A Gently Mad Blog Update

I haven’t put up a recommendations list in some time. I think I’ll work on one this weekend and post it.

My reading has slowed a bit. I cant’ say why but maybe it has something to do with catching up with a stack of magazines like Outside, Wired, Runners World, Scientific American, and a few others.

Right now I am reading Blindsight by Peter Watts and I just finished putting out the debut issue of Horror Literature Quarterly which I may say has some great stories by Kealan Patrick Burke, Nate Southard, and Shane Jiraiya Cummings. The second issue will be out in July.

The rest of my time has been taken up by slush reading, forming Gently Mad Press, Inc.(and working on the website).

I was up in Toronto for WHC 2007 which was a great time. And I picked up some cool items to add to my collection. I’ll post about them later.

On Compulsion

And just like the tumblers in a lock events occur that make me purchase more books.

I was contemplating placing an order with Neil over at Clarkesworld Books since he is closing up shop and he needs to get his inventory moved. Who am I to not help the guy out.

This order would have been for most of the Earthling Publications stock he has. I was not completely convinced I would make this purchase until well into the spring. Until one of those events happened.

On How Collectors Save the Written Word

    A few posts ago I spoke of On the differences on Collecting and Reading. The last line of that post “Up next I’ll take a look at the collector and how he does a service to preserving books and culture.” reminded me that I wanted to write about how collectors preserve the written word and at times save literary traditions from going extinct.

On the Idea of Speculation

As It Pertains to Money and As It Pertains to Longevity in Literature and Collections.

A certain idea has been running through my head the past few days pertaining to the speculation of the price of a specific book or edition and whether it is some how immoral to speculate on such things. Is it some how immoral to speculate on the financial gain or loss of a specific author, book, or publisher? Does the after market price of a certain volume increase or decrease the value of the work as literature? Is the person that speculates on price of a certain volume doing some irreparable damage to book collecting, reading, rare book markets?

On the differences on Collecting and Reading

At times some people comment about “collectors” who just buy books to collect them and not read them. Those same peopl at times seem to have virtrol in their voices about those of us that buy books to “just” collect them. I enclosed just in quotation marks to show that these detractors of collectors somehow place upon collecting books some form of sitgma. The “just” they use in their discussions of collectors, to me at least, seem to signify that collectors only buy and not read. And somehow that is antithesis to what books are for.