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Finished copies exist: Printed, bound, the whole shebang, coming soon to a bookstore near you. Here’s a photo to prove it. The guy holding the book is Tom Doherty, Publisher of Tor Books. I caught him laughing, not that that’s a hard thing to do.
Great shot—and what I really love is squinting at all the other titles in the bookcase behind him....
Why is this man laughing? Careful photo analysis -- with a computer -- reveals that he is holding a mock-up of the cover, wrapped around a copy of The Last Dangerous Visions. Nice try, "Tor," if that is your real name!
Kp (hy! wht th--)
Hah! If we were just going to photograph a jacket wrapped around a different 704-page book, we could have posted that picture ages ago; and anyway, The Last Dangerous Visions is the wrong trim size. (We do use stacks of unjacketed LDV hardcovers as shelf supports and office partitions, though.)
John, for your sake I'm sorry I trimmed the photo. In the original you could see most of the next bookcase over, for more squinty fun.
And even more uselessly squinting to try to see what the books behind the first rows of books are. Ah, the horrors of having insufficient shelving! (We just moved out of an apartment. For some bizarre reason, the people moving in didn't *want* the two hundred linear feet of bookshelves that we'd put up. Can you imagine?)
Catie, be thankful you don't live in Dallas. I kid you not, the people there don't know what bookcases _are_. (One of local boy Dan Piraro's "Bizarro" cartoons summed up the Dallas mentality quite nicely: One couple is showing off their living room, with a TV jammed into a classic fireplace and a GIGANTIC bookcase next to it, and Couple Numero Uno is commenting "Not only did this place come with a spot for our television, but we have a rack for our videotapes, too!") My fiance and I have enough books to cause the floors of our apartment to shift, and her family just wonders what's wrong with us. My family...well, they gave up on me in 1983, when my dad discovered he got more respect when he told friends I was a child pornographer instead of a journalism major.
Not bitter at all, Erik; we're one of the few, the proud, the SF publishers that have never bought The Last Dangerous Visions.
Though if I remember correctly, Tom Doherty was at Ace when they almost published Blood's a Rover.
That's uncanny - Have Tom Doherty and Clive James ever been spotted in the same room?
I don't know if they have Steve, but Tom's accent is pretty clearly postmarked "Massachusetts", so I think we can assume that they're two separate people.
I've been struck by that resemblance myself.
Teresa,
I didn't know Tom Doherty was a Massachusetts boy! (I've only seen him once, and it was so long ago I can't remember what he sounded like to me).
Naah, it's not "LDV": it's obvious that it's a two-book volume of L. Ron Hubbard's _Excalibur_ and Jerry Pournelle's _Return of Space Viking_. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go: I'm waiting for the proof of _The Second Coming of Sid Vicious_ (illustrations by Edgar Harris) to show up in the mail, and I think I may be waiting for a very long time...
Send the review copies in the Last Dangerous Visions cover.
I never got into Robert Jordan, but y'all probably made many people's self.getWinterSolsticeHolidayName () happier.
Oh, shoot. Now I'm wondering whether it's Connecticut. You could look him up; he's in Who's Who.
What I do remember is that Tom's home town has ceased to exist. There was some sort of reincorporation step-shuffle-ball-change, and when it was over his township had disappeared and the town hall had been sold to IIRC a law firm, to use as their offices.
Tom's accent varies depending on what he's talking about. If it's literature and philosophy, he pretty much has a standard American accent. But when he's running distribution numbers in his head and telling someone to go check the book orders on some title, "orders" comes out as something in the neighborhood of "awduhs", not quite "ahdahs".
But don't we all do that? When I'm a certain kind of mad, or I'm talking about fixing cars, low-level electoral politics, or Mormonism, my accent takes off running in the direction of the Rocky Mountain West. And on the rare occasions when Claire Eddy loses her temper (or has had several drinks, or has a mild concussion), she's unmistakably the voice of Hell's Kitchen.
"awdahs" certainly sounds like Massachusetts Bay; I think even the western part of the state isn't that dry. (Rhode Island has a strange mishmash, but I haven't heard any of them enough to match it to transcriptions.)
Tom's hometown wasn't the only one to disappear administratively (ignoring the four towns that were outright submerged by the Quabbin Reservoir). The 1980 Boskone was technically held in 2 (3?) different towns because the various faces of the hill that was Ferncroft (which gave its name to the hotel) had been (weighed, numbered, and?) divided among Danvers and other neighboring towns -- the banquet manager creebed to me about juggling who to beg for a liquor permit according to which function room was being used.
I used to take on a slightly Irish sound when drinking Guinness, but I think that was the power of suggestion.
It's a curious question. I wonder if my accent does shift...I'm aware of adjusting it deliberately, depending on circumstances - I'm going to be as Noo Yawk as possible when I visit my 'rents in CA this Xmas - but I wonder if it shifts by itself too? (I'm usually pretty aware of such things, and I haven't really noticed it.)
I know I take on accents when I'm around those who have them if I'm not very careful. After 2 weeks in Ireland recently I was having to exert really heroic efforts not to sound that way.
When I get a certain level of annoyed Jordin says my southern accent gets really noticeable. (It isn't really sothern--I grew up in NE Oklahoma, but there's nothing else to call it really.) When I get really pissed off, I tend to decend into babbling incoherence.
MKK
Tom was born in Hartford, Connecticut. But yes, he does have what my Western ear hears as a New England accent.
Ummm... Perhaps this is impolite to ask, but do things *happen* in _Crossroads of Twilight_? That is, I read the first four books, and then gave up because it seemed to me that we were further from the end of the story at the end of book four than we were at the end of book two.
Since then--or so people tell me--the plot has engaged in a drunkard's walk that has given no signs of getting closer to the end of the story.
If you'll assure me that things *happen*, I'll buy it in hardback...
Brad DeLong
