That was a terrific article. Thanks for posting it, joe.

Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha! Le Roi en Juane is MINE! And, appropriate to the subject matter, I had to get up at 5 am to seal the deal due to transatlantic time differences. Soon, I will have an excuse for all my eccentricities...

PLEASE keep us posted. I am agog that a French original exists.

Or so the "translator" says. While I suppose it's possible that Chambers got the name from an actual obscure play he came across in his art school days in Paris, it's far more likely that Ryng is a big genre fangeek and wrote his own version of the play like James Blish did, using the conceit that it's a translation of the original found version as a marketing tool. Certainly I've found no historical basis for a flap over the publication of such in 19th century Europe, as the short stories indicated.

Whatever the case, the near impossibility of tracking down a copy of a 500 print run limited edition from a press that went out of business made it challenging and fun enough to be worth the price. I look forward to seeing how Ryng's version differs from the ones Blish and Lin Carter wrote.

I was in Borders today, and there was a couple looking at the Summer Reading selections, trying to find books to read, and for their teenage kids to read. And I single-handedly convinced the woman to buy Anagrams and pushed her towards Slaughterhouse-Five and got her intrigued by Ella Minnow Pea, though I'm not sure whether she ended up getting it. And I pushed the man to 1984 and made a sale off Einstein's Dreams. And their kids will soon discover the wonder and brilliance of Edward Eager's Half Magic. All because of me.

It was odd; they were just looking for books. Something to read, you know? And they weren't voracious book-readers, as evinced by the woman's being impressed at how many of the books I'd read, so somehow, they were willing to take the recommendations of a stranger who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. There's something about this dynamic that's interesting and worth exploring, but I'm not feeling intellectual enough to truly analyze it, just make the observation.

Salon is publishing a Sean Steward novel in. . . what do you call it? Serial form? Perfect Circle is the title, there are three chapters up.

P-C, that's very cool.

My favorite bookstore is having a cheapie-cheap used book sale this weekend, so I picked up 8 books for $12:

Sea-Cat and Dragon King, Angela Carter
In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot
My Father's Dragon, Ruth Gannett
Elmer and the Dragon, Ruth Gannett
The Dragons of Blueland, Ruth Gannett
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
Borderland, ed. Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold

The Angela Carter book was a real find; I'd never even heard of it before. It's a kids' picture book. And I was psyched to find a copy of Borderland too. Aren't there a bunch more Borderland anthologies out there? And doesn't Micole have a story in one of them? I think the one I got is the first one, but I'm not sure.

My Father's Dragon, Ruth Gannett

This is one of my favorite books in the world. I have my Dad's old copy, and I cherish it.

The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

Ooh, a classic. Ah, Turtle.

Jen, isn't it great? My dad read it to my brother and me when we were young.

And who doesn't love The Westing Game?

Hmm. Possibly I should finish one of the, um, nine books I'm currently in the middle of before starting another...