Apex Book Company

Strange books. Books bound in human skin. Books signed in menstrual blood (more on these two later). Books embellished with gold and precious stones – strange books are a collector’s delight, and never more so than in the realm of science fiction, a genre that had made specialist presses a cornerstone of its existence, and which attracts collectors like flies to a particularly gory, succulent corpse. I should know. I’m one of them.

The following three books are each a unique work of bizarre art and collectors’ lore. They are rare, precious, and somewhat strange. I have never seen them in the flesh. Each is a holy grail to a band of questing collectors. Feast your eyes, then on–

Self-Destructing Poetry: William Gibson’s Agrippa

William Gibson is the author of Neuromancer, one of the most influential science fiction novels ever written. The true first edition was a US paperback. The first hardcover – and the most coveted edition therefore – was the UK edition published by Gollancz. The closest I’ve come to owning one is the tenth anniversary edition published in the UK by HarperCollins. It’s inscribed by Gibson, but otherwise it’s not particularly valuable, except to me. Agrippa: A Book of the Dead is a poem written by Gibson following his father’s death. The full text is currently available on Gibson’s web site. Now…

Agrippa was published in a book – or rather, artefact – published by Kevin Begos in New York and designed by artist Dennis Ashbaugh, featuring copperplate aquatint etchings and pages of DNA sequences set in double columns, the whole thing coming in a bronze box. By all accounts it is the epitome of minimalism and restraint. What makes it interesting beyond its art-object nature is the centrepiece, if you will, of the whole thing: Gibson’s poem, which came on a – supposedly – self-destructing computer floppy-disk. The disk, or the software, was designed to display the poem only once, each page being erased as it was read. Whether it worked or not is open to debate. The text found its way onto the Internet (which seems rather fitting) while this fabulously rare, bizarre collectors’ item continues to exist mainly in story form. Gibson himself, on his web site, says, “Today, there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don’t have one myself…”

Reading This Book Will Give You Cancer: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury is one of America’s most famous writers of the fantastic. Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Firemen in a future America, men whose job is to prevent people reading books by burning them – this was before television did the job all by itself. To commemorate publication, Bradbury’s publishers, Ballantine Books, had a limited number of copies bound in – yup, it was asbestos. Thus, a book about burning books

was itself impervious to fire, and a collecting legend was born. (And if you thought television gives you cancer, try reading this one!) About 200 copies were made, numbered and signed by Bradbury. A recent copy put on auction had an estimate of $12,000-$15000. If you can afford it, by all means get one – just don’t roof your house with it…

Raising the Stakes, Playing for Keeps: Tim Powers’ Last Call

One of my favourite books, this one. I’m a big Powers fan (I’ll talk more about that in a future column) and this unique edition, published by American Charnel House, is a wonderful example of bizarre book-binding. Last Call is the story of card player, Scott Crane, the supernatural history of Las Vegas, and a very odd poker

game. The Charnel House edition, which came out in a lettered edition of just 26 copies, has – I kid you not – end-leaves made of uncut sheets of one dollar bills, a limitation sheet made of uncut two dollar bills, while the front board is embedded with an actual tarot card and two poker chips from the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. There was also a less fanciful limited edition of 350 copies. Prices for the lettered edition, of course, have risen steadily ever since publication. Last I looked (a few years ago) it was around $6000. Who knows what it is now?

So there you have it. Three books to give collectors haunted eyes and sleepless nights. A self-destructing book, an indestructible book, and a book actually made of money. But of course, the greatest, and perhaps the most bizarre, story of a modern binding is that of the Titanic Omar, and I did promise to tell you about that one…

But maybe next time.

END

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.