Sun 25 Oct 2020
I have good news to report. Bill Pronzini has just informed me that after many years of collecting, he has finally found a copy of the last Phoenix Press hardcover mystery in jacket that he’s needed to complete the entire run.
The one book that has eluded him for so long is Tread Gently, Death, by Robert Portner Koehler. It probably has no intrinsic value other than it’s so rare. As a milestone in collecting history, that’s another matter altogether.
The cover is shown below. For covers of the complete run, go here:
http://www.lendinglibmystery.com/Phoenix/1936-39.html
October 25th, 2020 at 3:20 pm
And what is he going to do with them now he’s found them?
October 25th, 2020 at 3:32 pm
Between you and me, Roger, don’t tell anyone, since I’m not sure, but I think he reads them.
October 25th, 2020 at 4:54 pm
Right, Steve, I do read ’em.
October 25th, 2020 at 6:14 pm
Is there anything more interesting than collecting books? Sure, I know about sex, money, power, etc. But collecting is something really special and only practiced by a very few such as Bill.
October 25th, 2020 at 6:20 pm
Spoken by someone who knows something about collecting!
October 25th, 2020 at 8:16 pm
Ah. I wondered, Mr Pronzini.
I keep coming across blogs with passages like “I bought all this series of books forty years ago and never got round to reading them…” (I have the same tendency myself) and reading about people selling their collections of things and starting to collect something else, so I wondered if it was the hunt rather than what was hunted that inspired you here.
Also
http://www.victorianweb.org/drawings/beerbohm/5.jpg
was behind it…
October 25th, 2020 at 8:18 pm
Damn! Missing caption reads: “And what were they going to do with the Grail when they found it, Mr. Rossetti?”
October 25th, 2020 at 8:52 pm
Right. Without the caption, that was a head-scratcher. Thanks!
October 25th, 2020 at 8:45 pm
Completing a collection or finding just one rare book is always tinged with just a little melancholy until the next obsession over takes you, especially if it is a fairly long quest.
The thing about so many Phoenix Press titles is how wonderfully bad they may be. You never know when one will prove to be a treasure of alternative genius.
So many of them seemed to take the genre and the English language as a challenge to be utterly defeated by levels of not quite competence rare in the history of letters making them perverse but very real fun.
October 25th, 2020 at 9:21 pm
So true, David, about the tinge of melancholy. But I’ve found that it goes away pretty quickly when there are other long sought after books and magazines to be searched for. There are several more on mine, though none that I’ve been after quite as long as the Koehler.
Also true that Phoenix mysteries are fun to read. I get almost as much pleasure from so-bad-they’re-good mysteries, westerns, science fiction, etc. as I do from reading quality work.
October 26th, 2020 at 6:24 am
Extremely cool. Ellen Nehr would be smiling.
October 26th, 2020 at 11:14 am
I’m glad I never heard of the Phoenix Press!
In my youth I had a taste for “only a warped genius could write as badly as this” books and I’d probably have looked for them. I’ve started reading all the books I was going to read one of these days now, and I’m puzzled enough about why I ever thought I’d read the ones I did get without this lot.
October 26th, 2020 at 8:04 pm
There are three distinct kinds of Alternative Genius.
There are the genuinely eccentric writers whose style and language is unique to them, and whose work reaches a kind of eloquence and often maddening quality it is almost impossible to describe. Nothing they write is ordinary. Even when they manage to represss those qualities they seep through. Robert Leslie Bellem is certainly in this class, Carroll John Daly to a lesser extent.
Then there are the good, even great, writers who for some reason have one off book that goes awry in interesting ways. They can range from bestsellers to literary genius, and even the bad book is interesting. Ian Fleming’s THE SPY WHO LOVED ME comes to mind.
The final group is completely clueless. They have limited storytelling skills, limited writing skills, and they make every literary mistake you can imagine, but they are such oddballs their work is like a forty car pile up you have to look at no matter what. Harry Stephen Keeler certainly fits that bill.