Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel, Desmond Cory's Feramontov and Timelock, and Roald Dahl's Sometime Never Join Beautiful British Book Covers

One would have thought, having reached a new milestone of 60 covers in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery, that I might perhaps rest on my laurels, or at the very least pause for a moment's reflection. But oh no. I'm plunging merrily onwards, and have now added another four dust jackets to the page, beginning with a jacket designed by a man who already has one wrapper in the gallery:

Published by Collins in the UK in 1965, this is the British first edition of Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel. As with the Agatha Christies I showcased yesterday, this copy isn't actually mine – it's from Rachel's splendid collection of Christies – but I wanted to include it in the Beautiful British Book Jackets gallery because its wrapper was designed by Brian Russell, who also designed the jacket for the 1962 Frederick Muller first edition of Desmond Cory's Undertow, which joined the gallery last week. And if you compare the two, there are definite similarities: the ever-so-slightly askew typography and rough edges on the black sea on the Undertow front cover are echoed by similar treatments on At Bertram's Hotel.

And speaking of Desmond Cory, a further two Cory jackets – for Johnny Fedora spy novels – have also joined the gallery, rephotographed from their original appearances on Existential Ennui: Klim Forster's cover for the 1966 Frederick Muller edition of Feramontov, and Abis Sida Stridley's one for the 1967 Muller edition of Timelock. Those two probably have more in common with the, shall we say, less subtle, less nuanced school of jacket design which would come to prevail in the 1970s, but there is, I feel, enough of the playfulness of the 1960s about them to warrant their inclusion, and with Timelock there's an additional link to At Bertram's Hotel: Sida Stridley's photographs illustrated the 1965 Woman's Own serialisation of the novel.

Finally, having set a precedent with the inclusion of Cecil Walter Bacon's lovely jacket for the 1970 Geoffrey Bles edition of P. M. Hubbard's Cold Waters, I've decided to add another wrapper which falls just outside the established remit of the gallery: that of the 1949 British Collins edition of Roald Dahl's Sometime Never – again rephotographed from its original appearance – designed by Stephen Russ, if only to illustrate that there were, of course, lovely dust jackets being designed before the 1950s, as there were after the 1960s. But I still stand by my assertion that the '50s and '60s were a golden age for wrapper design, and I'd suggest that you'd find more beautiful book jackets from those two decades than you would from the years either side – as I'm hopefully demonstrating.

And there are still more dust jackets to come, as I'll shortly be adding three jackets from children's books from the early 1960s – although the authors in question will already be familiar to regular readers of Existential Ennui...

Kenneth Farnhill Dust Jackets for Agatha Christie Novels Third Girl, Endless Night and By the Pricking of My Thumbs (Collins, 1966/67/68) Join Beautiful British Book Covers

So then, as well as adding Kenneth Farnhill's splendid dust jacket for the 1964 Michael Joseph first edition of P. M. Hubbard's Picture of Millie to the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page, I've also now bunged in three further Farnhill wrappers, bringing the total number of covers up to sixty. All three new additions wrap Agatha Christie first editions from the mid- to late-1960s, and while in comparison both to Farnhill's earlier Hubbard wrapper and to many other wrappers in the Beautiful Book Jackets gallery, they're quite simple designs – bright, flat colours and bold typography combined with a decorative motif (or no motif at all in once instance) – they are, to my mind, and in their own way, iconic. Certainly when I think of Christie novels, it's jackets like these that spring to mind, rather than, say, Tom Adams's more celebrated paperback covers.

All three Christie covers, I should point out, are courtesy of the lovely Rachel; I don't own any Agatha Christies myself, but hey: what's hers – as in Rachel's, not Agatha's – is mine, although I'm not sure the reverse is necessarily true. You can see the covers in question below, along with back covers and cases/jacket flaps for reference, but I'm not quite done with Agatha Christie yet, nor P. M. Hubbard, nor indeed the subject of last week's posts, Desmond Cory. Because I'll shortly be adding yet more wrappers to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design, including a Christie jacket by a designer who's already made it into the gallery, plus some children's novels, and more besides...

Third Girl by Agatha Christie (Collins, 1966), Kenneth Farnhill jacket design

Endless Night by Agatha Christie (Collins, 1967), Kenneth Farnhill jacket design

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie (Collins, 1968), Kenneth Farnhill jacket design

Desmond Cory's Johnny Fedora Spy Novels: Feramontov (Feramontov Quintet #3, Frederick Muller, 1966) and Timelock (Feramontov Quintet #4, Muller, 1967)

I had intended this to be the final post in this current series on British author Desmond Cory's Johnny Fedora spy novels... but on reflection, I've decided to extend the run slightly. I'll explain how and why at the end of this post, but first, having reviewed books one and two in what's known as the Feramontov Quintet – the five-book series-with-a-series which finishes off the Fedora thrillers, and which all pit Johnny against Soviet spymaster Feramontov – Undertow (1962) and Hammerhead (1963, alias Shockwave), let's take a look at two further Feramontov novels I've managed to find in first edition.

First up, a British hardback first edition of Feramontov, the third book in the Feramontov Quintet – and the fourteenth Johnny Fedora novel overall – published by Frederick Muller in 1966. The jacket design is credited to Klim Forster, about whom I've been able to determine very little, although he did illustrate the cover to the 1967 Macmillan edition of Jean Stubbs's My Grand Enemy, and a 1972 Daily Telegraph Magazine article titled "The Major and the Macaroni" by journalist and Labour MP Chris Mullin (whose excellent diaries are well worth a read).

I mentioned in my introductory Desmond Cory/Johnny Fedora post that many of Cory's Fedora novels have become decidedly uncommon in first edition (or any edition in some cases), and although the Muller first of Feramontov isn't the scarcest of the Fedoras, it is still in short supply: AbeBooks currently has just three copies listed, one of those lacking a dustjacket. Set once again in Spain, the story sees Feramontov eliminating British agents; on publication in the States the novel was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review alongside Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Octopussy, the latter dismissed as "a thin and even emaciated volume", while Feramontov was hailed as being full of "colorful action, copious carnage, elaborate intrigue, frequent surprises" (see article "The Evolution of Desmond Cory" on the Desmond Cory Website).

Cory was often compared with Fleming, even though Johnny Fedora beat Bond into print by two years (the debut Fedora outing, Secret Ministry, appearing in 1951; Casino Royale wasn't published until 1953), and the second Feramontov Quintet novel I'm showcasing in this post was even more directly contrasted with Fleming's work – and just as favourably:

First published in hardback in the UK by Frederick Muller in 1967, Timelock is the fourth Fermaontov novel (and the fifteenth Fedora outing). The jacket design in this instance is credited to Abis Sida Stribley, a designer who was also a photographer; Stribley's photographs illustrated the original 1965 Woman's Own serialization of Agatha Christie's novel At Bertram's Hotel (I'm assuming the photo on the cover of Timelock is Stribley's, too). Set, like the other Feramontov novels, in Spain, Timelock is notable for the fact that Fedora and Feramontov actually meet this time; previously they'd only set eyes on each other from afar.

I bought this copy in Dim and Distant in Heathfield, East Sussex, but the Muller edition is practically common as muck in comparison with other Cory firsts: AbeBooks currently has a staggering five copies listed (although one of those might be sans jacket). As mentioned above, Timelock was again juxtaposed with Fleming's 007 adventures, this time by writer and critic Anthony Boucher, who wrote in his New York Times Magazine column Criminals at Large: "I must say once more that I find Cory's Johnny Fedora a much more persuasive violent, sexy and lucky agent than James Bond." (Again, see "The Evolution of Desmond Cory" on the Desmond Cory Website.)

I had, as I say, planned to leave it at that for now for the Cory/Fedora posts – I'm still on the hunt for an affordable first of the final Feramontov – and Fedora – novel, 1971's Sunburst – but I do actually have in my possession one or two other, earlier books from the series (I've been a busy little bee, as per usual), one of which is particularly exciting. So rather than save those for a later date, let's carry on with Cory a wee while longer, with another first edition showcase post... and another review.

Before that, though, look out for some breaking news regarding a different spy novelist – a contemporary of Cory's whose novels are all out of print... but not for much longer...

Parker Progress Report: A Review of Dead Skip by Joe Gores and Plunder Squad by Richard Stark (Random House, 1972)

(NB: a version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

Well I hope we all enjoyed my pithy Q&A with the creator of the Dexter series of novels Jeff Lindsay on Monday; don't forget you can read more from Jeff this week on Blogomatic 3000, Another Cookie Crumbles and Shots. Back here on Existential Ennui, though, it's back to regular business, with a Parker Progress Report.

For the uninitiated, over the past year or so I've been making my way through Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novels – and the spin-off Alan Grofield books – bunging up reviews as I go along. The last Parker Progress Report (as I term these Parker missives) I posted, back in January, was on the fifteenth Parker novel, Plunder Squad, and having reviewed the third Grofield novel, The Blackbird (a Grofield File, if you will), in November of last year, one might reasonably assume that my next review would either be of the sixteenth Parker novel, Butcher's Moon (1974), or the fourth and final Grofield outing, Lemons Never Lie (1971).

But there's a book that was published in the same year as Plunder Squad (1972), one which, although not actually written by Donald E. Westlake, one could still make a strong claim for it fitting into the Parkerverse. That book is the second novel by crime writer Joe Gores, Dead Skip, which begins Gores's six-novel series (plus assorted short stories) centring on the operatives of Daniel Kearny Associates, a firm of "skip tracers", or private investigators who specialise in car repossession. Dead Skip's story primarily focuses on three DKA investigators: Bart Heslip, who winds up in a coma following what appears to be a car accident; Larry Ballard, who suspects there's something fishy about Heslip's supposed accident; and the boss of DKA, Dan Kearny himself.

Quite apart from its Parker connections – which I'll return to shortly – Dead Skip is a fine novel in and of itself. Gores was a private investigator for twelve years, which lends the workings of the story an added plausibility, an authenticity, even. Much of the novel is taken up with Ballard's legwork, as he retraces Heslip's steps in order to try and work out which of his fellow P.I.'s open cases might be the one that led to Heslip laid up in hospital with a fifty-fifty chance of ever recovering. Trudging from door to door, driving back and forth across San Francisco, Ballard hits brick wall after blind alley, in the process encountering a colourful cast of hookers, barflies, errant wives and embezzlers, any one of whom could be behind what Ballard believes was actually an assault on Heslip.

It's only when the grizzled, shrewd, experienced Kearny himself hits the streets towards the end of the novel that the strands of the investigation begin to tie together – and it's here that Parker enters the fray. Following up one of Ballard's leads, Kearny finds himself in the Concord suburb of San Francisco, and at a nondescript single-storey house in that suburb. Parked outside this ordinary house, however, are five cars. Obviously Kearny knows a thing or two about cars, and quickly spots that three of them are rentals – from three different rental companies. His hackles raised, Kearny rings the doorbell, and is met by a "wide and blocky" man with "flat square shoulders, a good half a head taller than Kearny's five-nine. His hands were out of a foundry, his wrists roped with veins. His face was bony, as flat and hard as the shoulders, rough-hewn in the same foundry as the hands."

This, needless to say, is Parker. What Kearny has stumbled upon is a meeting to plan one of the – ultimately abortive – heists in Plunder Squad; the exact same scene plays out from Parker's perspective in that Stark novel (although slightly shorter: about four pages to Dead Skip's six). But what's interesting is the way Gores depicts Parker, and the back-story he builds into the encounter. At first Kearny doesn't recognise Parker, but as he's about to be turned away from the door, he suddenly recalls his name. Turns out the two have met before, "off stage", in the first Parker novel, The Hunter (1962), when Parker broke out of a prison farm and was on the lam. According to Kearny, Parker shacked up with a woman in Fresco, and that woman was Kearny's sister, with whom Kearny stayed one night, helping Parker to kill a bottle.

Now, for anyone familiar with the Parker novels, all this is of course new information, but Gores takes great care to ensure Kearny and Parker's relationship dovetails with the established Stark "facts". He also effectively conveys Parker's cold, taciturn, dangerous nature: Parker helps Kearny out in his investigation (mostly to get rid of Kearny, one suspects) by bringing to the door the wife of a member of the plunder squad, but when the address she furnishes for Kearny's suspect is identified by Kearny as being incorrect, we get this passage: 

Parker didn't move, but the atmosphere changed. To Kearny it was as though the other man were leaning over her like an oncoming storm. You could almost see the shadow crossing her face. "Once more," Parker said, and there wasn't anything in his voice at all.

Clearly this is the same man we know from the Stark novels, the Parker we all know and fear.

It's fascinating to read the entire encounter with Kearny in Plunder Squad. Last month Violent World of Parker supremo Trent posted a PDF download of a Donald E. Westlake interview from a 1988 issue of Armchair Detective, and the subject of Dead Skip and Plunder Squad crops up in that. For me, that interview shed new light on how the scene came about, as, according to Westlake, it was Gores who penned his side of the encounter first, and Westlake who had to make his novel fit around that. Which kind of helps to explain the curiously bent-out-of-shape nature of Plunder Squad, with its cul-de-sacs and plot non sequiturs – aspects which in fact make the novel more interesting than it might otherwise have been.

Bearing this in mind, it's possible to spot the odd sly dig at Gores in Westlake's take on the encounter. For one thing, Westlake opts to tackle the scene very early in Plunder Squad, perhaps evincing his mild frustration at having to derail his own story. But there's also a telling moment straight after Kearny reminds Parker of the drinking session the two had at Kearny's sister's place: 

Parker remembered. Kearny had a private detective's ticket, but his field was bad credit risks, not wanted convicts. Parker had allowed him to kill most of that bottle that night, and had left early the next morning.

Westlake reveals in that Armchair Detective interview that he and Gores had planned a follow-up, this time with Westlake writing the scene for Gores to fit his story around. "It never happened the second time," said Westlake, "which is unfortunate, because, see, it's easy for the first guy. Joe could just write, ' . . . and Parker opened the door.' Then, in my book, I had to explain why. I had to get him there. Then I was going to do a thing where somebody from Dan Kearny Associates would pass through my book, and leave it to Joe to figure out. Joe stopped doing novels for several years."

The crossover between Dead Skip and Plunder Squad is typical of the games Westlake played both with his fellow writers and within his own books in the '60s and '70s. For my money, Westlake was at his most formally audacious during this period: tinkering with the structure of the Parker novels, spinning a bit-part player off into his own series of books (Alan Grofield), even leaking elements of the Parkers into his newly instigated Dortmunder series. I wonder occasionally what readers at the time made of these games, these shared chapters and crossovers – in a pre-internet era, how many were able to make the connections between a Stark Parker, a Stark Grofield, a Westlake Dortmunder, a Gores DKA?

I'll be returning to this period of formal deconstruction down the tracks, but before we draw a line under this (mildly and unintentionally epic) post, I just wanted to bring to your attention one other, earlier, largely unremarked nod to Westlake/Stark in Dead Skip, one which comes across as oddly meta in the context of what's to come...

Twenty pages before the Parker scene, Larry Ballard is talking to the female manager of an apartment block, who mentions in passing, "I've never met a real detective before... but I love Agatha Christie . . ." Ballard doesn't respond verbally, but in his omniscient narration Gores wryly notes that Ballard "only read Richard Stark".

Lewes Bookshop Bargain: The Alteration by Kingsley Amis (Jonathan Cape; Tom Adams Cover Art)

Here's a book wot I bought fairly recently (does last year still count as 'fairly recently'...?) in A&Y Cumming, up near Lewes Castle:

A UK hardback first edition of Kingsley Amis's The Alteration, published by Jonathan Cape in 1976. It's from the period in Amis's career when he was experimenting with genre – see also The Green Man (1969, a ghost story), The Riverside Villas Murder (1973, an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit) and so forth. The Alteration is an alternate reality tale, set in a 1976 where, as the jacket blurb has it, "things are not the same. Due to a slight alteration in history involving Catherine of Aragon, Martin Luther, Thomas Moore and others, a Holy Victory was won in an event called the War of English Succession, and today England, like most of the world, is virtually ruled by a Machiavellian Pope who hails from Yorkshire." Residents of Lewes might note that scenario's relevance (well, maybe not the northern Pontiff) to our contrary town and its Bonfire proceedings...

I did already have a copy of this edition (and I have a paperback too, with a Beverley le Barrow cover – I'll have more on him soon), but this new copy is in much better nick than that previous one, certainly the best condition I've seen this particular edition in (and it was only a tenner, which was very reasonable). You'll often find with the Cape first that the pages have browned and the dustjacket spine has sunned (i.e. faded – and yes, I'm aware this is all dreadfully nerdy book-collector stuff; have you read Existential Ennui before?), but this copy has only lightly tanned pages and the spine is as brightly coloured as the rest of the jacket. Which is good, because the illustration, by Tom Adams, wraps all the way around it.

The Alteration isn't the only Amis jacket that Adams illustrated; he also provided the Dali-esque dustjacket for the Cape first edition of Amis's pseudonymous James Bond novel Colonel Sun (written as Robert Markham). But he's best known for the series of covers he created for the Fontana paperback editions of Agatha Christie's novels in the 1960s and '70s. There's an entire book dedicated to those – Tom Adams' Agatha Christie Cover Story (a.k.a. The Art of Her Crimes), long out of print, although we have a copy at home – not to mention a Flickr group and a Facebook page. And there's also Tom's website, which is definitely worth a gander.

Lewes Bookshop Bargain: X v. Rex by Philip Macdonald

I've still got a couple of recently bought Book Bargains to blog about, both of which, as the title of this first of two posts suggests, were bought in Lewes, the East Sussex town in which I oh you know the drill. So let's see if we can't get 'em squared away by the end of the week. And look! Here's one now:

A 1955 first Penguin paperback edition of X v. Rex by Philp Macdonald. I found this in the cheapo paperback dump bins outside second hand bookshop A & Y Cumming up Lewes High Street (the Bow Windows Bookshop has similar dump bins, as do a few other Lewes book emporiums). Really, I just liked the sound of the story: a policeman is killed in a country town near London, and then another, and another, until panic spreads and the government becomes involved (the "X" of the title is the killer; not sure who "Rex" is though... Rex Stout? Rex Harrison? T.Rex? Rex-N-Effect?). In fact, according to the ever-reliable (ahem) Wikipedia, it's a very early example of a serial killer novel, before the term 'serial killer' had even been invented.

X v. Rex has a somewhat convoluted publishing history; I think it was originally published by Collins in 1933, under the pseudonym Martin Porlock. It then gained the title The Mystery of Mr. X for a Literary Press printing, possibly around 1934, again under the Porlock pseudonym, before finally being published once again as X v. Rex under Philip Macdonald's own name in this Penguin edition. To add to the confusion, it was also published as The Mystery of the Dead Police, again under Macdonald's own name, certainly by Dell in the US in 1955, possibly by Collins in the UK earlier. What I do know for sure is that Macdonald largely wrote whodunnits or locked room mysteries, which makes X v. Rex even more unusual. Leafing through it outside the shop, though, two things grabbed me more than the serial killer angle: the political intrigue, with the Prime Minister growing increasingly alarmed at the situation with the murdered policemen; and that the descriptive prose is intermingled with diary entries by the killer himself.

This edition of X v. Rex was one of ten books issued as a Penguin paperback to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Collins' famed Crime Club, along with the likes of Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia and Nicholas Blake's A Question of Proof; all ten books were published on the same day in 1955. Which is quite a neat little idea, and just goes to show that even back then publishers weren't above the odd publicity stunt...

Kingsley Amis and the Thrill of the Thriller

That post yesterday about William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms got me thinking about literary authors who try their hands at genre fiction, and how the results are viewed. Thing is, there's no getting round the fact that, in literary circles, genre fiction is generally considered an inferior beast to 'proper' novels, that is yer Booker Prize shortlist-type affairs. So whenever a literary writer stoops to reside a while in the rambling, well-worn, many-roomed mansion that is genre fiction, it's big news.

Sebastian Faulks waggled a toe in the genre pool (hey, the mansion has a pool!) with his James Bond effort Devil May Care, and Boyd has done so with his book. Both generated headlines and commentary aplenty. I haven't read either yet (although I have both to read), but while the critical reception of Ordinary Thunderstorms was generally positive (if often qualified), the response to Devil May Care suggested that even Faulks himself felt rather above the whole thing. There's certainly precedent for that, if it is the case: as Book Glutton points out in his thoughtful response to that Boyd post, Grahame Greene for a long time divided his own novels into two camps – serious literary efforts, and 'entertainments'.

I don't think thrillers, crime fiction and so on really need defending, either from critics or from authors themselves: if a writer writes well, understands plot, character, structure, pacing, it shouldn't – doesn't – matter if a book happens to tumble into a genre. Anyone with half a brain can see the pared back brilliance of Richard Stark's prose (and the likes of John Banville have said as much). But there are still plenty of literary types who see these kinds of books as anathema: witness the furore prompted by Stephen King being awarded the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award at the US National Book Awards (former CEO of Simon & Schuster Richard Snyder proclaimed King's work "non-literature").

All of which reminded me of an interview I read recently with Martin Amis, which dealt in part with a literary figure who practically wallowed in genre fiction: his father, Kingsley Amis. In that interview (which of course I can't bloody find now, but anyway), Amis mentioned that his father tended to read for pleasure. Which made me think, as opposed to what? Reading for displeasure? What Amis was getting at, I suppose, was the argument that fiction shouldn't be easy, that it should challenge, confront, perhaps change. And perhaps it should. But shouldn't it also, ultimately, be readable – that is, pleasurable?

Amis went on to say that Kingsley put more stock in the poetry he wrote (Amis Sr., that is), viewing the novel as an inferior form. Amis Jr. would be best placed to know that, I guess, but it strikes me as slightly disingenuous. For one, Amis Sr. wrote a lot of novels. If he thought so little of the form, isn't it odd that he spent so much time embracing it? For another, Amis took a great pleasure in the sort of fiction that Amis Jr. would sneer at: thrillers, spy fiction, science fiction. Kingsley loved Ian Fleming's Bond novels, the thrillers of Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household and Gavin Lyall. He wrote reviews of and essays on SF and genre fiction; there's an entire book of his writings on SF – New Maps of Hell (1960) – and on the Bond novels – The James Bond Dossier (1965). He even wrote letters to the authors he admired; Peter O'Donnell's proudest moment of his career was a letter he received from Kingsley noting how much Amis liked O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise books. (You can read the letter here; note Amis admits this was the second time he'd read the books – all thirteen of them.)

Amis Sr. also wrote his own versions of these types of books: The Anti-Death League (1966), a military espionage novel (amongst other things); The Green Man (1969), a ghost story; The Riverside Villas Murder (1973), his take on an Agatha Christie whodunnit; The Alteration (1976) and Russian Hide and Seek (1980), both speculative fiction. And famously, or perhaps infamously from Martin's perspective, Kingsley wrote a Bond novel himself, 1968's Colonel Sun, under the nom de plume Robert Markham. All that novel-writing, all that reading, all those essays, all those fan letters: seems an awful lot of time, effort and energy expended on something that, according to Martin, Kingsley viewed as somehow inferior.

By saying Amis thought less of the novel than he did poetry, what I think Martin is actually doing is making excuses for his pater's predilection for 'low' fiction, for the genre novels that Kingsley enjoyed and occasionally tried his own hand at. You get the sense that Kingsley's appreciation of thrillers, SF and the like, offends Martin. I don't know if that's true or not, but Kingsley's passion for genre fiction and belief in its worth is plain to see in his own writings on the subject. Conversely, it is notable that, by the sounds of it, Kingsley tended to steer away from the sorts of novels his son writes. (Amis Jr. mentions in the interview that when Kingsley got to the part in Money where Martin himself appears as a character in the novel, he chucked the book across the room.)

In the end, I guess it all comes down to personal preference: whether you read to challenge or better yourself, or whether you read for enjoyment. Of course, there's no reason not to do both. But equally, the one shouldn't preclude the other. I've read Martin Amis and I've read Kingsley Amis. And I know which I prefer. *

(* Kingsley, obv.)

(For further thoughts on Kingsley Amis and genre works, head here for an essay by me and here for a guest post by critic Michael Barber.)

More Shelf Porn!

Where were we? Ah yes, the main bookcase. Well, my main bookcase. There's another one with all of Rachel's books on it, which is, frankly, a bloody mess. I tidied my main bookcase up over the weekend. Hint hint. But here's a section of one of Rachel's shelves, with all her Agatha Christies on:











Lovely. Back to my shelves. From the top: (Well, nearly the top; the very top shelf has got CDs on it. Chaos!)











All fairly self-explanatory. And the next shelf down:











And the next one:











Nice bit of double-stacking there, I think you'll agree. Those Marvel hardback graphic novels sticking up at the back are the first couple of collections of Ed Brubaker's Captain America. There's also a French collection of Jim Woodring's Frank nearest to us, next to another Paul graphic novel (see previous post), which is obviously in the wrong place. Jesus. In the front row are some Jim Thompson paperbacks (you can just about see The Killer Inside Me and Nothing More Than Murder), various other paperbacks, a first edition hardback of Brian Aldiss' book about science fiction, Billion Year Spree (the yellow cover down the other end), and, nearest to us, a novel I actually edited – Tank Girl: Armadillo. Next!











And the bottom one:











And now, full frontal shots (phwoar, slight return) of the top two and bottom two shelves, but not the middle one, which I inexplicably forgot to photograph. Top two shelves:











Looking a little disorderly there. Possibly could do with another tidy. And finally, the bottom two shelves:











On the upper shelf there we have some old Marvel Treasury Editions sitting on the top (including Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation); the two collections of Chris Ware's sketches; lots of Fantagraphics' indie Mome anthology; and all sorts of magazine-size comics, including all the A4 copies of the brilliant British anthology Escape (the A5 ones are on the lower shelf in the previous picture). And on the lower shelf, Superman/Batman graphic novels (the whole of the Jeph Loeb run, which I really liked, so ner); Alan Moore's Top Ten hardbacks; various other DC hardbacks; lots of books by Norwegian cartoonist Jason; the whole run of Lucifer graphic novels (I also have the original comics, saddo that I am); a few more indie things, some more DC stuff, and right on the end, Joe Matt's first oversized hardcover Peep Show collection. Marvellous. Any questions, see me after.

Of course, this doesn't include all the comics I have stashed in the big spaces above the built in wardrobes, nor all the comics I have in my mum and dad's loft, nor all the books I have up there too. Hoarder much?