Inside Jacket

Here’s a feel good story for today. Philip Pullman, author of the Northern Lights trilogy has created a special edition book to benefit children in Africa living with HIV and Aids.

À Outrance – an old French term for a fight to the death – is an outtake from Northern Lights which describes the battle between two armored bears, Iorek Byrnison and Iofur Raknison.

“Just as that great storyteller Anton Chekhov knew that if you show a gun in the first act, you have to fire it in the next, I knew that if you have an armoured bear with a problem to overcome, he will have to overcome it by fighting. So there was going to be a battle, and Lyra would have to bring it about.” – Philip Pullman

Of the 265 books published, 15 of them are unique copies created by some of the top bookbinders, created through an initiative with Oak Tree Fine Press.  (And what is really exciting for us  is that Oak Tree Fine Press  is offering the “basic” special edition books on AbeBooks!)

The 15 unique books are being sold through a silent auction and are expected to sell for thousands of pounds.  The cheaper copies can be purchased for £150 (approx. US$257) and £500 (approx. US$857) apiece.

Each copy of the special edition book has been carefully printed letterpress by hand on traditional cast iron Heidelberg Press, one sheet and one colour at a time on mould made Somerset paper and comes in its own leather-trimmed slipcase. A set of six woodcut images signed by Pullman and the artist is also included.

Pullman hopes that the 15 unique editions are purchased for a large sum by collectors. “Normally I’d feel a little equivocal about being published in an edition that very few people can afford. The reason I agreed to this was that all the proceeds are going to benefit children in Africa with HIV/Aids,” he said.  “It seems a wonderful way of both making exquisite and unique objects and bringing help to children who desperately need it.”

Uber wealthy horror magnate Stephen King wants his readers to help him out do the thinking for him. He currently has two new re-hashed story ideas and wants you to help him decide which literary masterpiece potboiler will make a bigger contribution to the art him more money. The Shining sequel or a new Dark Tower Mid-World book, only you can decide.

I was quite excited when I heard the details about Sarah Palin’s book tour. Not because I wanted to line up to the meet the lady, but because I thought lots of signed copies of her book, Going Rogue, would end up for sale on AbeBooks and we’d be selling them by the truckload.

It hasn’t quite worked out like that. A couple of signed copies have found their way on to AbeBooks and been sold for $115 to $180, but that’s about it. It’s not like the mad scramble, money is no object, for signed Barack Obama books in the hours after his election campaign victory. Don’t get me wrong – people are searching AbeBooks for signed copies of Going Rogue every day but they are going away disappointed because we have no signed copies for sale.

Basically, the problem is that no booksellers are willing to line up for 10 hours, 12 hours or 14 hours in order to get a book signed by Palin at one of her appearances. The waiting times at her appearances have been huge with folks camping out in order to get a decent place in the line-up. It simply doesn’t make financial sense for booksellers – they could spend the day runnning their bookstore, uploading new books to Internet sites or acquiring new rare books to sell. Fourteen hours spent in a line-up outside a Barnes & Noble bookshop in the Midwest simply isn’t well spent time for a return of $100 on the book.

When I saw the headline – Julie & Julia author takes job in butcher shop – I was thrilled. Excellent, I thought, now we won’t have to suffer through any more ridiculous books about trying to cook an over-complicated French recipe every day. Sadly, we are going to have to suffer through another book from Julie Powell.

Julie Powell’s new book is not for the squeamish, in more ways than one. It opens with her in the back of a butcher shop, flecked with blood and reeking of meat. She’s busy slicing a raw, slippery liver with a foot-long knife.

By the end of the book, another internal organ — her heart — has been filleted: Powell dissects the pain caused by her two-year affair with an old college flame that sent her into an emotional tailspin and almost sunk her marriage.

I think I’ll give this one a miss, especially as the book “reveals the pain of loving two men at once, of her fondness for sadomasochism and even a bout of self-punishing sex with a stranger.” What about the pain of cutting off a finger while chopping up some mutton?

Although I suppose when you are down in the dumps, a butcher’s shop isn’t the worst place to end up. There’s a sharp object in your hand, you can handle some flesh very roughly, and you walk away from your job with blood on your shoes which always alarms the vegetarian community.

An author who works in a bookshop, called Review, in Peckham has won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize with her debut novel. It’s only worth £5,000 prize – I wouldn’t get out of bed for that kind of money – but I’m sure it’s well appreciated by Evie Wyld. Her book, After the Fire, beat Aravind Adiga and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Set mostly on the coast of Queensland, After the Fire explores failures of communication across three generations of Australian men. The shadows of domestic violence, the Korean war and Vietnam loom large in a taut story.