Good books Die Young - Guest Post by Bob Newman

The other day I was re-reading an old online review of a book by Olga Tokarczuk, in which I encouraged new readers to start instead with my favourite book of hers, Primeval and Other Times. When I checked on Amazon, I found it was now out of print - a second-hand copy was available for about £75 - and the Kindle edition had vanished completely. How is it possible for the best book (IMHO) by a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to disappear like this? And how can it be possible for an e-book to go out of print? And why is it that so many of the books I want to recommend to people are now available only at silly prices, or not at all? Is it just me? 

My current literary enthusiasm - my wife might say obsession - is for José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola and writes in Portuguese. The first novel of his that I read was A General Theory of Oblivion, which was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2016. Ever since, I have been reading everything by him that I can lay my hands on. The bad news is that Oblivion was the fifth Agualusa book to appear in English, and some of the earlier ones are already quite hard to get hold of. Some of them are out of print and have never been available as e-books. For Creole, for example - which Agualusa’s excellent translator Daniel Hahn rates his favourite - Amazon lists only a single copy of the paperback, which can be yours for £273.99. The good news is that there are plenty of his novels still to be translated, and they will surely be offered to us when - as seems inevitable, if there is any justice - he finally gets his Nobel Prize. (Another small piece of good news is that at the time of writing a couple of copies of Rainy Season are available on the web for the price of an ordinary paperback. Buy now while stocks last!) 

I’m a long-standing fan of Kurt Vonnegut - though I hold the unfashionable view that Slaughterhouse-Five is far from being his best book. One of the six or eight that I prefer is Galapagos, an entertaining and thought-provoking read that has been cited in more than one academic book about evolution. You can still get it in hardcopy, but, oddly, the e-book is currently available only in Italian, German, or Spanish. 

Finding books I’ve decided I’d like to re-read can be a challenge, unless I still have a physical copy playing its part in my cluttering up of the house. I must have lent someone B S Johnson’s Travelling People, a novel I remember enjoying about half a century ago. (Cripes!) One of the characters was “bouncy banana-loving Henry Henry”. To read this one again would cost me at least £75. A children’s book called The 35th of May (Erich Kästner) made a big impression on me back in primary school days, and must be what first got me into SF. When I wanted to re-read that one, late last millennium, I could only find it in a German edition. Which I’m pretty sure I read. (Part of it, anyway.) 

One terrific book that never has been readily available in the UK is The Soul of Anna Klane, by Terrel Miedaner. Fans of Douglas R Hofstadter (such as myself) were able to read several chapters of it in his anthology The Mind’s I (“Fantasies and reflections on self and soul”). Most of us, I think, will have been hooked, and wanted to read the whole thing. Unfortunately it is copyright “The Church of Physical Theology Ltd” in the USA and hasn’t been published anywhere in any form since 1977. (I managed to order a copy from a second-hand bookshop in Kentucky, and it is one of my greatest treasures.) 

There are of course many books that thoroughly deserve to be unavailable or entirely unpublished. (It may just be possible that I have written several of these myself.) And even a published author with an enthusiastic following may have books that don’t deserve to see the light of day. I’ll forbear from giving an example here. If I did, I’d have to call out one of my favourite SF authors. 

But I remain surprised that so many books for which there must, surely, be a demand do not ever appear as e-books - and even more surprised when some of those that do achieve e-bookhood manage to disappear again. Producing the e-book version of something already published in physical form must be a relatively cheap process, and keeping an existing e-book available must cost next to nothing, I would have thought. So why can’t I have Kindle editions of all my favourite books please?

You can find Bob's poetry website here and he has four books available on Amazon. Three of these are poetry, with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Pigs probably the most entertaining of them. Between Timid and Timbuktu is a collection of his short fiction.