Running repairs might have been a theme of this week. I bought 200 polypropylene bags recently, so I've started cleaning, repairing and bagging some of my paperbacks. They are 5 x 7 3⁄8 inches, so good for, say, old Penguin crime novels, but not for a lot of the 1950s digest-sized paperbacks, which is what I actually want to protect. Not that they'll go to waste, as I have hundreds (maybe thousands) of books that will comfortably fit.
I've bagged up some of the books on nearby shelves, although I've had to skip some—I bagged my Raymond Chandlers, but couldn't do Killer in the Rain because the spine is too wide and my Hamish Hamilton edition of Pearls Are a Nuisance, which is digest size. I bagged all my Hal Clement books, bar The Best of..., which (again) had a too-wide spine. Hopefully I can buy some slightly larger bags next year.
And one of my shelves was looking slightly drunk and was listing badly; the top shelf began 8 inches to the right of the bottom shelf because the backboard that keeps it upright had bowed because I had stacked too many books on the shelves, some magazines, and a couple of dozen hefty reference books. The nails that held the board in place had mostly come loose, so it was a case of emptying the shelf (thanks Mel!) lugging it out into the kitchen and hammering two dozen nails into it. The lower shelf is permanently warped, but I managed to get a few nails in to hold it steady and even managed to get the two boards to fit back into the bit of plastic that runs from top to bottom down the centre.
It is now back in place, looking good, and I have a small stack of books that I will sell off one way or another that are no longer causing the shelves to bow.
Tuesday and Wednesday was my weekend—it tends to move around as Mel never has the same days off one week to the next—as I'd spent Saturday and Sunday going through the proof copy of the AIR ACE PICTURE LIBRARY COMPANION and ironing out some textual anomalies and tidying up a couple of bits that needed clarifying. I was back on the same text on Monday when proofreader extraordinaire (stand up and take a bow) Richard Sheaf sent me an embarrassingly long list of corrections and queries.
The text is now done and the book will be out next month. Quite when I don't know as I need also to sort out the contract for MYTEK THE MIGHTY Volume 4. This should be sorted out shortly, hopefully next week. Once I've coughed up some money to Rebellion I should be able to get a decent print run sorted by (hopefully) mid-November. Then it's full steam ahead with the ACTION Index.
As well as the bagging and repairing of books and shelves, I'm also trying to clear the shelves of some book I no longer need, so you might find a few things turning up on Ebay.
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| Ships of the Sky (extract), unpublished strip by David Slinn |
He was a delight to chat with, and a conversation could veer sideways into all sorts of areas: it might start with a focus on Cowboy Picture Library (to which he contributed) but could end up with a discussion about Bob Geldof's opinion on teenage girls' magazines. Email took over from phone calls, which meant scans, lists and research could be bounced around—often between David, myself and David Roach—hoping for a consensus of opinion on who an artist might be. Sometimes he could be elliptical with an answer: there is still a Cowboy Comics artist he identified but never got around to naming. "Think so-and-so" [I forget the name] he said, implying that I would recognise the similarities and then make the mental leap that he had. I hadn't a clue and still to this day those issues remain unidentified. (My particular skill when it comes to indexing comics has always been to listen to people smarter than myself and write down what they say.)
David had helped so much with the Ranger index that I thought he deserved a co-writing credit; that's not to say that his contributions to all the other indexes was any less welcome. David and I had launched into a new project, an index and history of (Junior / TV) Express Weekly and the first results were bounced between us in January of this year. I mentioned in my blog for 10 January that I had been writing an article on why newspapers were rationed for so long after the war, full rationing only ending in 1956. Yet new publications were allowed from 1950. Well, that's all part of the Junior Express story and the first thing I sent over to David. I wrote up a second part in April while I was waiting on paperwork for the first two Mytek books. Once that arrived I dived straight back into getting them ready for publication, unaware that David was not well, having been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
He spent his last few months in a hospice, where he was well cared for by staff and family. We chatted a couple of times on the phone and I sent him the second section of the Express Weekly history. Sadly, his condition deteriorated and he passed away on Wednesday morning.
His family will still be processing the news themselves, so it's too soon to write more. Hopefully I'll be able to share more in a week or two.
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