LB’s Autumn Newsletter—
BRAND-NEW HARDCOVERS FROM 1959!
David Trevor here. “The indispensable David Trevor,” as LB has occasionally called me, but it’s sometimes difficult for me to tell praise from irony.
Never mind. The other day I mentioned, not for the first time, that it had been a while since we’d sent out a newsletter. (Over three months, if you’re wondering. Or even if you’re not.)
“I’m retired,” the Great Man pointed out. “I haven’t written anything in a couple of years, and there’s nothing in the works, nor will there be. There’s no news, which leaves us with nothing to put in a newsletter.”
“What about the new hardcovers?” He looked at me. “Twenty-one of them,” I went on, “with more to come, and as far as I can tell these are First Hardcover Editions, which makes them as collectible as—”
“Non-fungible tokens?”
“As ballplayers’ rookie cards, or game-worn jerseys, or any of the crap they salivate over on Antiques Roadshow. You thought enough of them to publish them, and I guarantee there are readers who’d like to own them, but how can they buy them if they don’t even know they exist?”
He gave me a look.
“They’re early work,” I said. “You wrote them under pen names, and for years you wouldn’t autograph them, or even acknowledge having written them. Then your attitude started to change, and you allowed one or two to be reprinted, and when self-publishing came along—”
“Ego and avarice carried the day,” he said. “Virtually everything I ever wrote is in print, and I feel fine about it. Except when I don’t.”
We went back and forth like this, not exactly arguing, until he held up a hand to stop me in midsentence. “You may be right,” he said. “But I don’t want to write it. It’s too much like work, and I’m retired. You’re the one who thinks a newsletter is called for, and you probably have an idea as to what should go in it. So you do it.”
So here I am. Doing it. Being, um, indispensable.
# # #
Okay, where to begin? The Collection of Classic Erotica consists of books LB wrote under various pen names between 1958 and 1964; the publishers, under various imprints, were Midwood, Nightstand, and Beacon. (If you want to read about those books and those years, he’s written about them in some detail in his memoir, A Writer Prepares.)
Here are the books currently available in hard cover:
And four novels LB wrote in collaboration, the first with Hal Dresner, the others with Donald E. Westlake:
The books are all Amazon hardcover editions with Library Bindings, which means that instead of dust jackets they have the cover art printed directly on their hard covers. For collectors, note that these are in almost all instances the first hardcover editions of each title. (Exceptions: the three Block-Westlake collaborations.) Note too that the new cover art is exclusive to these new hardcover editions.
The price is $16.99. (Which, for a hardcover novel in the year 2024, strikes me as Pretty Reasonable.)
Will LB bring out the rest of his erotica in hardcover? Well, that depends. He’s hard to predict. If the new hardcovers prove popular, he’ll probably bring out more. If not, he’ll be less likely to bother. But he’s hard to figure.
A while ago, LB agreed to publish hardcover editions of his Classic Crime Library titles, and we priced those at $16.99, and sales have been pretty good. More important, the folks who bought them seem happy with their purchases. So here you have some of the Classic Erotica titles, and if they get t good reception, I’ll be back some months from now to tell you we’ve published the rest.
That’s all I got—along with our good wishes for the holidays season, of course.
Oops! This just in—recently a Turkish magazine interviewed LB for an issue devoted to his work, and reprinting a Matthew Scudder story in translation. They’ve just published, and you can click here to read the interview in English—or in Turkish, if you prefer. He hasn’t been giving many interviews lately, so you may find this of interest.
Indispensably yours,
David Trevor for…
