Not much to report as I've spent part of this week writing an introduction to the next Don Lawrence book, the fourth, to be reprinted by All Verlag in Germany. This one features 'Wells Fargo' and 'Longbow', and, although I've written about both in the past, I didn't think the introduction I wrote for the 2010 reprint of The Don Lawrence Westerns by Book Palace Books was appropriate.
That said, I have to admit that I'm particularly proud of it—it traced the history of transport across America from the San Francisco gold rush to the modern National Highway System, but with a special emphasis on the story of overland delivery services Wells, Fargo and Company and the Pony Express. Seven chapters across 11,500 words, it took ages to research but it was a joy to put together.
This one's a little more on topic.
While doing the research for the new introduction, I couldn't help but think of how few Westerns I've read. My dad and my sister read westerns, mostly Louis L'Amour, but there are plenty of classics like Owen Wister's The Virginian, Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, Ernest Haycox's Stage Coach to Lordsburg, L'Amour's Hondo, Jack Schaefer's Shane and plenty of others that I ought to read at some point. I always preferred science fiction, crime and thrillers and I have thousands filling my shelves, of which at least a couple of thousand are still unread.
Oh, and I bought a couple more this week, just in case I got sucked into another dimension and while I'm was trapped there I finish reading those thousands of books. I wouldn't want to risk running out. And, as of writing, I only have three more books on the way... oh, and three books in my basket on eBay.
Our water company (Affinity) brought in a hosepipe ban on Monday (17th) with immediate effect and we promptly had brief spells of rain over three nights after almost 50 days of dry weather which put the county into drought conditions. It feels like I'm back in my smoking days: the only way to get a bus to arrive was to light a cigarette.
The rain hasn't had much impact on the colour of the grass or the crust of crud that had formed on our pond. I had been meaning to so something about the pond for some while, and this seemed like an opportunity to get rid of at least some of the leaves, broken branches and general detritus that has joined forces with the algae to turn the pond into a pool of muck.
I'm not sure how much of an improvement it has made, as there is now just a layer of damp mud and the tree that overhangs the pond thinks it's autumn already and is shedding leaves. We shall see what happens when we get some serious rain. Maybe we'll even get frogs back in the garden like we used to before new neighbours introduced a couple of cats into the equation and the frog population dropped to zero. They and their cats have moved, so maybe the frogs will come back...
THE SHRINKER received a nice 4-star review in SFX. Thanks to Stephen Jewell, who has given Bear Alley Books some nice reviews in the past. It's almost impossible to get our books mentioned in the mainstream press, and even in specialist magazines as they seem to dedicate so little space to reviews these days. Selling direct (as I do) also creates a barrier, as some newspapers and magazines will only reviews books with ISBN numbers (which can be expensive, up to £93 per book), which I did use in the early days, but found that dealing with wholesalers was a nightmare as they always paid late, when they could be bothered to pay at all.
I'll finish with a few random scans of books found in the wild. We have a couple of places around town where people put old books and, once in a while, something nice turns up. The oddest of the latest crop is a book by Willie Rushton, published by Four Square but in association with Sydney (Australia)-based Tudor Press and with a $1 price tag. Was it ever distributed in the UK, I wonder.
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