A Tale of Two Cities part 8

 

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Iain M. Banks cover gallery

I have been planning to produce a cover gallery for Iain M. Banks for some time. His announcement that he has terminal cancer made me realise that time can sometimes run away from us. I probably first thought about doing this in 2011 and it's now 2013. See how time flies?

I have never spoken to Iain, but I did run an extract from one of his books in a magazine I edited way back in 2000. The third issue of Science Fiction World contained the prologue of Look to Windward, along with an interview with Iain. I remember talking to his agent Mic Cheetham and running the idea of an extract past her. She suggested a price which was substantially more than the budget for the whole magazine. We eventually settled on a figure the magazine could actually afford, although I think I had to write a few more reviews and whatnots to make up the cost. 

For more on Iain's message and how to leave messages for him, visit his official website. Information about Banks and his books – both SF and non-SF – can be gleaned from Wikipedia and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.

Original Mark Salwowski artwork for some of Banks' novels can be found here.

Consider Phlebas (London, Macmillan, 1987)
Futura/Orbit 0708-83707-7, 1988, 471pp, £4.99. Cover by John Burns
---- [2nd imp.] 1988; [3rd imp.] 1988; [4th imp.] 1988; [5th imp.] 1989; [6th imp.] 1990.
Orbit 978-1857-23138-0, 1991.
---- [2nd imp.] 1992; [3rd imp.] 1992; [4th imp.] 1993; [5th imp.] 1993; [6th imp.] 1994; [7th imp.] 1995; [8th imp.] 1996; [9th imp.] 1996; [10th imp.] 1997; [11th imp.] 1998; [12th imp.] 1999; [13th imp.] 2000; [14th imp.] 2001; [15th imp.] 2002; [16th imp.] 2003.
Orbit 978-1857-23138-0 [17th imp.] 2005, 471pp, £8/99. Cover design by blacksheep
---- [18th imp.] 2005; [19th imp.] 2005; [20th imp.] 2006; [21st imp.] 2007; [22nd imp.] 2008.

The Player of Games (London, Macmillan, 1988)
Orbit 07088-8309-5, 1989, 309pp, £4.99. Cover by Keith Scaife
---- [2nd imp.] 1990; [3rd imp.] 1991; [4th imp.] 1992; [5th imp.] 1992; [6th imp.] 1993, £5.99; [7th imp.] 1993; [8th imp.] 1994; 
---- [9th imp.] 1995, £6.99. Cover by Mark Salwowski
---- [10th imp.] 1996; [11th imp.] 1996; [12th imp.] 1997; [13th imp.] 1998; [14th imp.] 2000, £7.99; [15th imp.] 2002; [16th imp.] 2003
Orbit 1857-23146-5, 2005 [17th imp.], 309pp, £7.99. Cover design by blacksheep
---- [18th imp.] 2005; [19th imp.] 2006; [20th imp.] 2006

The State of the Art (Willimantic, CT, Mark V. Ziesing, 1989)
Orbit 1857-23030-2, 1993, 216pp, £5.99. Cover by Mark Salwowski
---- [2nd imp.] 1994; [3rd imp.] 1995; [4th imp.] 1996; [5th imp.] 1996; [6th imp.] 1997

Use of Weapons (London, Orbit, 1990)
Orbit, 1992
---- [2nd imp.] 1992; [3rd imp.] 1993; [4th imp.] 1994; [5th imp.] 1994; [6th imp.] 1995; [7th imp.] 1996; [8th imp.] 1996; [9th imp.] 1997; [10th imp.] 1998; [11th imp.] 1999; [12th imp.] 2000; [13th imp.] 2002; [14th imp.] 2003; [15th imp.] 2004
Orbit 0185-23135-X [16th imp.] 2005, 411pp, £8.99. Cover design by blacksheep
---- [17th imp.] 2006; [18th imp.] 2007; [19th imp.] 2008

Against a Dark Background (London, Orbit, 1993)
Orbit 1857-23179-1, 1995, 487pp, £7.99. Cover by Mark Salwowski
---- [2nd imp.] 1995; [3rd imp.] 1996; [4th imp.] 1997; [5th imp.] 1998; [6th imp.] 1998; [7th imp.] 2000; [8th imp.] 2001; [9th imp.] 2003;
---- [10th imp.] 2005, 487pp, £7.99. Cover design by blacksheep
---- [11th imp.] 2005

Feersum Endjinn (London, Orbit, 1994)
Orbit 1857-23273-9, 1995
---- [2nd imp.] 1997; [3rd imp.] 1998; [4th imp.] 1999, £6.99; [5th imp.] 2001; [6th imp.] 2002; [7th imp.] 2004; [8th imp.] 2004.
---- [9th imp.] 2005, 279pp, £8.99. Cover design by blacksheep
---- [10th imp.] 2005; [11th imp.] 2005; [12th imp.] 2006; [13th imp.] 2007; [14th imp.] 2008; [15th imp.] 2009

Excession (London, Orbit, 1996)
Orbit 1857-23457-X, 1997, 451pp, £6.99. Cover by Mark Salwowski
---- [2nd imp.] 1997; [3rd imp.] 1997; [4th imp.] 1998; [5th imp.] 1999; [6th imp.] 2001; [7th imp.] 2002; [8th imp.] 2003; [9th imp.] 2004.
---- [10th imp.] 2005, 451pp, £8.99. Cover by Bruce Coleman / design by blacksheep
---- [11th imp.] 2005; [12th imp.] 2006; [13th imp.] 2007; [14th imp.] 2008; [15th imp.] 2008

Inversions (London, Orbit, 1998)
Orbit 1857-23763-3, 1999, 393pp, £6.99. Cover by Mark Salwowski
---- [2nd imp.] 2000; [3rd imp.] 2001; [4th imp.] 2003
---- [5th imp.] 2005, 393pp, £7.99. Cover design by blacksheep

Look to Windward (London, Orbit, 2000)
Orbit 1841-49059-8, 2001, 403pp, £7.99. Cover by Mark Salwowski
---- [2nd imp.] 2003; [3rd imp.] 2004.
---- [4th imp.] 2005, 403pp, £8.99. Cover design by blacksheep
---- [5th imp.] 2005; [6th imp.] 2006; [7th imp.] 2007; [8th imp.] 2008; [9th imp.] 2008; [10th imp.] 2009; [11th imp.] 2010

The Algebraist (London, Orbit, 2004)
Orbit 1841-49229-9, Jul 2005, 534pp, £7.99. Cover design by blacksheep
---- [2nd imp.] 2005; [3rd imp.] 2005; [4th imp.] 2005; [5th imp.] 2005; [6th imp.] 2005; [7th imp.] 2005; [8th imp.] 2006; [9th imp.] 2006;

Matter (London, Orbit, 2008)
Orbit 978-1841-49419-7, 2009, 593pp, £7.99. Cover by Debra Lill

Surface Detail (London, Orbit, 2010)
Orbit 978-1841-49895-9, 2011, 627pp, £8.99. Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

The Hydrogen Sonata (London, Orbit, 2012)
Orbit 978-1841-50149-9, 2013, 630pp, £8.99.
---- [2nd imp.] 2013; [3rd imp.] 2014; [4th imp.] 2014; [5th imp.] 2014.

A Tale of Two Cities part 7

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Mary Louise Parker

Trying to find out anything about the author Mary Louise Parker is like trying to swim through molasses. Search for her on the internet and you are swamped with information and images for the (admittedly highly attractive) actress Mary-Louise Parker. Now Mary-Louise can do no wrong because she is one of the stars of Red, based on the comic written by Warren Ellis, but in this instance of Google searching you would wish that you would weed her out of the results. Removing the word "actress" still gets you 13,800,000 hits; removing various other terms (theatre, Bruce Willis, Weeds, etc.) and I was down to 3.6 million hits. At which point I gave up.

Working from the other direction, e.g. "Mary Louise Parker illustrator" wasn't much help either. Reference books offer little, although Parker does have an entry in Sue Sims and Hilary Clare's Encyclopedia of Girls' School Stories. They, too, seem to have drawn a blank as far as information about her life is concerned, so I don't feel quite so bad.

In that book, Kat Tyler describes Parker as belonging to the 'jolly japes' school of writing, "with plenty of dramatic incident; readers who like a densely plotted story may well enjoy Parker's books ... Characterisation and character conflict are not Parker's strong point, so she needs to fall back on a great deal of 'plot' to keep things going; perhaps it is not surprising that she repeats motifs so often."

While it has been impossible to find anything solid about Mary Louise Parker, it is possible to speculate a little. You will notice from the list of her works below that a number of her books were illustrated by an artist who signed their work M.L.P. There was also artwork signed by L. Parker and, in one instance, when she illustrated Pennie by Bertha & Ernest Cobb (Sampson Low, 1930), the British Library Catalogue notes her name in full. (The book also contains illustrations from its original American edition by J. F. Bridgman.)

The earliest works signed by L. Parker date from 1923. 

Publications

Novels
Pat of the Fifth, illus. MLP. London, Sampson Low, 1927.
Mollie of St. Mildred's, illus. MLP. London, Sampson Low, 1928.
Diana and Pam – Chums, illus. MLP. London, Sampson Low, 1929.
The Girls of St. Hilda's, illus. MLP. London, Sampson Low, 1930.
'Miss Spitfire' at School. London, Sampson Low, 1931.
The Mystery of the New Girl. London, Sampson Low, 1932.
Good Chums All. London, Sampson Low, 1933.
One Thrilling Term. London, Sampson Low, 1934.
The Queer New Girl. London, Sampson Low, 1934.
Madcap Jill at School, illus. MLP. London, Sampson Low, 1934.
A Jolly Trio, illus. MLP. London, Sampson Low, 1935.
Captain, Pro. Tem.. London, Sampson Low, 1936.
Judy Arrives!. London, Sampson Low, 1936.
'Peter' and Co.. London, Sampson Low, 1937.
Top Dogs v. The Duds, illus. E. Sharp. London, Sampson Low, 1937.
Dormitory Seven. London, Sampson Low, 1938.
Fifth Form Quins. London, Sampson Low, 1938.
The Triumphant Term. London, Sampson Low, 1939.
The Twins at School. London, Sampson Low, 1939.
Dormitory 'Wistaria'. London, Sampson Low, 1947.
Suzette Wins Her Way. London, Sampson Low, 1947.
Three New Girls. London, Sampson Low, n.d. [1949]

Illustrations
Brother Eskimo by Alan Sullivan. London, Sampson Low, 1923. [Frontispiece]
The Scourge of the Moors by H. Turing Bruce. London, Sampson Low, 1923.
Their Island Home: The later adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson by Jules Verne. London, Sampson Low, 1923?
The Wreck of the Andromeda by Harry Collingwood. London, Sampson Low, 1923?
Pennie by Bertha & Ernest Cobb. London, Sampson Low, 1930. [Frontispiece]

A Tale of Two Cities part 6

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Comic Cuts - 5 April 2013

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Friday seems to come around faster and faster the older I get. I can't believe it was a week ago that I was writing the last of these columns.

To bring you up to date: I was predicting that I would have the Ranger book finished over the bank holiday. I was close but didn't quite make it, having decided that it was more important that I watch a film and Jonathan Creek. So that meant a couple of hours work on Tuesday morning, partly due to the fact that I hadn't gotten around to laying out the back cover of the book . . . and once I'd decided what I was going to do with it, I had to redesign a couple of internal pages which I had pinched images from.

To cut a long story short, after a couple of final run-throughs of the pages to make sure there was nothing obviously wrong, I finally sent everything off to the printer and I'm now waiting on the arrival of a proof. Which, as you know, is the signal to start taking orders.

 

Sample pages from Ranger: The National Boys' Magazine

With everything Ranger-related now finished for a few days before the proof arrives, I was keen to get down to the next task in hand. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible as I discovered that my constant battle for data-storage space had been lost. When I was copying scans and various designs that I was using for the Ranger book, one of my external hard-drives announced that it was completely full and I wasn't able to squeeze another byte onto it. This leaves me in the scary situation of only having one copy of some things until I can buy a new drive, set it up and mirror the data. There's also the problem of having nowhere to back-up the files I'm working on as the 102 GB of data is greater than the 30 GB I have left on my main storage (external) drive and the 19 GB of workspace I have left on the hard drive of the computer I'm writing this on (and that's after I've cleared off all the Ranger material).

 

 

Three complete strip features are included in full in the new Ranger book

So what am I getting for my birthday next week? Hopefully a nice, new 2 TB external drive to add to the 5 1/2 TB I'm already using to store and mirror all my work. (And I really need to back up this computer soon as I've only done it once since Christmas.)

One bit of good news: the problem I was having with the Rolling News and various other lists that make Bear Alley as user-friendly as I can make it has resolved itself. It took about a week, and Blogger haven't actually explained what went wrong, but everything seems to be working OK now. Fingers crossed.

It's rather late so I hope you'll forgive the lack of additional scans this week. There are only so many hours in the day and, if I'm right about the week coming around faster and faster, the hours only have 50 minutes in them at best.

Next week will see the conclusion of Dickens' adventurous 'A Tale of Two Cities', which will also run over the weekend. But there will be more, including a look at Mary Louise Parker (not the actress) and a cover gallery for Iain M. Banks, whose recent announcement (see the Rolling News) was a hell of a shock.

A Tale of Two Cities part 5

 

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

A Tale of Two Cities part 4

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

A Tale of Two Cities part 3

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

A Tale of Two Cities part 2

 

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

A Tale of Two Cities part 1

Here's another classic adaptation of Charles Dickens. I can't recall any other UK adaptations of this particular novel, which is odd as it is set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and there is plenty of action, captured beautifully by Bill Baker. It was reprinted in 1985 but hasn't been seen since.

From the outset I'd like to apologise for the quality of the scans. They are from a set of reference scans produced a few years ago which I have attempted to clean up enough to make them readable. Unfortunately, with the Ranger index needing urgent attention and some paying work pressing, I haven't had the time to do any more.

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)