I used to think editing an anthology merely meant choosing some stories you liked, banging them together into a book and – voila! – you had an anthology, easier than frying two eggs and altogether less messy.

I still wish that were the case.

Editing an anthology is closer to being a cattle rustler in the old Wild West, only writers are a lot worse than cattle, and publishers are far more dastardly than any old-time outlaw. To be an editor one needs a pair of mental six-shooters, the patience to lie in wait, still, unmoving, waiting for prey to come unsuspectingly down the trail below. One needs a cold and calculating heart, a killer’s instincts, but worst of all, one needs romance.

Without that last bit – without that grand illusion, that wonderful delusion that what you are doing might just be important, the rest fades to insignificance. There are very few commercial editors, a handful of people making – or, rather, eking out – a living from anthologies. Like gold prospectors in ’49, they dig into the ground, coming up with nuggets until the next mine. To do it, one has to want to do it, needs to believe in doing it – but why bother?

I like short stories. I read them here and I read them there – I read and read them everywhere. I read them in collections, in anthologies, in magazine, online. I pick and mix. And now and then, at low ebbs, when the moon is bright and the wolfmen howl etc, etc, I get the urge to put together an anthology.

I don’t really know why that is. It might just be that it’s a cool idea for an anthology, and I’d like to read some stories in this particular theme, and there aren’t any, or there are only a few. This is what happened with A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults that finally came out last year from the British Fantasy Society, but was an on-going project for so long that I don’t care to remember it any more. The idea was simple: short-short stories in the style of the old Dick & Jane primers, but with adult themes. How great! I thought. This can’t fail! They called me mad, but I will show them, I will show the world! Mwahahahaha!

They did call me mad. Several writers did when I pitched the idea to them. Some liked the idea and kept asking me about the anthology every now and then but also said they had no idea what to write for it. And others just wrote them. I had to beg and cajole and threaten and, in one particular case, hold a writer hostage for a week in an abandoned basement, chained to the leaking radiator, until–

Where was I?

And once you have the writers, and the stories, you need a publisher, and I wish someone had told me that in advance. And finding a publisher for an anthology, original or otherwise, is like hunting yetis in the Himalayas – you might see footprints, but you never see the actual beast.

Something else I should have been told: try not to lose money editing an anthology.

I decided to remember it next time, and also that there will never be a next time.

And then, of course, it was a full moon or the tides were high or maybe I was, and I decided I really, really, really wanted to edit another anthology.

That’s how The Apex Book of World SF came into being.

But perhaps that’s not true.

In fact, I’ve been compiling anthology ideas – and occasionally pitching them around – for a while now. A few years ago, for instance, a friend of mine and I – both big steampunk fans – decided that what the world needed was – wait for it – a big steampunk anthology!

The rest of the world, being short-sighted and indifferent to passion, thought differently. We were turned down by several big UK publishers but were offered a limited edition deal on condition that we sell a trade edition, which we couldn’t do because no-one wanted it.

It was, I realise now, a case of being ahead of our time since, three years later, the world was startled with not one but two big steampunk anthologies (Extraordinary Engines edited by Nick Gevers, and Steampunk edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer). I would sue, but they’re really quite nice people, so I won’t, plus I hate losing.

I have a few anthology files lying on the hard drive, and occasionally I add stories I come across to them. They’re themed, and maybe one day I’ll get to do them after all but, in the meantime, I managed to con Apex into doing my world SF anthology, and that deserves some explaining.

I’m one of those people whose first language isn’t, in fact, English, and who didn’t grow up in that block of English-speaking countries that so dominate global popular culture these days. And so I’ve always had an interest in what’s being done out there – in places like China and Malaysia and Israel and France and Peru – those places that obviously do have a long and respectable literary tradition but – gasp – no English-publisher cares very much about it and, if they did, it would be to translate a rare best-seller or a Nobel prize-winning writer (thank you, Sweden!) – and science fiction and related genres end up, of course, at the very bottom of the list.

However, having an interest is a wonderful thing. It’s all you really need. People respond to it. So, this way and that, I ended up knowing a fair bit about the stuff being written in other parts of the world. In China, I was a guest of SF World Magazine in Chengdu and hung out with a bunch of science fiction writers no-one outside China has ever heard of, and they were great. I picked up comics and horror books in Malaysia, Bulgarian and Russian science fiction in Eastern Europe, talked to people from all around the world as a guest at the French Utopiales festival and, somehow or other, met and talked to and exchanged views with writers from all around the world, from the Netherlands to the Philippines to South Africa.

And I wanted other people to care, too.

The Apex Book of World SF is a project I’ve wanted to do for years before I actually did it. I badgered Apex until they said yes, and I chased the writers I wanted and begged and cajoled and threatened until they gave me their stories. In one case I had to kidnap a writer’s elderly mother and dangle her upside down from a helicopter above an underwater volcano before–

Where was I? Right.

It took me about a year to put it together. A lot of trawling for stories, reading, selecting, asking, chasing, negotiating – but it was still a hell of a lot easier than Dick & Jane. Maybe I’m growing up.

So now my second anthology is coming into being. I’m still not making any money out of these things – perhaps I need to think about editing as a hobby, and everybody needs a hobby, right? – but at least I’ve not lost any, so far, and besides – it’s all about that grand illusion, that wonderful delusion that what you are doing might just be important.

I think it is. I wish there were more anthologies like it. I think there have been about five over the past century. I could be wrong. It might be six. And I wish people would read it, because there’s some great stuff out there beyond the British Isles and the American mainland, beyond the seas and far, far away. Not that far away, really. Very close, in fact. Just around the corner from where I’m writing this. And I hope people read it not because they think they should, but because it’s fun. There’s a lot of fun out there in the world. Some depressing and scary stuff too, but a lot of fun. I think The Apex Book of World SF has a bit of both.

So if you buy it, and read it, let me know if I was right. And now, as I write this, the moon is uncommonly bright, and the wolves are howling in the forests, and the compulsion is taking me again. Must. Fight. The. Urge!

It’s no use. They’re closing in on me. Anthologies. Fluttering their pages in the silent wind. Baring teeth as painful as paper cuts. They’re out there. Waiting…

If you read this–

I–

Help m-

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.

In 2009, Apex will be releasing his anthology of world SF titled The Apex Book of World SF.

Those of us who work outside the English-language world or parallel to it – that is, those writers who either work in their native languages or choose to use English for fiction despite it not being their first language – are committing an act of cultural appropriation. Science fiction and fantasy as genre fiction arise – despite various historical markers from the Odyssey to Frankenstein brought out like dusty family heirlooms every now and then by scholars of the genre – from the American pulp magazines of the first part of the twentieth century. The works we identify as genre are part of what Raymond Chandler called the formula story, developed in Astounding and Weird Tales and Black Mask and Thrilling Wonder Stories and any number of other thrillingly-titled cheap magazines.

Yet those stories had, and continue to have, an appeal beyond the American mainland and the English-language world – an appeal that led to those stories and novels being translated into other languages and, later, for writers in other languages to try and write similar stories in their own tongues.

The history of non-English science fiction and fantasy is – despite various histories of genre that might point variously to the Bible or Journey to the West as preceding works in a long literary tradition – one of appropriation from the American mode, of a writing and a re-writing of formulae and tropes first fashioned in the furnaces of American pulps. And they continue, to a large extent, to be fashioned in the magazines and paperback houses of America.

What, then, does it mean for us outsiders? Are we wrong to appropriate American modes? Do we fail by doing so? And what does it mean when we consistently fail to engage in dialogue with the particular culture that fostered our shared love for these genres?

The last is perhaps the most perplexing, although the easiest to answer. Translation from other languages into English is, at best, negligible, and this phenomenon is carried evenly across genres. The English-language market, put simply, is not overly concerned with reading translations. In comparison, a very large percentage of books published in Europe and Asia are translations – not only from English but also from other languages (although English dominates). Genre, literature as a whole, in this case, is not a dialogue but a monologue, with us on the receiving end. Occasionally an answer might filter back – a Spanish best-seller translated into English, a specialist press putting out a small-circulation anthology of Chinese short stories – but that vast world of non-English genre remains a terra incognita, uncharted and unknown.

It is perhaps because of this, that a new generation of writers are beginning to use English to tell their stories, people like myself who have, at one point or another, made a conscious choice as to language, and came down on the side of English (at least, predominantly, although not exclusively). But what stories do we tell? Do we continue to emulate American stories? Should our characters be called Bill and John and Bob, or shall they be Wu and Ho and Eshkol and Phaiboon? And who will end up in space – will it be full of Americans or Chinese? Can there be Israelis on Mars? Can there be Malay in the asteroid belt? Is the future American – or is ours?

The future, of course, belongs to everyone, but the question remains: to what extent do we take our act of appropriation? Do we stay faithful to it, or do we attempt to subvert and rewrite it in our own image?

These are not, of course, questions to be answered in an article. The debate on these points is taking place right now in countries all around the world. It takes place in Israel, and in the Philippines, and in France, and everywhere genre fiction has taken hold. They are tenacious, those seeds of genre fiction. They plant deep roots.

Some – most – of us would remain unknown to American and British and Australian readers. Most writers are best in their native tongues, and so we get Chinese science fiction novels and epic French fantasy and Israeli YA novels and Malay horror. There are perhaps great works of genre being written and published around the world that we will never know of (and having an American award called the World Fantasy Award will not change that). But English is the new universal tongue. Many of us come from former British colonies. For many, English is a valid language and we are making the attempt to scale that previously-unassailable world. These are exciting times to be a writer.

But are we right to do it? The cultural appropriation debate that took place recently was, it seemed to me, conducted primarily between Americans. But how do we conduct the same argument? Whether Chinese or Argentineans, we are not (usually) minorities in our own countries. And yet we are constantly in the position of outsiders – at least when we put ourselves in direct comparison with the American model. Which we must do because, for better or worse, that is the model we initially drew upon.

Cultural appropriation, it seems to me, is, or should be, at the cornerstone of genre fiction. Not having it would mean that 1950s John W. Campbell Jr. future – a future of Anglo-Saxon men, a future of Johns rather than Isaacs, if you will. For bad or worse, Campbell shaped genre fiction. He ushered in The Golden Age. Only, to me, Campbell not so much shaped the course of the river as dammed it, and his Golden Age was an age in which I, and others like me, could not go. I’d like to celebrate the end of the Golden Age.

We must borrow from each other and do so liberally. Sometimes we might fail – often, perhaps. But we must make the attempt to weave a tapestry of voices rather than a single one, realise that the future is Asian as much as American, Muslim as much as Christian, and that – more than that – it is being written by different voices, even if – particularly when – they speak in other tongues.

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.

In 2009, Apex will be releasing his anthology of world SF titled The Apex Book of World SF.

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.

I became a collector – for a while, at least – because of libraries. At least I think that was the reason. I was a library kid. I never owned books. I started off at the children’s library, which I remember as two shadowed rooms, a bit of light streaming in through the shutters, a stern librarian keeping guard at her desk, shelves packed with books reaching up to the low ceiling. You had to whisper when you were inside, and the smell of the books was that of a jungle: a sweet-rotting smell that is both death and renewal.

Or maybe I’m just being fanciful. By the time I graduated to the adults’ library, I’d read every one of the books on the children’s shelves at least once. I wasn’t discriminating. The great thing about kids is that they don’t discriminate – they can’t – and so they read everything, only later figuring out if a book was any good or not. At the time of reading, it simply doesn’t matter. I read them all and wanted more – but when I think about it now, I realise I never owned a book.

Book collectors know – or so they tell themselves – that they are not the real owners of a book. They are keepers, guardians, temporary custodians of their collections. Books come into a collection from somewhere – someone – else, and will be moving on sooner or later. Book collectors talk of provenance the way art collectors do. Such-and-such book came from the collection of so-and-so. It has the bookplate of the previous owner, who was the king of Mexico (true story, that). To come from a prominent collector’s collection can enhance the value of a book. Collectors like to think of their death, at which point their collection will be put up for auction. They like to think of “their” books ending up in someone else’s collection with a little notation beside it: From the collection of… or Previously owned by…

Perhaps all collectors begin from the simple lack of owning anything to call their own. I doubt it, but it is probably true in my case. As I moved on to the adults’ library, I also began periodic trips to the nearest town where you could buy books (books that were not in the library) and then return them for half-price. I would buy five or six at a time, read them, return them on the next visit. Second-hand bookshops, in many ways, act as lending libraries – still do, for that matter. I’m still doing this today.

I don’t know when the need, the desire, to own a book of my own became manifest. Just as when I began to read, I wasn’t choosy. I bought used paperbacks that looked like a dog had chewed on them (and probably had). But, for a while, they were mine, and only mine. I put them on the shelves, rearranged them, looked at them. It was only later I became fussier: hardcovers, limited editions, even new books (from time to time). The question, perhaps, is why, and I think I have an answer, of sorts.

Limited editions, by themselves, are not particularly worthy of note. Neither are first editions. Most books published, it has been noted elsewhere, will only ever be first editions. And for a small-press book, a print run will always be severely limited.

Yet the books that I truly love – as physical objects, rather than reading material – are the ones that have been made out of a sense that a book is more than what is inside it. That, on its own, it is a work of art. I still own, for instance, a limited edition of one of R.D. Wingfield’s Frost novels. UK readers might recognise Frost as the name of a long-running television series. The programme was based – very loosely – on the novels of which there are only four. A few years ago someone decided to release one of them in a limited edition and, being a huge fan of the books, I pre-ordered it immediately. The book, when it came, was gorgeous. I still have it, and it still isn’t worth much more than I paid for it, but you should see it. Not that it’s particularly fancy. But it is printed on heavy, acid-free paper, bound simply and beautifully, and when you hold it in your hands you know this book will last, will outlive you, that it is meant as a sort of messenger to the future, a time-traveller that time cannot touch.

Or maybe I’m just being fanciful again. These days, the majority of my own collection has dispersed to other collectors, other lives, and once again I visit second hand stores to exchange worn paperbacks for more reading material. Perhaps I’m wiser, perhaps just poorer, but damn it – more than anything I miss that smell.

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.

I was supposed to write a column for this month’s issue but instead I travelled to an ancient city far in the high majestic mountains where I live, the capital of a once-great and near-mythical kingdom, and on the way I got food poisoning and had, in rapid succession, diarrhoea and the sort of projectile vomiting so beloved of babies. The diarrhoea came first. The vomiting, when it came, filled the sink and blocked it. The puke came out of my nose – in chunks. I’d also picked up, a day or two before, a persistent cold virus, so as I type this my lungs are attempting to depart my body rather in the manner of a UFO cult sensing the approach of the mothership.

Which just goes to show – what people call adventure is only fun once you’re safely back home and the washing machine is working. Of course, most of the world doesn’t have a washing machine, and still washes its clothes in a stream… which reinforces my view that the washing machine is probably the most significant technological artefact of recent times. You can say singularity to me, and I will answer you: washing machine.

It’s been a good year, over all. Last year I lived on a remote desert island in the South Pacific, which sounds all lovely and idyllic and all that until you realise living in a bamboo shack on the beach in hurricane season, with no shipping, electricity, food or – yes – washing machine is less romantic than it might sound.

Of course, it sounds bloody lovely when you’re back home and have a real bed to sleep in, and a fridge – another great invention which should be celebrated – can we have International Fridge Day, anyone?

But this column is about books, not mythical kingdoms or diarrhoea (which for the life of me I can’t spell). Books… books have so many practical applications. People don’t appreciate it. Take my favourite, for instance: you can burn books.

Seriously. When you need to light a fire, because you’re cold or you need to cook – and again, most of the world still needs wood fires to survive – how do you start it?

Of course, a good fire-maker can start a fire with a single match and a solitary piece of kindling. I used to be able to do that in my time, living as a beach bum on a lake in Africa, but the skill has left me since then, and last year I took to burning books instead. I was left several utterly dreadful books by the previous owner of the said bamboo hut. Having attempted to read one – an international thriller, I think it was – it made my nose bleed after five pages – why not do something useful with this assemblage of wood pulp? Why not – yes – burn it?

In Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s novels (which I highly recommend you read, in particular The Buenos Aires Quintet) the detective, Pepe Carvalho, is in the habit of burning books. Sometimes he burns one or two pages. Sometimes, when the mood takes him, he burns a whole book. There is an art to burning a book. Books don’t actually burn well. You have to separate the pages to allow oxygen in and, once you do manage to burn the bloody thing, you end up with a terrific amount of fine papery ash that blows everywhere, like a cloud of black butterflies taking off into the night – which is a bit of poetic licence you might as well burn too.

So I used to burn books. It is strangely satisfying. I can’t really explain it. There is something almost sensual about burning a good book. There is something near erotic in separating the pages and watching the words flare and fade on the page and, later, finding a random piece of paper still floating somewhere, a few words still legible, if nonsensical: “Water on”; “me? she said–”; “in the colours of the”; “a great silen”. There’s a sort of poetry in burning books.

I urge you to try it.

Lavie Tidhar’s linked-story collection, HebrewPunk, is available for purchase from the Apex Book Store. Buy your copy today and receive a free matchbox with every order.

Marginalia is really something of a complex subject. Technically, the term is used by collectors to define such items that are peripheral to a collection – small, obscure, related publications of uncertain value. A famous author might have once published a poem in an obscure literary magazine; the same author might have given an interesting interview in a publication far from his usual audience – a science fiction writer, say, talking in a food lovers’ magazine; a crime writer may have sold a rare story to a truckers’ magazine; an academic article relating to your favourite writer may have been published in a peer-reviewed journal most people had never heard of. These are all, in the technical sense, marginalia, and collectors who purposely go in search of them can be termed completists; although it is nearly impossible to be a true completist, if only due to the very incompleteness of the information regarding such marginal titles, of which even the authors themselves may be unaware.

But make no mistake: however obscure, however obtuse, even, such publications may be, that is not to say there aren’t collectors out there searching for them. At this very moment, someone may be scanning eBay for traces of related postcards, posters, publicity slips, promotional material, anything and everything that makes collecting the strange, small things around the main body of a collection so fascinating.

Another word for marginalia is ephemera, of course. I tend to think of marginalia, in fact, in a slightly different way. That’s what I mean when I say it’s a complex subject. For me, marginalia comprises those publications which are marginal, not in relation to a subject but in relation to a recorded history. It is those pulp paperbacks that never even made it into the national library catalogue (Library of Congress in the US, for instance, or the British Library in the UK) – nearly, but not every country has both a national depository of books and a related law requiring publishers to send a minimum number of copies to be recorded. Marginalia, then, are those books that never made it into the official records. They may be pulps, they may be obscure – or even once popular – magazines, they may be tiny self-published poetry collections, fanzines, autobiographies, recipe books, memoirs – an entire universe, in fact, of unofficial, sometimes dreadful, almost always fascinating minuet going unnoticed like canoes in the wake of great tea-clippers.

But wait, there’s more. This category of marginalia can be divided further, although sometimes the divide is blurred. On the one hand, such books as put out by established publishers but which have since sunk to almost complete obscurity, or are known only by a few remaining devotees. I recently purchased – in a small shop in Malaysia with the not-inappropriate name of Junk Books, two lovely paperbacks – the pages yellowing and brittle to the touch, their smell like slowly rotting teeth – of a once-famous writer who went under the name Hank Janson. These paperbacks once sold in their millions. They were once banned by the courts for being too racy. They are still avidly collected to the point that a small British press, Telos, has begun to re-issue some of the Janson titles. The two I bought? Mistress of Fear, the cover artwork still bright after forty years, shows a girl with long legs, in a flimsy dress, jumping out of a window. The second? Desert Fury, the third in a trilogy, which includes Auctioned and Persian Bride, shows an equally vibrant, scantily-clad girl on the cover. My copy of Mistress of Fear boasts “eleven million sale” on the cover. So it goes.

Another of my proud possession in this category is perhaps more respectable, although I suspect almost equally obscure – a Hebrew chapbook published in Warsaw, Poland in the 1920s, containing some early poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik, at one time Israel’s national poet and still one of the most highly regarded Hebrew poets of the twentieth century. Rare? Absolutely. Obscure? Without a doubt. Priceless? Not to the shop who sold it to me for a few shekels several years ago, but it is to me.

So, the first type I talked about is the marginalia around a collection. Promotional postcards, for instance. Michael Marshall Smith collectors would give their right arm, or at least a digit, for the set of four postcards produced to market his second novel, Spares, back in 1990. They were given away free of charge in cinemas and pubs, and are now virtually impossible to find. Valuable? How can you tell? And to whom?

Or what about the Terry Pratchett interview in the first and only issue of the South African Fantamania Magazine? What, in fact, of the first chapter of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, that was done as a small, handsome promotional chapbook by his UK publishers (this one I sold, together with my first edition of the book itself. It is the nature of collecting that things go around, changing hands back and forth by those of us obsessive enough to buy them, desperate enough to sell them).

Then there is the second type: lost paperbacks, lost writers. My favourites remain the – incredibly elusive – so-called stalag novels, soft-core concentration camp porn published in Israel in the wake of the Eichmann trial of the 60s. You won’t find them in the national library, I suspect. Today, the few collectors who even know of their existence would have to pay good money to get hold of one. Back in their day, they were sold – literally – under the counter – and in their tens of thousands. They feature the same bad paper and titillating covers of the Janson books and, no, I don’t own even one, though not for lack of trying.

The third type of marginalia can sometimes prove both the least rewarding, the most rewarding and the most elusive, and it is in the field of those self-published tomes that range from poetry to biography to fiction, including such illustrious forefathers as the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and downwards in a spiralling gyre. The amateur historian will lack for nothing in his quest for memoirs, accurate or otherwise. I once, long ago, had the job of typing up the entire autobiography of a Zionist activist who’d escaped the Nazis into Russia, was arrested as a seditionist by the KGB, tortured, and sent to twenty-years’ exile in a Siberian gulag. I would spend the morning typing up torture methods. Then go to lunch. On Russian interrogation techniques, I was, for a short while at least, a reluctant expert.

Today, with the advent of print-on-demand technology, this field is set to grow exponentially. It has never been easier to publish that recipe book, that memoir, that regional history study, or that great big novel about Bigfoot on the moon.

Marginalia. Ephemera. Call it what you will, but I take comfort in the knowledge that it’s there, like a cloud of debris in Earth’s orbit, silent and unseen and waiting to be found in a dusty alcove of a dusty bookshop, in a jumble sale or an abandoned loft, rubbish, or treasure – or both.

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.

I used to collect books of lists. I say used to – I might not be able to resist if I came across a new one. But it’s a limited sort of field, although perhaps wider than you might think. The classic volume in the field is the simply titled, and best-selling, Book of Lists, of course, yet it also includes such esoteric tomes as The Book of Royal Lists (which I have with a signed inscription – although not to me – of one of the compilers), The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists and – not in my collection but should certainly be on my to-buy list (aha!), The Wrestlecrap Book of Lists! (which comes complete with a tax-free exclamation mark as part of its title).

It is only human nature to make lists. For collectors, lists are almost their raison-detre. Collectors love nothing more than to compile lists of the things they collect. Bibliography – which is something I’ll be talking about at more length some other time – is the ultimate act of list-making in the book collecting world.

But think further. Lists are a component of fiction, too. One of the first things school students learn about the comma is that it is used to make lists. Writers also like the semi-colon for this purpose – the semi-colon being this mysterious, alluring punctuation mark that, like a bit of a tipple, one can become overfond of. I first came across the Semi-Colon, Its Imminent Disappearance, And The Importance Of Its Preservation (or at least, I wish there was a book with that title – I’d buy it!) in John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire (of which I only have a battered and bruised British first edition of little financial value). The book includes, towards the end, a discussion on the semi-colon, bemoaning the fact no one uses it any more. Which is, as the English say, poppycock! I am glad to report the semi-colon is very much alive and starting revolutions. Last I heard it was wanted by the FBI for causing excessive literariness and endangering public safety. However, we have not gathered here to discuss the renegade semi-colon, but rather the function of lists, to which the humble semi-colon is a mere accessory.

Why are lists important? They have so many uses I can only talk about two or three of them. One is in description, as in this snapshot of the city of Haifa (from my forthcoming story “The Projected Girl”, in Ellen Datlow’s Naked City anthology):

Standing on the balcony and leaning slightly out over the railings, Danny could see the streets below, where partisans, rabbis, poets and assassinated politicians wove between each other: there Hannah Senesh, who parachuted into Yugoslavia and death at the hands of the Nazis; there the Ba’al Shem Tov, who could perform miracles; there the great Arlozorov Street, named after the man who was shot right there on the beach, back in 1942; there Ibn Gvirol, the Andalusian poet and author of the Fons Vitae. Looking left, the golden dome of the Baha’i temple shone in the sun and there, further down, was the great sprawling mass of Hadar, with its shawarma stands, its cheap clothing and sunglasses, its second-hand book stores, dingy travel agents and numerous coffee shops – Danny’s favourite place in the whole, wide world.

There is something interesting to me in the way street names define a city. Israeli cities are full of ghosts; London’s streets of implied exotic pasts – Rose Street was a public latrine, St. Giles’ Circus – now a busy intersection – was a public gallows. Geomancy is fun. But speaking of ghosts and gallows leads me, naturally, to murder. The fact is that crime writers love their lists. Lists are often used to hide clues, as in the following example:

On the desk of the late Mr. Penrose-Trimm were a letter opener, made of ivory; an envelope with a Cape Triangular stamp, cancelled, and an almost-illegible scribbled address; a whiskey glass, empty; a pen; a notebook; a vase of fresh flowers; a clock stopped at three-thirty-five; a capsule of cyanide; a paperweight with a red-black substance staining one side; a revolver; a plastic frog; a pencil case; and a typewriter.

Ooh, those crafty crime writers! Which of these items is a clue? Who murdered Mr. Penrose-Trimm? And how? Was it cyanide in his whiskey? Was it the paperweight stained with what might be blood? Was it the revolver? What does Mr. Penrose-Trimm do?

We can deduct (write it down, Watson!) that Mr. Penrose-Trimm is a writer (pen, notebook, typewriter). We might infer that he is a crime writer – hence the various exotic murder implements on the table; that he may have a child (hence the plastic frog); that someone has changed the flowers on his desk recently; and on and on and – look! I made another list right there.

The real clue, which we only figure out many pages later, was actually the envelope with the Cape Triangular stamp, by the way. The almost-illegible address scribbled on the envelope actually says, “It was Colonel Mustard, in the Billiard Room, with the number eight ball.” But no one had thought to look at the writing closely until the detective, Mr. Pembrook-Pentecost Primm, has a blinding flash and realises the clue had been there all along. There is another reasoning in crime circles for including clues in lists: the unwary reader, eager to get to the action, would often skip lines of static description, therefore not even seeing the planted clue until forced to go back and say, “Oh, yeah, right, it was there all along.” It’s a bit of an iffy proposition – hoping the reader skips what you write is not such a great idea – but it works.

Lists really are essential. They impose order, which is what writing essentially is. The humble commas serve as the traffic officers – or rather, traffic cones – while the semi-colons act as glow-marks along the proverbial road of the narrative. There is a wonderful crime story by Antony Mann called “Shopping” which is composed entirely of shopping lists (they start with flowers and chocolate and end up with knife, masking tape and black bin bags). Finally, lists can be used for both humour and to create dissonance, and I’ll end this with a short extract from my forthcoming book (with Nir Yaniv), The Tel Aviv Dossier, in which I get to indulge my love of lists to a Nero-like level of excess.

We’re going up-hill. Everything is at an angle, and here and there there’s the sound of crashing, buildings falling down, the noise startling in the quiet. Occasionally something comes rolling down the slope – loose fencing, car tyres, an Uzi, a potted-plant, a dead cat, a frying-pan, an old issue of Penthouse, a black chasid’s hat looking like a flying-saucer, a dirty-laundry basket made of bamboo, a paperback Amos Oz novel, a TV remote control, a goldfish, a photocopier rolling like a boulder, a Coca-Cola sign, burger wrappers, a door, a little clay figure of the sort school kids make in art class… Daniel reaches out for that last one. It’s an ugly thing, a grotesque little figure like some sort of primitive fetish figurine, but painted in garish gouache colours. It’s a head. It looks like a toad. I almost expect it to blink. I hate toads. Frogs too. Daniel says, “It’s a head.”

“Yes,” I say, a little testily, “I can see that.”

“No,” he says. “It’s a head.”

“Daniel, I already told you–”

“Hagar–”

“Dan–”

I finally look up. And there’s a human head coming down the slope towards us. It’s disgusting. I make sure the camera captures it. The head bounces and rolls and comes to land at Daniel’s feet. I think I’m going to be sick.

“I told you,” he says.

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.

Note: Starting with this entry, “Confessions of a Book Junkie” will become a monthly feature.

I used to be a carnivorous short story reader.

Sorry. I think I meant voracious. Is carnivoracious a word, by the way? A voracious carnivore?

Anyway.

I used to be a-–voracious–-short story reader.

Which is to say-–I’m not any more.

The complication this causes in my life is that-–you may not know this-–I write short stories. I get paid for them. Per page, or per word, or perhaps–as the old joke goes–Badabing. And this leads certain editors of certain magazines to the erroneous-–another fine word, that one-–conclusion that, therefore, I should be subscribing to said magazines.

Of course, it would be terribly impolite of me to say something along the lines of-–well, sure, if you paid me more!

Thank you. I’ll be here all week. I mean, I suppose it’s a legitimate assumption, but for that fact that, no, I don’t, on the whole, derive much pleasure from short stories any more and-–as strange as it may seem-–I am not, in fact, the target audience for the magazines.

Which begs the question: who is?

I used to read a lot of short stories and, for that matter, I still do. But now I read them piecemeal and, on the whole, with a sense of suspicion. I suspect it is merely that, growing, um, older (cough), I find it harder to immerse myself in a short story. I need a longer scope, an ease of access, a sense of a wider vista spreading out before me. I’m the ideal target audience for novels, oh yes, ideally ones that come complete with a mysterious corpse, but as for short stories…

There is an assumption in certain circles that the primary readership for short story magazines is writers. Which seems daft to me, not to mention counter-productive. I saw this recently in an online discussion, and I see it a lot elsewhere, and to some extent I see it when the editors who buy stories from me politely remind me I should be subscribing to their magazines. It is true, of course, that most writers read (though not all, by any means). And yet it seems to me that those two functions-–reader and writer-–are not so well-defined. Readers write, and writers read, but it’s not to say they read what they write or write what they read-–and if that makes any sense to you, you must have a PhD in mathematics, or something. The people who buy short story magazines are readers (of short stories). They might be writers too, but I don’t think the writing aspect informs, or should inform, the reader inside.

But, you know, even though I say I don’t read short stories all that much anymore, I wonder if it’s true. If I pick up an anthology I’ll read two, or four, or even five stories and leave the rest. I read collections, or re-read them (Someone recently sent me C.L. Moore’s classic Shambleau and Other Stories collection, which I’ve read a couple of times in the past and re-read again with much happilyness). I read stories online, one here, one there, but they add up. So I’m an eclectic reader as far as short stories go, and I generally prefer spending my money on Chinese food than magazines (though in fairness, I don’t usually have money for either).

Anyway. The truth is that I do love magazines though. One of my top-five possessions includes a 1940s copy of Astounding Science Fiction that came complete with the bug-eyed-monster-chasing-Earth-girl-in-brassier cover. Now that’s science fiction! And I have a good run-–did I mention this before?-–of this kind of a Fortean Times clone from-–I think-–the 1980s. And back copies of The Armchair Detective, and all kinds of one-issue copies I bought because they had writers I like in them-–single back-issues of Interzone, The Third Alternative, F&SF from the 1960s (Roger Zelanzy’s Jack of Shadows in its serial appearance) and others. I’m not much for literary magazines, as you may have noticed, because frankly, life is too short.

Kind of like short stories.

But of course, at the same time, I love short stories. I love it when I approach a story with my usual suspicion and yet get completely blown over. I like the kind of stories that put a gun to your head. When I find one of those stories, I read them, and re-read them, and want to tell people about them. They’re mainly science fiction stories, because, well, I am a certified geek. But not only. One of my favourite stories is P.G. Wodehouse’s “Crime Wave at Blandings,” which is a masterpiece. But then pretty much everything he’d ever written is. I even read his golf stories collections. And I remember reading Marion Arnott’s “Prussian Snowdrops,” which is an utterly mind-blowing crime story. William Gibson’s “The Guttenberg Continuum” is a story I re-read regularly. I loved Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God” and “Story of Your Life.” I like James Joyce’s “The Dead,” although I appreciate it more than like it, but I loved Salinger’s “For Esmé–with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and the Hebrew short-shorts of Etgar Keret, and I still re-read all the Sherlock Holmes stories regularly, and, and…

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, a few years ago I purchased the complete annotated edition–two beautiful large volumes containing the complete novels and stories, with annotations. Quite collectible, I believe. Smells strongly of tobacco even after almost ten years–the previous owner must have been a pipe smoker.

And I do love collectors’ items. I have the first issue of Postscripts magazine, the 150-copy signed hardcover edition, which I think is my only signature by Ray Bradbury (though I own a beautiful second printing of the Martian Chronicles, and damn you all who own a genuine first!). I have quite a few Stephen Jones anthologies all signed by Steve and many of the contributors, my particular favourite being White of the Moon, a small-press hardcover that was launched in London’s Princess Louise pub in the presence of a large number of contributors who all signed it for me.

Which reminds me of an unrelated story. I own a very strange collectors’ item. I was at a one-day event organised in London by the venerable British Fantasy Society, for which you paid £20 at the door. Included in your entry price was a paperback fantasy novel. Every attendee received a copy of the book, and no-one was sure what to do with it. Well…

I ended up getting it signed by just about everyone I could corner. Stephen Jones refused to sign it (“I don’t sign books I didn’t work on”) but China Miéville did (“I’d sign anything, you know that”) and so did about 40 or 50 other people and, frankly, I wish I knew who some of them were. I was possibly a little drunk at the time… I might have put it on Ebay at some point but hell, who would have bought this?

In any case, I still get very excited when I find a new short story that blows me away. And I love the fact that short stories are alive and well, and proliferating not only in print but online, too. I’m still not sure who the people who subscribe to the magazines are. People with more money than me, that’s for sure. I just happen to be the kind of guy to prefer-–if I had the money-–a subscription to either Newsweek, New Scientist, The Fortean Times, or the Australian Women’s Weekly–because they have the best recipes.

Of course, I could always subscribe to Playboy and say it’s for the fiction…

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.

I think the first Pratchett book I ever read was Only You Can Save Mankind. It was also the first book of his that I bought – eventually. I was living in South Africa at the time and a new bookshop had recently opened – the first and, I suspect, only science fiction and fantasy bookshop to ever open in a country better known for Apartheid and Nadine Gordimer. South African fiction is predominantly about Apartheid – two of the classics in the field are Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton and A Dry, White Season by André Brink – although I do own a curious volume I once found in a second-hand shop in Cape Town, which is possibly the only example of science fiction from over there – a utopian novel set on the moon and written by an Afrikaans judge of the supreme court back in the sixties…

But I do digress. I used to go to the bookshop – it was called Fantamania, and I should really talk about it some more at some stage – on Saturdays, and mainly browse. I didn’t have much money for books – my parents were complaining about the ones already in the house – so when I discovered Only You Can Save Mankind, I did the only thing I could think of – I read it, piece by piece, at the shop.

It was the kind of shop where they let you do that, which might explain why it went out of business. Every week I would come back and the book would still be there, and I’d read another chapter. Eventually, of course, I bought it – it was a Doubleday hardcover, second printing, but I still have it.

After that, I bought the books new, in paperback, one at a time, until I had a pretty exhaustive collection of reading copies. I sold them at last on my recent visit to South Africa – they paid for a steak dinner for me and my brother, which is one of the things I love most about books – the way you can sometimes convert them into food, thus proving beyond doubt their contribution to physical well-being.

My true Pratchett collecting only began once I came to the UK. Pratchett is one of those writers with immense patience for his fans, resulting in fairly frequent book signings, which are an experience in themselves. I went to my first signing at the old Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street (the shop had since moved and lost in the process much of its charm, but that’s a subject for another week). I queued for – four? Five hours? In the queue were old people, and young people, and visible crazy people, and there were girls dressed like witches walking around advertising a theatre adaptation of Carpe Jugulum, which I actually – and to this day I don’t know what possessed me, besides the fact that it was fairly close to where I lived – went to. I still have the tickets, alongside the signed copy of the book.

On that day I bought, and had signed, first edition copies of Carpe Jugulum, The Last Continent and one other book, I’ve forgotten which one. They’re not particularly valuable, of course. Once Pratchett’s print runs hit the millions, values drop accordingly. Still, over the next few years I bought each new book in hardcover, and eventually had it signed.

I’m not sure when my true Pratchett collection started. Perhaps it started in Fantasy Centre, the greatest SF bookshop in Europe, which sits opposite a porn shop on the Holloway Road and which deserves a column, at least, all of its own. At that time, I found a first edition of Equal Rites, which is the third Discworld novel, and highly collectible. It was, as far as I could see, at least Near Fine – collectors’ term for absolutely lovely, really – and I got it for £25, which was a bargain even then. Then there was the general second-hand bookshop in Richmond-upon-Thames, where I found a copy of Sourcery – the fourth Discworld book – for £7.50… Suddenly I had a viable collection. “Think,” I said to my girlfriend, “what would happen if I put these on Ebay!”

“You’ll never put them on Ebay,” she said.

“They’re my emergency fund,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said.

Ebay was responsible for me getting my hands on Eric, the fabulously hard-to-find hardcover first edition, which is a Discworld short story illustrated by Josh Kirby. It’s a beautiful book, and I got it – and a couple of other early first editions – from a guy on Ebay who wasn’t sure what they were but, since they were in hardcover, wanted £7.50 each for them. I took a gamble and, despite a couple of book club editions, scored well.

I never had much love for the middle books, where the cover illustration is truncated for some reason: I find them unattractive. Therefore, I had a good selection of the books from Carpe Jugulum or so on, and a decent selection of early titles – Eric, Sourcery, Equal Rites, Guards! Guards! (that one from the same Ebay guy who gave me Eric) but none in the middle.

Eventually, I did have to use my ‘emergency fund’, and I didn’t let them go cheap. But I did have to let them go – a plane ticket and a new horizon were beckoning, not to mention my credit card company – and so now my old friends are gone. I have something to compensate for it though, a story of my own – I was once mistaken for Terry Pratchett.

This happened a few years ago. I was a guest at a massive French festival – an SF convention is a more appropriate term, perhaps, but there you go – partly on the basis of winning a short story competition that year that was organised by the European Space Agency. It was the kind of festival that had a lot of money to spare, since, besides myself (surely, the star attraction) it had less well-known guests (Brian Aldiss and Tim Powers were only two of them) – oh, and a bloke in a hat called Terry Pratchett.

At the time I had long dreadlocks, which contrasted, I felt, quite sharply with Pratchett’s own bold, bald appearance. I shaved my own hair recently – now I just look like my dad. In any case, on the second or third day of the convention I was asked to do an interview for a German television programme (Don’t ask me why. They wanted to know what I thought the future would look like. The right thing to say would have been that I’m sure the future would get on with or without my opinion. What I did in fact say was, “Wow, yeah, fantastic! Um, are you sure you got the right guy?”)

The interview was done in the bar area, where I was filmed going in circles around a weird sculpture-thing, waving my hands and saying things like, “You know, going to space would be really, like, awesome!” to round it off; however, the two pleasant gentlemen from German satellite TV suggested a new approach.

“Ve vant you to tell our viewers vat your story is about!” one of them said.

“Vat do you say if ve put red light under him, and a blue light directly at him–”

“Like a Doppler shift!”

“Ja! And zen he can tell ze camera what ze story is about in thirty words.”

I said, “Um.”

They took me into a room. We couldn’t figure out how to switch off the lights. Finally one of the organisers showed up and pointed out the switch. Everyone was politely embarrassed. I had lights pointed at me, and lights under me, and we did about thirty takes that went something like:

“It’s about a rock going through space–”

“More passion!”

“It’s about this rock and it’s intelligent and it’s going through space!”

“Look into ze camera!”

“It’s about this intelligent rock and it’s seeding the solar system with other self-replicating nodes in a massive solar system wide communication network aaaarrrrggggh!”

“Again!”

It reminds me of the joke: how many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Shut up! Ve are asking ze questions here!

No, really, they were very nice. I never watched the interview (Stephen Baxter was another interviewee, and I dread to think what they did to him). It’s probably best I never saw it.

When I came out of the interview room, a diffident young man approached me. He had a badge identifying him as one of the organisers, and a bulging white envelope in his hands which, imagination claims now, must have been stuffed full of hundred Euro notes. “Excusez-moi?” he said. “Are you Terry Pratchett?”

I stared at him in disbelief. I was hot, I hadn’t eaten all day, and here was some crazy Frenchman thinking I was Terry Pratchett. Of course, I felt an overwhelming impulse to say yes.

“Um, no,” I said. “You’re looking for a bloke in a hat, bald, with a beard, you know?”

“Oh, I am so sorry,” he said. “Merci. Au revoir.” And off he went.

A half-hour later I ran into Pratchett by the escalators. “Some guy was looking for you,” I said, “and he thought I was you, which is really stretching credibility to the limit!”

Pratchett took one look at me from beneath his wide-brimmed hat, and said, “Yes, he managed to insult both of us in the same sentence!”

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.