So,
for the past couple of days I’ve been thinking a lot about the Shadow Library, that
is, all the books I once owned but have since either sold or given away. Every
now and then I remember a volume or two and post it here. Last night I went
back and tried to make a count of what was there and came up with a round
number of 850 books that were no longer with me, including copies of books I
have in other editions. Now I wish I had included the titles and authors to
better pinpoint them; perhaps I’ll go back and do that or something like make a
list and publish that. When the question arose in my mind, I had to squash the
compulsion to calculate how much money it would take to replace every volume,
if I ever had the foolishness to try to do so.
“Rude
Tales and Glorious” by Nicholas Seare was a gift from my friend Wylie Reeves
when I was putting out “The Broadsheet of Fantasy Literature”, a sort of ‘in
real life’ fanzine I was working on in the early Eighties. I never had the
nerve to tell him the book was a little too smutty and sarcastic and not nearly fantastic
enough for me.
