After last year’s terrible result with the TBR – ending the year having reduced it by only one book – I’ve tried to limit my book buying this year and increase my reading. I’ve managed the latter, but not the former, and may well finish 2018 with more books on the TBR than I started. Oh well. I definitely need to have a clear out…

Meanwhile, here are the books I’ve bought since my last book haul post:

Some collectables. I read Golding’s Rites of Passage two years ago and was much impressed. I wanted copies of the sequels, but in an edition that matched my copy of Rites of Passage. As you do. But couldn’t find any on eBay, on the few occasions when I looked, that weren’t tatty. And then one evening, I spotted all three books in first editions as a set for £50, which wasn’t much more than two secondhand good condition paperbacks would have cost me. So I now have Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in first edition. Golding appears to be quite a good author to collect. First editions of his books are not ridiculously expensive – well, except for Lord of the Flies, of course. The Black Prince, by Adam Roberts and based on an unpublished screenplay by Anthony Burgess, was published by Unbound Books, who crowdfund their titles. I pledged for it in May 2017, and it arrived this month. So that’s nearly 500 days from pledge to book. And that’s one reason why I’m not especially fond of crowd-funding. Plus, of course, there’s the cost – you typically pay over the odds for the final product. The Black Prince cost me around double the RRP of a hardback novel, and four times what Amazon are asking. (To be fair, one of the rewards for my level of pledge was an ebook of reviews of all of Burgess’s novels by Roberts. Which I’m looking forward to reading. Even if it is an ebook.)

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been collecting the 1970s Penguin editions of DH Lawrence’s books, and I managed to find another four – Twilight in Italy, Phoenix, Phoenix II and A Selection from Phoenix – and yes, I know the contents of the last book are from the first two, but never mind. It’s a set. The book with the blue cover is from a series of Penguin Critical Anthologies published by, er, Penguin, during the 1970s. This one being on, of course, DH Lawrence.

Some secondhand paperbacks… Odd John is one of the Beacon reprints of sf novels, many of which were “edited” to make them racier – see this post I wrote on them: Sexy Sci-Fi. I now have copies of all of them. The Midwich Cuckoos was given to me by a friend who had accidentally bought a second copy. I know the feeling. The Final Solution was a charity shop find. The Woman Who Loved the Moon was my sole purchase at Fantasticon, a sf convention in Copenhagen I attended last month. And The Sleep of Reason is the tenth book in Snow’s Strangers and Brothers 11-book series, and proved the hardest to find. There were plenty of first editions, mostly tatty, on eBay, but no paperbacks. I found a single paperback on Abebooks from a seller based in New Zealand, but that would have cost £40+ which was way too much. And then one popped up on eBay… for £2.50. Result. I now have the set.

Some non-fiction. I’ve been picking up the Secret Projects books when I find them on eBay, and with Flying Wings and Tailless Aircraft I now have thirteen of them, and only two left to find. Midland Publishing, however, have been reprinting the books with new cover designs, but the new series doesn’t quite map onto the old series. Weirdly. Art & Outrage is a record of correspondence between Lawrence Durrell and Alfred Perlès about Henry Miller. Copies are quite easy to find, but not in good condition. Which this one is.

Finally, my purchases at this year’s Fantasycon in Chester. There were plenty of books to buy – all the usual small presses were there – although no secondhand books. Dealers who specialise in secondhand books don’t seem to bother attending UK conventions anymore. I’ve had better luck at Swedish and Danish cons… There were a number of books in the Fantasycon dealers’ room I quite fancied buying, and in the past I’d have no doubt bought them. And then they’d have sat on my bookshelves unread for a decade or more, before I finally read them or decided to get rid of them. So I limited myself to three: the new Aliya Whitely novel, The Loosening Skin (there was a launch for the book during the weekend, which I didn’t know about when I bought my copy, or I might have gone to it; I didn’t bother to get it signed, even though the author was at the con); a self-published collection by Gary Gibson, Scienceville & Other Lost Worlds; and a critical anthology, Gender Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction, which actually won the British Fantasy Award for non-fiction during the weekend.