books, page 120 of 138

Towards the end of 2009, I was invited to contribute an essay to a festschrift for Colin Wilson‘s 80th birthday in June of this year. Originally to be published by editor Colin Stanley’s Pauper’s Press, the project was taken on by O Books, and is to be published in May this year. I was invited because of my David Lindsay site, The Violet Apple, and so of course my essay was about Wilson’s writings on David Lindsay, and the enormous influence he’s had on the fact that Lindsay is still in print today.

Within the pages of Around the Outsider, I mingle with academics, writers, and several musicians, including the onetime bass player from Blondie, Gary Lachman, whose books (including A Secret History of Consciousness, and The Dedalus Book of the 1960s — which I used in researching my Lindsay essay) seem to me to be continuing very much in the spirit of Wilson himself; and also David Power, who has published a book on David Lindsay, David Lindsay’s Vision (which has an introduction by Colin Wilson).

There’s more about Around the Outsider at Colin Wilson World, and Colin Wilson Online, and it can now be pre-ordered through Amazon.

There must be a word for that sense of dislocation you feel when you see a different cover on a much-loved book and it just seems wrong. I remember what a shock it was, for instance, to come across the US covers for David Eddings’ Belgariad series, which I’d read and re-read when I was thirteen, and whose UK covers (by Geoff Taylor, who seemed to have a monopoly on fantasy covers in the UK at the time), perfectly summed up the epic scale of the books while leaving their main characters either unrepresented, or distant enough to keep their details blurred — something I thought showed a proper respect for the reader’s interpretation of what the characters looked like. When I saw the US covers, with the main characters up-front and in detail, it seemed wrong, almost slightly indecent.

It wasn’t that I’d formed my own idea of what the characters looked like, I just knew they didn’t look like that. And this is true of how I picture characters in fiction generally. I don’t form a full, photographic representation in my head. I tend not to like it when the author provides a detailed summary of a character’s features — this sort of nose, that sort of mouth, that sort of chin — because I usually end up just juggling the elements in my head trying to make them stick, and it all gets a little cubist. When confronted by such a physiognomical checklist, I opt for one feature and stick to that. Forget the beetling brow and cleft chin, if he’s got a big nose, that’s enough for me. (When in doubt, always pick the nose… That could have been better phrased…)

Far more important to me is getting a idea of what the characters sound like. After all, in fiction, you don’t get much description of what a character’s nose is up to, but you do get a lot of dialogue. If a big-nosed character fails to detect a particularly subtle odour in one scene, I’m not going to complain; but if a previously laconic character suddenly starts spouting paragraphs, or a well-spoken chap drops into the demotic, it’s more likely to jar. (Unless, of course, there’s a reason for the change — such as the laconic man revealing a hidden passion for what he’s talking about, or the well-spoken chap’s well-spokenness being just an act, soon dropped under pressure.)

I think it comes down to my just wanting one simple peg to hang the character’s later actions and internal development on. With those US covers for The Belgariad, though, it’s just that the characters seemed too damned heroic — all the flowing hair, Constructivist-style poses, and, for god’s sake, body-builder’s muscles on the boy Garion! In my mind they were a bumbling, ordinary-looking lot, and that was part of their charm.

But how’s that ever going to sell books?

This December sees the last ever issue of Book & Magazine Collector, after 26 years of publication. I was never a regular buyer, but usually had a look at the contents, and bought it if there was an author I was interested in. (I also went on a couple of back-issue binges over the years.) It was always gratifying to see how many fantasy, science fiction and horror authors the magazine covered.

It’s tempting to say the internet killed it, and this must be partly true, if only because B&MC was always at least half made up of wants & for-sale lists — stuff which came to seem quaint, not to say dated, when you consider how the internet has changed the buying of secondhand books. (Not all for the good, no — it’s almost impossible to find a bargain nowadays, and some prices get artificially inflated. But not all for the bad, either. I loved hunting through booklists for titles I wanted, but love far more being able to quickly search multiple booksellers and find all the available copies and editions of the book I want.) I never used that part of the magazine anyway. What really interested me were the articles about individual authors & illustrators, and that’s the thing I’ll miss.

But surely the internet has blogs and wikis enough to make up for that? In theory, yes. There’s nothing to stop people writing in-depth, well-researched, well-written articles about authors’ oeuvres and posting them on the internet. But, on the other hand, there’s nothing to spur them to do so, either. And that, really, is the difference with the internet: not in what it can do, but in what, in practice, it does do.

If nothing else, print magazines encourage higher standards. For the reader, they act as a stamp of quality; and the same stamp pushes the writer. This isn’t something that’s impossible on the internet, but, let’s face it, Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have a tag for “this article reads like it was written by a committee more interested in facts than readability”, as it does for “this article needs more references”. Good, expert writing tends to be led by examples set by the likes of B&MC. It’s all too easy, in a Wikified world, to forget what good writing is like.

Also, there’s just finding the information. When I started my website on David Lindsay (back in 1998), I assumed that, soon enough, every writer would get a website dedicated to them, providing all the information you want to know about them, including news, a bibliography, a biography, and so on. But it’s rather disappointing to see how few authors that I’m interested in have well-run, up-to-date websites — even the living ones! Fritz Leiber, for instance, is surely crying out for something as good as, say, this Tim Powers site, or this Joan Aiken one. (But Fritz Leiber is perhaps starting to see something of a revival, what with a new Selected Stories, a collection of rarities, and the cornucopia of download delights recently on CthulhuWho’s’s blog. So, there’s hope.)