"Big as a telephone book" is a cliche, but you don't understand. This is as big as a telephone book. It is not a book to be carried; it is a book to be transported. When you open it somewhere in the middle, the weight falls on your hands and makes you think you're holding two separate books. Fact is, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps was originally published as three separate books, each of them big and fat and glorious on their own. But Otto Penzler and Black Lizard have done something crazy. They've defied the laws of book binding and time and space and glued these three books--over 1150 pages of classic pulp stories--into one physical object. It is too big for your briefcase. You're going to have to bring a backpack, or just haul it around in your arms. Which might be useful in certain parts of town, because this slab of hardboiled noir pulp goodness is thick enough to stop a bullet. (In fact, a bullet may only make it two-thirds of the way through before stopping at Laura Lippman's introduction to the "Dames" portion of the book.) That is, if you can lift this sucker fast enough to catch that bullet. I'm telling you, it's heavy. Heavy as a telephone book.And I haven't even told you about the treasures inside: a new, never-before-published Hammett. Three Chandler stories. Three Woolriches. Two complete novels. (Two!) Both Cains (James M. and Paul). Horace McCoy. Steve Fisher. And dozens of unfamiliar names that will thrill you, because even if you've been a serious student of pulps and pulp anthologies and pulp studies, chances are you're going to discover someone/something new.
And there are illustration all the hell over the place. Classic Black Mask-style pulp art, plucked right from the pages. You could flip through the book, just savoring the art, and it'd be worth the cover price alone.
So yeah, The Big Book of Pulps. I was lucky enough to receive an early copy of this book, I've been gnawing on it like a starving dog with a 76-ounce steak. Hands down, it's my favorite book of the year. It makes me happy just knowing this book exists.
It's out November 6. Yes, you definitely need a copy.
Thanks for the tip -- it seems fitting that this pulp volume can double as a blunt improvised weapon.
ReplyDeleteParking in the same garage is a photographer, Thomas Allen, who takes vintage paperback pulp covers and cuts, folds, wires, and tapes them into 3D configurations, then photographs them. He just published a book of his work called Uncovered, with a forward by Chip Kidd (a book cover designer who commissioned a bunch for the new James Ellroy repubs). I saw them speak about it in Manhattan recently. Terrific stuff.
I wont say any names but someone I know is going to review this and the page count alone is scaring him. Lightweight!
ReplyDeleteI need to point out the column I'm writing right now for the three books is a hundred pages longer.
This book is so cool that it defies hyperbole.
ReplyDeleteIt has more great, rare, hardboiled pulp fiction than any ten other reprint anthologies.
It's an opportunity to read superb work that, until now, was lost in the crumbling pages of magazines accessible only to hard-core pulp collectors with plenty of disposable income.
If you dig this kind of stuff and you don't get it, you are karmically impoverishing yourself.
Honest.
John C. Hocking
http://www.detroitnoir.com/