Apex Book Company

Bibliographies are cool.

That is, they’re cool for a given definition of cool… of a compulsive-obsessive book junkie sort of cool… long lists of titles, editions, cover artists, first edition ‘points’, original price, number of copies produced, the tiny differences between a second and a third paperback reprinting… who reads this stuff?

Obviously, I do – my favourite bath-tub reading used to be book catalogues (incredibly soothing!) and I still like bibliographies a great deal. How I got into compiling one a few years back is a story for another time, but… what’s the appeal?

A bibliographer is like a detective, and a bibliography is a mystery under investigation. No writer’s bibliography is straightforward. A publishing history is full of fascinating black holes, mysterious disappearances and reappearances of secret names and side-plots. Like the science fiction writers who made some extra money writing paperback pornography under pseudonyms. Or the story that was thought lost until rediscovered forty years later in someone’s attic. Or what about the American writer whose novel could only be found in a French translation?

There are stories so obscure the writer has long forgotten they were published until the bibliographer, poring over documents in a darkened room with a magnifying glass in hand, discovers it. There are books their own authors tried to destroy. And there are those books whose first edition has been almost entirely destroyed – accidentally pulped in one case, or bombed by the Nazis in another. Some copies slip away, somehow. It would be nice to think they may have made their way here from some alternate reality where the bombing didn’t take place or the accident never happened. And then there are the ghost copies, like the final issue of the magazine that has been rumoured to exist for thirty years, an urban legend only ever seen by a friend of a friend of a friend, but still believed in, ‘known’ in the way such things are known.

There are Loch Ness Monsters of books, Yetis of short stories.

A bibliographer is a detective following a cold trail. The investigation has to go back years, decades, centuries. It requires an obsessive attention to detail as well as a delight in the hunt, the chase, the joy of discovering that which was thought not to exist. Stories abound: the collector who found a booklet so rare no-one knew it existed and sold it for forty-five thousand dollars the next day. The copy with the author’s name misspelt, or the copy with the missing chapter, that were pulped and only a few, already purchased, escaped. There are obscure magazine appearances, unauthorized translations no-one – particularly the writer – ever knew about. There are the stories – like J.D. Salinger’s – that can not be collected and only be found in their original publications, in yellowing 1940s magazines, or in samizdat publications, the pirated Salinger collections that appear, every few years, on the market.

And then there are the ones that are improbable all together. The sequels to Harry Potter published in India and China that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. There are the Tarzan stories never seen by ERB, Inc., and then the macabre books that can be found in some bibliographies – the ‘collaborations’ between the dead writer and his living accomplice (anyone read Raymond Chandler’s Poodle Springs?) or the authorized sequels written by a succession of writers to continue a franchise for as long as it could last – The Oz books, most notably, or Dune, or the Amber novels or, for that matter, Peter Pan and Gone with the Wind.

A good bibliographer follows the trail, going through dusty archives, through boxed and mildewed correspondence, through bookshops and magazine shops and catalogues too numerous to count. The detective then puts it all in order, for the client is very demanding, and will pursue the mystery long after the report has been filed and forgotten: bibliographies are meant to sit on a shelf for years, to be referred to, quoted from, picked at, consulted. In the shadowy world of books they are the ultimate reference guide, the maps that chart the course, sometimes the only history that remains of things that have long since disappeared.

We should celebrate bibliographies. We should have Bibliography Day, and give awards to bibliographers; only no award could compete with the simple satisfaction of discovery and the joy of the hunt. We should buy bibliographies because, uniquely amongst books, they are both history and story, and mystery and romance. They bring the love of books to its apex, its obsessive summit, and they satisfy in us the childish urge to collect and catalogue and to possess, the way we did with bottle tops or postcards. Buy a bibliography today – but never attempt to compile one! That way, only madness lies…

I should know.

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.