Reading something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue
I’ve been following Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series for years now, so I got the 7th book, The Woman Who Died A Lot (TN-7), as soon as it hit the shelves in Manila late last year.
The holiday rush was setting in, and I had a demanding client on my hands so I was determined to lose myself in a good book (pun intended), and Thursday Next has proven to be an old reliable.
This is going to be strange, two years overdue, but I was rooting around Jasper Fforde‘s (one of my favorite authors, in case you didn’t knw) website and I just found out I was among the picks for the Thursday Nextreme (Thursday Next X-treme) in 2009.
I remember visiting the site this year to “download” the TN6 special features, but I totally forgot about joining Nextreme!
(book review first published in today’s Manila Bulletin, Students and Campuses Section)
The latest installment of British author Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, “One of Our Thursdays is Missing,” hit bookstore shelves this month, four years after the last novel in the series was released.
Preceded by “The Eyre Affair,” “Lost in a Good Book,” “The Well of Lost Plots,” “Something Rotten,” and “The First Among Sequels,” “One of Our Thursdays is Missing” is the much-awaited follow-up in the comic fantasy series starring Thursday Next, a literary detective who has the rare ability to “jump” into the BookWorld.
My Tuesday night habit, before heading to Murphy’s for weekly Quiz Night, is book hunting. Tonight I happened to be browsing at National Book Store Greenbelt, and I thought I’d already scored my bounty — a spanking new trade paperback copy of Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, marked down to from P629 to P150 — so I was headed over the counter when something caught my eye a few tables down.
I swear, it was as if a heavenly beacon was lighting the way for me! I squinted, did a double take, then squealed, dodging two elderly women picking out cookbooks in my haste to get my hands on this:
An author’s signature increases the value of a book. Signed first editions, especially by famous authors, can cost an arm and a leg (the Holy Grail of the moment is a signed first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, at £8,000 to £10,000), and while there are no hard and fast rules in book valuation, a signed copy is more valuable than an identical unsigned one.
For me though, the potential value of the book is secondary; the biggest thrill from getting a signed copy is being able to come into contact with the author (or illustrator) of the book, whether directly (through the rare book signings that happen in this part of the world) or indirectly (e.g. rummaging through the bargain bins and hitting paydirt!).
