The Princess Bride - A Hot Fairy Tale

I collect editions of The Princess Bride, and have decided to start providing descriptions and details of my editions on this blog. You can find an explanation about this and a list of editions here. I will most probably backdate posts which contain further editions, so that my blog doesn't become unreadable to passers-by, so if you're interested in the list, make sure you click on the link.

I'm going to start with an edition with the original, 1973 text. It's a reasonably ordinary edition, printed on cheap paper for a mass market audience. The most exciting thing about it is that it has a glossy, colour map insert in the middle of the book.

Title on cover: William Goldman's The Princess Bride
ISBN: 0345315324
Format: paperback
Measurements: 108 x 174mm


Front cover, spine, and back cover:

Adventures in Fabletown

 

Recently I've been reading Bill Willingham's comic book series, Fables. The series started out as a set of cute stories with fairytale characters in them, I suspect in an attempt from Vertigo to retain their Sandman audience after Sandman ended. Over time, however, (I'm up to volume 7) this series has become a serious literary contender. Every time I start reading  a volume, I can't put it down. There's all the things that fairytales should have - blood, sex, revenge, murder, magic - and there's also modern sarcasm and wit, beautiful art, and just the right amount of subversion (the picture top left depicts an impoverished Prince Charming seducing a hapless New Yorker).

The characters, over time, have become characters I care about, and I was astonished to discover how pleased I was to find rounded, interesting male fairytale characters. We're so used to worrying about how female characters are represented that I had never noticed before how rare it is to find well-represented male fairytale characters, characters with more than one motive and who blur the lines between protagonist and antagonist. But here we have Prince Charming, B.B. Wolf, Jack of the Tales, Beast, Bluebeard (to name a few) and they display charm, ruthlessness, internal struggles and depth of character. They stand alongside (or head to head with) Snow White, Rose Red, Beauty, Cinderella, characters we already knew were intelligent, resourceful, stronger than they look, forces to be reckoned with.

The series is about a group of Fables (fairytale characters) who live as refugees in our world after a powerful Adversary took the fairytale lands by military conquest. I highly recommend it. Currently I'm reading the prequel, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, which, to top everything off, has art by Charles Vess.

Round and round and round she goes

Since I abandoned this blog last year, the Australian book market has undergone a dramatic change. At this moment, the entire market is in a state of flux and nobody really knows what's going to happen.

The collapse of REDgroup Retail led to the close of 139 Angus & Robertson and Borders stores, with many suburban areas left without a local bookshop. Crikey provides a rundown here. For people like me, who no longer live within reasonable distance from a bookstore, this means relying on online purchasing. But the online market has gone bizarro, too. Here's what's happened in online bookselling this year:

• Austalia's largest online bookstore, fishpond, has started outsourcing many purchases to warehouses overseas. While this means that a larger range of books is available, it also means that the customer has to wait much longer while the item is first shipped from the USA or the UK, and then shipped from fishpond's Sydney warehouse. This means it's just as cheap and much faster to order from overseas.

• Ferrier Hodgson, the administrator for REDgroup Retail, has sold the A&R and Borders online stores to Pearson Education. Pearson Education is a publisher, so this signals and unprecedented level of direct involvement in the book market by an Australian publisher.

• The Book Despository, the best option for buying books from overseas, has been bought by Amazon. This concerns me, because I think Amazon just might be the devil.

So where is one to buy a book? And what is going to happen to the book market? I suspect something big and different is going to happen over the next few years, but what it is I can't guess. Bookselling is a centuries old industry and things just haven't changed that fast until now.

In the meantime, these are the things I want to know:

• I want a local independent bookstore. Where's my local independent bookstore?
• Am I still going to get free shipping and my choice of non-Kindle ebooks on The Book Depository?

For those interested, by the way, I think I might start posting here again, though somewhat less regularly than I used to.

A quick note regarding fishpond links

While I'm not maintaining this blog anymore, I am aware that it may occasionally be visited and that I offer advice about purchasing books. For these reasons, I thought it might be worth noting that while I have previously linked several times to fishpond, an Australin online bookstore, I can no longer in good conscience provide a personal recommendation for their store. I have noticed a decline in their customer service standards of late, and I feel that product quality, reliability and delivery lead times have suffered.

It might well be that I have simply had a run of bad luck with my last few orders. Things do go wrong from time to time in the world of retail (I should know!) and often nobody is really to blame. If you still feel inclined to purchase from fishpond, by all means go ahead. In the meantime, I have removed the link on my "Where to buy books" page, but (because it would be much too time-consuming) I have not removed any links in previous posts.

The Princess Bride - 30th Anniversary Edition

The 30th Anniversary Edition of The Princess Bride is little-known. It contains all of the original 1973 text (with the original Goldman introduction appearing after the title page which simply reads ' The Princess Bride'), as well as the 25th anniversary introduction and a further introduction (both of which precede the title page of the book). There is also a map which comes immediately after the title page.


Title on cover: The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure
ISBN: 9780151015443
Format: hardcover
Measurements: 156 x 233mm


Front cover, spine, and back cover:

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 3: Wishes

I can’t be certain that I won’t pick this blog up again one day, but for now I will echo the sentiments of the wonderful Mr. G (who, like me, gets nostalgic when the year changes):

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 2: Christmas ramblings

This year as Christmas approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about the shade side of the Season. There’s a lot that I’m leaving behind at the end of this year, and a lot that I’m looking forward to in the new year, and I guess this has made me reflective. All of the media messages regarding Christmas amount to the same thing: it’s the most wonderful time of the year/you’ll have a fantastic time with your family/it brings us all together. But what if it doesn’t?


Christmas, if you push aside the commercialism and frantic rush for presents, is a time of year that keeps us honest. It can be a time for sharing and love and warmth, but the shade side is this: if you’re lonely, you feel your loneliness at Christmas; if you have trouble getting on with your family, you have to face the tension at Christmas; if you’re scared or doubtful or apprehensive about the future, the time of ‘celebration’ draws out the fear and doubt and apprehension.

I’ve been exploring these thoughts through various media. Here’s what I’ve been tuned in to:

Music: Kate Miller-Heidke’s ‘The Day After Christmas’. (I saw her live last year and she said something to the effect of: “This is a song about a time of year when you’re supposed to be happy, but if you’re not then everything sucks so much more.”)

TV: West Wing’s Christmas episodes (one from each Season). The Christmas episodes of West Wing are always poignant, exploring familial difficulties and personal setbacks.

Movie: Love Actually. I don’t think that requires explanation.

So what does this have to do with books? Only this: I haven’t yet found a book to read which explores the shade side of Christmas. The only one which springs to mind is A Christmas Carol, but Dickens and I have tried getting on before and we have Artistic Differences. So I’m putting the question out there: can anybody think of a shade-side-of-Christmas book for me to read?

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 1: Wrapping up

I learned last week that I’ve been awarded a scholarship do my Masters, beginning in January. This is wonderful news, primarily because it means philosophy will be my full-time occupation. It does mean, however, that books won’t play as large a role in my life anymore. I’ll still be an avid reader, but I won’t be a literature student and I won’t be working at the bookshop very much. I’ve decided that means it’s time to stop keeping this wonderful blog and to focus on other things.

Here’s a few parting bookish thoughts, in The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts, a Farewell in Three Parts.

Here’s some links and thoughts on some of my favourite subjects:

Neil – a wonderful interview of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer can be found here to listen to free or download for a tiny tiny fee.

Jane – a friend recently convinced me to give Northanger Abbey another go. It’s the first Jane Austen I ever read and my least favourite. I’m beginning to realise that last time I read it (at fifteen), much of the wonderful metafiction was simply over my head.

Laura – adopt a critic. Read Laura Miller’s bookish thoughts over at Salon.

Re-re-reblog

I shan't write a proper blog post because the universe might just implode, but Naja reblogged about my reblogging about her reblogging about my blog about graphic novels, and you can read it (that is, the first one in that list) here.

Sometimes when Naja talks about literature, I feel like she's plucked the thoughts right out of my brain and articulated them in ways I couldn't possibly. This is one of those times.

Reblogging

This is how awesome thinking comes about. Collaboration.

The fascinating, wonderful Naja linked to my previous post about graphic novels via Tumblr. I met Naja in the course of my English degree. She kept cropping up in my classes, in those delicious English classes about children's lit and fairy tales which felt like cheating because it wasn't work to study these things, not really, it was fun.

Anyway, here's something Naja says in her blog about my blog which, by the way, you can read right here:

Novels are only just a majority in my favourites collection, and sometimes I feel like a bad lit student for it, because I have such a short attention span and I much prefer WHAM POW PICTURES! to some weird snooty elite.

It's certainly not the most interesting thing she has to say (you really should read the whole blog) but I'm quoting it here because I relate to it. I have very little patience for long books, for wordy books, for overly literary books or for classics. I almost quit literature at uni after having to read Wuthering Heights in first semester, first year, but lucky for me I took a class on fantasy the following semester and fell back in love with books.

All this made me think about another blog I recently read, incidentally by Doc-in-Boots, the academic who runs all those classes on children's lit and fairy tales which Naja and I attended.