{"id":66,"date":"2016-05-07T15:20:10","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T15:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/2016\/05\/07\/paperbacks\/"},"modified":"2018-01-05T02:20:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T02:20:21","slug":"paperbacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/2016\/05\/07\/paperbacks\/","title":{"rendered":"Paperbacks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(Wrote this entry in August 2015, but apparently neglected to post it &#8217;til now.)<\/p>\n<p>Kathleen has finished removing soot from Peter&#8217;s books, so I&#8217;ve done a quick culling pass on the mass-market paperbacks and put the ones I&#8217;m keeping on my bookcase.<\/p>\n<p>(Climbing the library ladder with a hurt knee was a little bit scary, but ended up working out fine.)<\/p>\n<p>These books are only the ones that I rescued from his house in 2005; probably no more than a third of all of his books. (The other two-thirds I left in the house; I imagine they got thrown away.) When I was going through his house, I just grabbed all the books that looked at all interesting to me, figuring I would sort them all later. I rescued about twenty boxes of books at the time, weighing about a thousand pounds total. Then the books sat in my cousin&#8217;s garage for nine months; I flew up to Tacoma again that December to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2005\/12\/02\/3259.html\">sort and repack and mail them<\/a>. And then they sat in my garage at my old house for a year. I was thinking that they&#8217;d been in that garage for four years, but I just discovered that in fact I took them out in mid-November 2006 and started <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/11\/12\/3726.html\">putting them on my bookcases<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/12\/26\/3770.html\">finished in late December<\/a>); I have no memory of that. A few months later, I even <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2007\/03\/13\/3845.html\">catalogued them<\/a> using Delicious Library, a book-cataloguing application. But in 2009, I guess I must have packed the books up again when I moved, and then they sat in the garage in my current house for another six years. An <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/peter\/2010\/03\/the-fate-of-peters-books.html\">entry I posted in 2010<\/a> gives some more details.<\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t seem to have written much about the authors and contents of the books.<\/p>\n<p>Some things I noticed about the paperbacks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>He had certain favorite authors. For example (very rough counts):\n<ul>\n<li>About 10 books by Samuel R. Delany.<\/li>\n<li>About 30 by Philip K. Dick.<\/li>\n<li>Half a dozen by R. A. Lafferty.<\/li>\n<li>About 20 by Keith Laumer.<\/li>\n<li>Half a dozen by Fritz Leiber.<\/li>\n<li>About 10 by Elmore Leonard.<\/li>\n<li>Half a dozen by Larry Niven.<\/li>\n<li>About 10 by Norman Spinrad<\/li>\n<li>Half a dozen by Jack Vance.<\/li>\n<li>About 10 by A. E. Van Vogt<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>He had a lot of short-story anthologies, both sf and non.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of which, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.isfdb.org\/cgi-bin\/ea.cgi?1381\">Groff Conklin<\/a> sure did edit a lot of anthologies. Peter had at least half a dozen of those.<\/li>\n<li>He had very few books by women. I&#8217;m guessing no more than a dozen of these roughly 250 mass-market paperbacks are by women. A fair number of the books are anthologies, but the TOCs I&#8217;ve glanced at are typical of older sf anthologies in that they generally include nothing by women, or sometimes one story by a woman.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My selection mechanism has skewed some things slightly; for example, I think he probably owned most of the John D. MacDonald mysteries, but since I didn&#8217;t want those, I didn&#8217;t rescue them and they&#8217;re not represented in the above list. However, I noticed the lack of female authors even at the time; I think I was less likely to leave behind a book by a woman than a book by a man, so I suspect that the ratio was even more skewed in his full collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Wrote this entry in August 2015, but apparently neglected to post it &#8217;til now.) Kathleen has finished removing soot from Peter&#8217;s books, so I&#8217;ve done a quick culling pass on the mass-market paperbacks and put the ones I&#8217;m keeping on my bookcase. (Climbing the library ladder with a hurt knee was a little bit scary, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peters-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}