BOOK LUNACY

On the day before returning to the States from the UK, I spent several hours arranging JWP's stock of paperbacks for sale on her soon-to-be-launched Internet bookstore. I separated them into A to Z by authors — although once that was sussed out JWP would then have to alphabetize them within their own letter groups — and while that may not sound like much, it turned out to be more of a Herculean effort than I bargained for because the books were obtained from the estate of a recently deceased hoarder, meaning that including hardcovers, oversized paperbacks and coffee table tomes, there was a total of at least three or four thousand books.

This is just a small sampling of some of the stacks of paperbacks, a seemingly unending legion when you're the one doing the sorting, especially when there were zillions of books by the same authors (I never knew Jerry Pournelle, Jack Vance, and Keith Laumer had written so many books!).

Among the stacks I found a shitload of books I had not seen since my childhood and early adolescence, as well as many Robert E. Howard books I'd never heard of and an obscure Edgar Rice Burroughs book called THE EFFICIENCY EXPERT; while I'm a huge ERB fan, his non-fantasy/adventure books don't hold much interest for me, so I didn't add that one to the small box of books I pulled for later purchase (JWP may be a dear friend but she's launching this site to make money, so I don't want freebies). And from the moment I began opening boxes for sorting, there appeared a number books that became so ubiquitous that I would regularly call out to JWP and announce the discovery of more and more of the bloody things. I am of course talking about that killer of trees everywhere, namely the perpetually-churned-out STAR TREK novels.

This is a shot of just the front of an industrial shelf packed with books ranging across nearly the entire TREK universe; the Original Series, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, the movies, original novels and biographies of the series' stars vied for space, and these books averaged three or four rows each from the front to the back wall. I didn't even try to count them, but that's a fucking shitload of STAR TREK books!

Whatever the case, I'll let you know when JWP's site goes live. Trust me, science-fiction and fantasy readers, there's a hell of a lot to choose from, so get those wallets ready!