in the fight against the censorship that the “flea market” sites are forced into by the breadth of their audience.

In short, we feel that the future of the auction site will not be competition for the general market sites, but specialty auction sites for the serious collector. In reviving AB Bookman, we are looking toward that future.

If readers would like to ask questions about the new AB Bookman I am available to them at this email address, and would be more than happy to give them what information and plans I have. Please remember, however, that currently I am in Tempe (near Phoenix) and the archives are still in storage in Tucson.

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Rick Russell is the author of “ Antique Trader Book Collector’s Price Guide“, and (prospective)

Editor of the new AB BOOKMAN.

rick@sangraal-books.com