The publication of Collectibles, my latest anthology, is a joint venture with Subterranean Press, whose deluxe edition consists of 750 signed-and-numbered copies. Most of those are already subscribed, but they still have some available, and even if you’re sure you don’t want one, their site’s worth a few moments of your time. They’ve included excerpts from “Bue Book Value” by S. A. Cosby, “Lost Shows” by Lee Goldberg, “The Skull Collector” by Joe R. Lansdale, “A Bostonian (in Cambridge)” by Dennis Lehane, “Miss Golden Dreams 1949” by Joyce Carol Oates, and “Chin Yong-Yun Meets a Mongol” by S. J. Rozan.

That should be more than enough to give you a good taste of six stars of this star-studded anthology. As you can see by a glance at the cover, the list of contributors is impressive. (I’d characterize it as awesome, but I promised my wife I’d stick with words more suitable to my advanced age.) I’ve included a story of my own, “Collecting Ackermans,” as the book’s sole reprint, and I’ve written an introduction, “The Elephant in the Room.” And, inspired by Subterranean’s generosity in sharing those six excerpts, it’s my pleasure to provide you with the complete text of my introduction. 

TH4E ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

BEN: Ah, there you are. Just the man I’ve been looking for.

JERRY: Who, me?

BEN: Absolutely. I’m able to offer you something I know you’ll love, and at a remarkable price.

JERRY: What? I’ve got everything I need.

BEN: This you haven’t got.

JERRY: So? What is it?

BEN: An elephant.

JERRY: An elephant? Are you out of your mind?

BEN: But—

JERRY: I live in two rooms on Pitkin Avenue. Two small rooms on the fifth floor. I got no room for a goldfish, never mind an elephant.

BEN: But—

JERRY: There’s no backyard, just ten square feet of garbage cans. There’s no front lawn, just a stoop. And out in front there’s a fire hydrant, so you couldn’t even park a Ford Escort there, let alone an elephant.

BEN: But—

JERRY: So where would I put it? I got no place to put it, and if I did I wouldn’t be able to keep it alive, because I’m lucky I can afford to feed myself. I couldn’t feed an elephant, and if I could, how am I gonna clean up after it?

BEN: But—

JERRY: And what would I want with it in the first place? You think I’m gonna ride around on an elephant? You think I’m gonna walk it on a leash? I got no use for an elephant, I got nothing to feed it with, I got no place to put it, so I ask you again what I asked you in the first place. Are you out of your mind? Because why in God’s name would somebody like me want to buy an elephant?

BEN: You put it that way, Jerry, sheesh—I guess you wouldn’t.

JERRY: That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

BEN: I hear you, and I have to say it’s disappointing. Because what I didn’t get to mention is that I’ve come into possession of not one but two elephants, and I could give you a very special price if you were to take them both.

JERRY: Now you’re talking!

Now it’s true that Jerry’s not so much a collector as he is a bargain seeker, but I have a feeling most ardent collectors would get the point. And another conversation between the same two gentlemen has its own point to make:

BEN: This whole retirement is horrible. I got nothing to do and too much time to do it in. I’m going nuts.

JERRY: That’s natural. You worked hard all your life. You were always busy with one thing or another, and now you have nothing to do.

BEN: Isn’t that what I just told you?

JERRY: It is, and there’s an answer.

BEN: Oh?

JERRY: You need a hobby.

BEN: A hobby?

JERRY: A hobby.

BEN: What, like collect stamps and paste them in a book? Do jigsaw puzzles? Crochet lamp shades? That’s gonna fill my days with joy?

JERRY: I’ll tell you something. It doesn’t matter what the thing is that you do. What matters is that you’re doing it. You take an interest, you get caught up in it, and your life becomes a pleasure instead of an aggravation.

BEN: I think you’re serious.

JERRY: I am. Hundred percent.

BEN: And you? You also worked hard all your life. Now you got a hobby?

JERRY: As a matter of fact, I do.

BEN: Yeah? You care to tell me what it is?

JERRY: I keep bees.

BEN: You? My old friend Jerry? You keep bees?

JERRY: Yes, I do. As a hobby.

BEN: Bees. How many have you got?

JERRY: Well, it’s not like you can stand there and count them—

BEN: Round numbers.

JERRY: Round numbers, probably forty thousand.

BEN: Forty thousand bees.

JERRY: More or less.

BEN: Forty thousand bees. You live in two rooms on Pitkin Avenue. Where the hell do you keep them?

JERRY: Well, as a matter of fact, I keep them in a cigar box.

BEN: Forty thousand bees in a cigar box?

JERRY: So?

BEN: So how can that be good for them? Don’t they get all crushed and crumpled?

JERRY: So? Get a grip, Ben. It’s only a hobby!

On reflection, I’d say we can all be grateful these two guys moved to Vermont to make ice cream. Let’s move on. Let’s talk about Collectibles.

Once I’d settled on the theme for this anthology, I got busy dragooning contributors. Their stories, I explained, could be in any genre or no genre at all, and could concern any sort of collectible item.

What I wanted, what I always want when I’m wearing my anthologist hat, is to provide a grain of sand that will sufficiently irritate a writer to yield a pearl of a story. And, I’m pleased to report, that’s precisely what’s happened here. The stories don’t need me to speak for them. They require, as one might say, no introduction.

So what am I doing here? Besides recycling old jokes that were briefer and more to the point when I first heard them?

Well, I ought to explain the one byline that appears not once but four times in the Table of Contents. The name is Otto Penzler’s, and a well-known name it is, although the affable fellow who bears it is not a writer of fiction.

In the fall of 2019, when Collectibles was just beginning to take shape, Otto was good enough to send me a copy of Mysterious Obsession, a new memoir he’d published that centered on favorite books he’d collected over the years. He was, as you may know, not only an authority in the field of crime fiction and an editor and publisher of some of the best of it, but without question the world’s foremost collector thereof. His is a book to be taken in small doses, made for sipping and savoring, and I knew as much—but what I found was that once I’d picked it up myself I couldn’t put it down until I’d drained the metaphorical glass—to the dregs, I might say, but there was not a dreg to be found.

It seemed to me that a chapter extracted from Mysterious Obsession would be a welcome addition to Collectibles. But which chapter? There wasn’t a one that wouldn’t suit…nor was there one long enough to constitute a full chapter in my book.

You can see how I solved the problem.

Otto’s are not the only words in this volume to have already appeared elsewhere. There’s also a story called “Collecting Ackermans,” which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1977. The author was, um, Lawrence Block.

I always feel that any anthology with my name on the cover ought to contain a story of mine. This is an ideal often honored in the breach, especially of late, when my own creative juices have gone largely dry. This figures, after all; one embraces the practice of anthologism because it offers one a chance to appear writerly without actually writing anything.

Except, you know. Introductions.

So what I did, as usual, was enlist enough fine writers to fill a book. I get to decide for myself just how many that is, but somewhere along the way I seem to have settled on seventeen, and I’ve been compulsive enough to stick with it. Not like barnacles to the hull of a ship, or iron filings to a magnet. I’ve put together books that have exceeded or fallen short of that number. But I shoot for seventeen, and hit it most of the time.

I totted up my acceptances and was relieved to see that I had eighteen acceptances, or nineteen with Otto’s contribution. So Collectibles could get along without a Lawrence Block story.

Then Covid, and a world turned upside-down. And a couple of writers found themselves unable to produce stories. I was down to fifteen stories, sixteen counting Otto’s.

Could I write one?

I thought about it, and kept being struck by the fact that I’d already done so, that “Collecting Ackermans” was an ideal choice for the book. I read it to see if I still liked it, and guess what? I thought it was just fine.

Seventeen!

I’ve been a collector of one thing or another for most of my life. In childhood I amassed no end of collections. I netted butterflies in vacant lots, I soaked stamps off letters, I checked pocket change for dates and mintmarks. When reading became important to me, I collected books; when I started writing crime fiction, I collected the magazines that published it. Whenever I acquired an object that interested me, I wanted to add others that were of its ilk but slightly different.

I could list some examples, and then we’d have a collection of nouns.

The impulse has been with me in one form or another since childhood. Only recently has it abated, and after I sold my stamp collection a few years ago, there’s been nothing I’ve felt the need to collect.

I can only assume it’s age-related. Ecclesiastes would understand. I’ve grown beyond the time to gather stones and reached the time to cast them away.

Good job I’m not in a glass house.

But let’s end where we began, with the elephant. My Uncle Jerry Nathan, the younger of my mother’s two brothers, had collected stamps as a boy, and had been an ardent ornithologist as a young man, but I don’t recall his having collected anything in adulthood. Until perhaps his sixteieth year, when he announced with satisfaction that he’d begun collecting elephants. Not living ones, not the kind you’d house in two rooms on Pitkin Avenue, but the sort of carvings you put on one of those shelves designed to hold, um, carvings.

And indeed he had a couple of shelves in his living room, and there was a set of elephants on one of them. All the same elephant, really, in graduated sizes. I think he bought that first set, and then it became something to give him. “Oh, there’s an elephant, I think I’ll get it for Jerry.” And so the collection grew. Not to any great size, really, and I don’t remember anything noteworthy about any of the elephants, except that some were wood and some were not.

Never mind.

It must have been a couple of years after Jerry came down with his mild case of elephant fever when my cousin Jeffrey Nathan announced he’d begun a collection. (Jeffrey was the younger son of my Uncle Hi, my mother’s other brother. You don’t need to remember this. It won’t be on the test.)

I asked him what he was collecting.

“Giraffes,” he said.

A commendable choice, I told him. And we agreed that the giraffe was an attractive and distinctive and noble beast, and eminently collectible. And even its name was appropriate; Jeffrey and Giraffe were well suited to share space in the same sentence. He talked for a few minutes about his collection, the aptness of it, the opportunities it afforded. He confided that it had been several months since the idea came to him, several month since he’d become a collector of the long-necked creatures. And then I had a question. I asked him how many giraffes his collection contained.

“None,” he said.

None?

He explained that he hadn’t yet found a specimen that was quite up to the standards of his collection.

A couple of years later Lynne and I came across a giraffe somewhere and thought it was too good to pass up. Perfect for Jeffrey, we agreed, and bought it, but it was not without a degree of trepidation that we mailed it off to him. His collection, still without a single specimen, was pristine and perfect. Would we be lowering its tone?

Jeffrey called to thank us for the gift, and was quick to lay my concern to rest. “It’s fits the collection perfectly,” he assured me. “It’s just right.”

Well, really, what else could he say? But I’m still not sure we did the right thing.

If you got this far, you might as well order the book. The limited’s on offer from Subterranean while supplies last. The ebook’s available from Amazon – Apple – Kobo – Barnes & Noble; the paperback’s available from Amazon and probably other sellers as well.

Enjoy!