While in Austin Feb. 15 and 16 to run the Austin Half Marathon, I stopped by a few bookstores.
Jor R. Lansdale, Sugar on the Bones (2024). I paid full price for this book, at Book People on Sixth and Lamar. None of the local bookstores in San Antonio had a copy, but Book People still had signed copies from when Lansdale stopped by some time last year to promote his book. I managed to read the Lansdale book in one day. It follows similar plots to previous books in the Hap and Leonard series. Perhaps the next book in the series will be called Long in the Tooth, as those two chaps are getting close to retirement age. This is only a slight dig at the books; since the main characters age with each book, at some point they will need to stop. At this point they’re in their fifties, and it gets tougher to fight and recover at that age.
Dennis Etchison, Red Dreams (1984). A collection of short stories, published by Scream Press. The book is inscribed by Etchison, as well as illustrator J. K. Potter, and signed by Karl Edward Wagner, who wrote the introduction. I wonder what happened to “Joe,” the recipient of the inscriptions when Etchison and Potter signed it in 1985, for this book to end up at Half Price Books forty years later… Red Dreams is the first book by Scream Press that I own. There’s no price listed on this book, though it did come with a slipcase. This small press released some other great books in the 1980s, but I’ve never come across any until now. There’s a note at the front of the book that this is the “Boxed First Edition,” limited to 250 copies. Scream Press, like a few other small press publishers from the 1980s/1990s, lasted just a decade or so before it folded.
Lewis Shiner, The Edges of Things (1991). This book was published by Washington Science Fiction Association in Baltimore as a limited edition. My copy is number 346 of 600, signed by Shiner, illustrator Alicia Austin, as well as editor Mark L. Van Name. It was originally priced at $45 when published in 1991. According to the U.S. Inflation Calculator, this converts to $104.27 in today’s dollars. That’s quite a pricy book. HPB had priced the book at $20, which seemed like an great price to me. I like Shiner’s stories and style, and it was a book long on my wait list. WSFA published a book in honor of the guest of honor at Disclave, a Washington, D.C. area science fiction convention, from 1989 to 1992. Last year I bought the first book they published, Lucius Shepard’s Father of Stones. The book in between these two is by Mike Resnick. I’m not sure if anything was published in 1992, when Pat Cadigan was the guest of honor.
