Ed Gorman's Blog, page 221

Alan J. Hubin & Victor Berch; Rolling Thunder; Sears

Ed here: Last night I thanked Steve Lewis for giving me the phone number of writer Charles Runyon who is, happily, still alive despite my presumption that he'd passed. I was remiss in not thanking two of the great chroniclers and researchers of the mystery field, Alan. J Hubin and Victor Berch. My apologies, gentlemen. Here's a note from Steve Lewis.

Ed,

Re Charles Runyon. Credit Where Credit is Due Department: Al Hubin, Victor Berch and I spent yesterday morning swapping emails back and forth trying to track him down until Al decided that the direct approach was just that.

Switchboard.com was all it took!

Steve
-----------------------ROLLING THUNDER

I was also mistaken in saying that Rolling Thunder is available on DVD. It ain't. But it is available for free on Hulu. Thanks to Matt here's the link http://www.hulu.com/rolling-thunder

I watched it last night and found it as powerful as ever. If you like revenge movies--and a timely look at America during the Viet Nam war--this is your movie. I got interested in Linda Haynes, the lovely fine actress who co-stars in the film. I didn't remember anything about her but I found it hard to believe that anybody with her looks and talent (she's really good in this) didn't go on to have at least a solid run. Not so. Some good performances in unremarkable films with the exception of the blacksploitation film Coffey.

When I Goggle a name I generally just start opening sites without paying attention to what I'm opening. Most of them are misleadingly titled anyway so you might as well try them all. Soon enough I ran into a site that claimed to be a site listing all the "bisexual actresses in Hwood." I tells ya the guy who put this list together seems to believe that virtually if not literally every Hwood girl-woman-dowager is/was bi-sexual including the Columbia Pictures logo lady holding the torch. As I scrolled down for Haynes I started laughing out loud and saying yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. I believe the gentlemen was later swept away on an alien ship and sent to Venus to make a similar list of Venusian stars.

Linda Haynes gave up after eleven years and became a legal secretary. If you watch Rolling thunder I think you'll agree with me that she's as talented as she is beautiful.

---------------------------SEARS & ROEBUCK
As James Reasoner has pointed out, I try to depict in my westerns the everyday frontier rather than the mythic one. I own a facsimile edition of an 1880 Sears catalog and it's an invaluable tool. I'm partial to Sears because during the big war the local one put on some great liberty bond shows plus sponsored free Saturday afternoon cartoons in local theaters. Anyway I've always been fascinated by the fact that you could order a house from the Sears catalog. The example here is from the turn of the new century. But they were selling catalog houses for several decades previous.

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$107 Sears catalog home, 1908 (assembly required)
Andrea James at 11:22 AM Wed
Andrea James is a Los Angeles-based writer and troublemaker.

Image: Click to embiggen. 1908 Sears mail-order house No. 115 for $725.

I used to write ads for Sears, and I always admired their influence in American DIY/maker culture. They had a huge influence on reducing local general stores' price-gouging practices, and they gave consumers access to goods that were hard to come by (they started when there were no cars and only 38 US states). Back when Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward were battling it out over who would be the analog version of Amazon, Sears offered increasingly ambitious and specialized catalogs. One of their most ambitious projects was mail-order homes, inspired by success of The Aladdin Company. Last year, Cory blogged about Thomas Edison's similar prefab concrete home venture. But Sears Modern Homes had huge success with their wood-framed homes from 1908 through the Great Depression. Their cheapest model was $107 in 1908 (about $2,000 today). Unlike a lot of modern prefab, these were made to last; you can still find these homes here and there around the country.

1908-1914

Forgotten Books: A Purple Place For Dying by John D. MacDonald; Charles Runyon

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Forgotten Books: A Purple Place For Dying

Of all the Travis McGee novels, this strikes me as the one that would have been right at home in Black Mask magazine in its prime. This is McGee just before he goes all Iconic Hero on us. Here he's a little grittier, a little humbler and a lot angrier for a good sound reason--the buxom blonde rich woman who hires him to get some dirt on her husband (she suspects he's embezzling her money) is blown away before his eyes in a grim stretch of Southwestern desert.

I mention Black Mask because as all of those boys (and those few girls) knew you had to keep twisting and turning your tales to keep audiences interested. And this book has enough surprises, blind alleys and shocks to rival the most calculated beach book. Plus it's interesting to watch how McGee has to outwit not only the mysterious people who killed the woman but also the law. You have to go all the way back to Erle Stanley Gardner's fine Whispering Sands series to find a novel where the desert is as much a a character as most of the people in the book.

JDM also shows us a slice of desert life, how so many aspects of daily life are calibrated to compensate for the troubles and dangers of living here. As always his portraits of people are spot on. He was one of the first crime writers I read who was able to create characters who were a mixture of bad and good. And here we meet people we shouldn't like much but are forced to because of circumstances.

I've never been sure why A Purple Place For Dying is rarely mentioned in the McGee honor role. To me it's a fine, grim take on the classic desert story as seen through the eyes of a weary, nearly broke, often perplexed McGee.

GREAT NEWS ABOUT CHARLES RUNYON

I mentioned the other night that I (and others) assumed the fine writer Charles Runyon was dead. Well Steve Lewis sent me a phone number to try and I ended up talking to Charles for fifteen minutes. He's teaching writing at a college in Texas and has finished two novels that he's sending me to read. He's one of the good ones, man and writer alike. I'm happy to report that I was wrong.

Unsung directors - John Flynn

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Peter Dragovich writes an interesting article about the late director John Flynn in the new Crimespot. He cites The Outfit and Rolling Thunder as Flynn's best pictures (there's a third with Steven Segal).

I believe that Don Westlake said that The Outfit's characterization of Parker (here called Macklin) is the closest to the novel Parker. Robert Duvall is excellent. You buy him as a tough amoral guy because he doesn't play him as a tough amoral guy. He's just going about his business. I dubbed this off on tape years ago and I still watch it two or three times a year. Karen Black is sexy and sad; Robert Ryan lends his usual melancholy to the action film; Joe Don Baker is in his prime here and particularly strong--and as if he he wants to salute the crime film in general Flynn uses many familiar actors for some of the smaller roles, among them Jane Greer, Richard Jaeckel, Sheree North, Marie Windsor and even Elisha Cook, Jr. Duvall's intelligence and mystery carries the film. Flynn' direction is absolutely on the money. This should have been on tape and/or DVD years ago.

The second picture is Rolling Thunder which I've always considered one of Paul Schrader's finest scripts. This is one of those films you don't watch--you inhabit it, sometimes against your will. The star is William Devane . He plays a returning Viet Nam vet with only one thing on his mind, revenge. This and most of Karl Reisiz's Who'll Stop The Rain are the two best films I've ever seen about the era of Viet Nam played out on the American streets. The rage, the dislocation, the sucker's game fate of so many of the characters, Schrader and Flynn really give us the bleeding wound of that time. An amazing, disturbing movie.

My choice for Flynn's third best would be Best Seller, a starring vehicle for both James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Woods plays a hit man who wants to get back at an old enemy. To do it he needs the help of widower Dennehy who wrote a bestselling book about a murder investigation he was involved in as a detective. Unfortunately he's stalled on a second book and running out of the funds he needs to support his teenaged daughter and himself. Dennehy loathes Wood and doesn't trust him when he says that he knows who killed Dennehy's old police partner. He also claims that this will give Dennehy the biggest best seller he can imagine--killer and scandal are one and the same. There is a particularly moving and very strange scene where Woods takes Dennehy back go the small town where he grew up. Larry Cohen's script is excellent and Flynn's direction is flawless.

Rolling Thunder and Best Seller are easy and inexpensive to come by. Just light a lot of votive candles and pray that someday somebody will put The Outfit on DVD,

First Chapters - Kiss Me Deadly

I know people collect first lines but how about first chapters? I thought about this as I dug through a box of old paperbacks the other day. There among the various novels was Kiss Me, Deadly by Mickey Spillane. A battered first edition of the Signet paperback of 1953. Al Collins was kind enough to give me a hardcover copy of it twenty-some years ago. It's on my keeper shelf.

For me this is one of the most amazing first chapters I've ever read. Night, fog, a beautiful woman hitch hiking and nearly getting Hammer and herself killed by standing in the middle of a narrow mountain pass where he's forced to slam on the brakes. We soon learn that she's naked under a trench coat. We also learn from her behavior that somewhere back there a car is following her. There is a road block at which we hear that the woman has escaped from an asylum. In order to win Hammer's favor, the woman places his hand between her legs as Hammer talks to the cop. A few miles later the car descends on them. Hammer and the woman are dragged unconscious to a location where the woman, because she won't reveal certain information, is brutally murdered.

I think I read this in 1954 and it was the first time I became (dimly) aware of narrative drive. I wasn't old enough to understand all the innuendos but my God the action alone was enough. Spillane was always a master of mood (try the opening chapter of One Lonely Night) and he was never better than in Kiss Me, Deadly. (The movie is one of the great true noirs; Ralph Meeker is sneeringly masterful.)

Bomb To Bust Bad Movies

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Since I'm a fan of Nathan Rabin's work for The Onion I'm looking forward to buying his new book My Year Of Flops despite a somewhat tepid review in the NY Times this morning. I'm giving you a few hundred words of the review here plus my favorite photo of John Wayne. As I've mentioned before, even as a kid I didn't like Wayne. He always seemed fake to me, more blowhard than Real Man. Like a few of my neighbors.

From Bomb to Bust
By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
Published: October 22, 2010

There's been lots of ink and oceans of pixels spilled on the question of whether the Internet has killed film criticism, but the very short answer is that serious (if unpaid) criticism has thrived on the Web. The problem is that it's all too serious: you don't have to strain your Google finger to find a knowledgeable enthusiast expending 8,000 words on Ozu or Leone. Locating someone who can write succinctly and intelligently on, say, the 1985 Christmasploitation extravaganza "Santa Claus: The Movie" is much harder.
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Everett Collection
John Wayne as Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror."
MY YEAR OF FLOPS
The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep Into the Heart of Cinematic Failure
By Nathan Rabin
264 pp. Scribner. Paper, $15
Related

Intentionally or not, that's a gap that Nathan Rabin, the head writer for The Onion's A.V. Club, filled by embarking on a yearlong blog project in 2007, the results of which — rounded out with a few extras — are collected in "My Year of Flops." Rabin applied what he terms "three ­unyielding/slippery criteria" in choosing the films: Each had to be a critical and commercial failure upon its release. Each "had to have, at best, a marginal cult following." "And," he adds, gearing up for the zinger, each "had to facilitate an endless procession of facile observations and labored one-liners."

"My Year of Flops" covers some 50 underappreciated pictures; every troubled orphan is assessed and deemed a Failure, a Fiasco or a Secret Success. Rabin scrutinizes stinker after stinker, from the 1956 Howard Hughes-produced anti-miscegenation screed "The Conqueror" (he refers to its central figure, played by John Wayne, as John Wayneghis Khan), to the dismal 2005 film version of "Rent" (which he describes, aptly, as starring "fake 20-somethings playing fake bohemians in a wholly inauthentic take on la vie bohème"), to Cameron Crowe's woebegone 2005 "Elizabethtown" (which confounded Rabin so much he wrote about it twice).

for the rest go here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/boo...

Hollywood's Hypocrisy? Mel Gibson is Fired

Ed here: This week actor Zach Galifianakis and other name actors on Hangover 2 insisted that Mel Gibson, who'd been scheduled to do a cameo in the picture, be fired. A number of journalists have noted that they seemed to have no problem with Gibson being in the film until somebody leaked the fact that he would be appearing. At least that's one theory. Now Gibson is one reprehensible son of a bitch. The joke is that we'll have to create new minority groups because we're running out of ones he can insult--Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Catholics and probably some others I can't think of at the moment.

But a number of Hwood columnists have turned not on Gibson but on Galifiansks and Cooper and Helm (the stars) for indulging in what the writers see as Hwood hypocrisy.


BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ in Salon

If artists should be publicly censured and denied employment on the basis of offenses they commit in private life, how come Gibson is a pariah right now for threatening and hitting his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, while Alec Baldwin, who verbally abused his 11-year-old daughter on the phone, lashed out at a photographer, and has a long record of frightening behavior toward his ex-wife Kim Basinger, is currently one of the most beloved figures on network TV?

And while we're keeping score, how is it that Roman Polanski -- in theory a pariah after fleeing the United States to avoid prosecution on charges of drugging and raping a barely adolescent girl -- got a 2003 Oscar as Best Director (in absentia) and a standing ovation, while a 1999 honorary Oscar for director Elia Kazan was preceded by months of protest over Kazan being a rat for the House Un-American Activities Committee? One wonders, how many of the actors that made a big show of sitting on their hands when Kazan got his award applauded loudly for Polanski four years later? And does anyone doubt that if Polanski offered Galifianakis the lead role in his next film that the actor wouldn't happily accept? Or that if Tyson invited Galifianakis to his birthday party, that he'd show up with a bottle of Jagermeister, then re-enact the infamous punch-out from "The Hangover" while guests snapped pictures with their cell phones and posted them on Twitter?

Why is Lindsay Lohan, substance abuser and intoxicated driver, borderline-unemployable right now, but Kate Moss, a one-time cokehead blasted as a toxic role model for young women, still a sought-after model, appearing in a Valisere lingerie campaign and on the cover of Bryan Ferry's new album "Olympia"? And how is it that Charlie Sheen, who was accused of strangling his wife Brooke Mueller and holding a knife to her throat on Christmas Day, 2009, is still the star of the CBS sitcom "Two and a Half Men," and recently signed a new contract guaranteeing him two more years of employment? And if indeed a star's repugnant private life should affect the public's perception of him, why is Sheen's sitcom beating "Dancing with the Stars" in the ratings?

A bit of voice-over from the Vietnam epic "Apocalypse Now" applies here: "Charging a man with murder in this place is like giving out speeding tickets at the Indy 500."

for the entire article go here:
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/mo...

--------------
Josh Dickey from The Wrap

Everything, that is, but the timing. UnlikeTom Cruise, who had laid low for awhile, this was way, way too soon.

Loath to be associated with Mel in any way, the cast and crew of "The Hangover," inarguably the moment's coolest kids in comedy, made a big fuss when he was invited to their table. The on-set tension got to be too much, so Robinov and Phillips bagged the idea.

Now, the next group of actors who find themselves in that position will have this to consider: Do they want the added shame of being the ones who accepted what Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms would not?

When Mel heard the news that he lost the gig over a cast revolt, he was "as gracious as a person can be in a situation like that," a person close to the production told TheWrap.

But no amount of grace and image rehab can wash away the shame of being humiliated by the cool kids in front of everybody.

http://www.thewrap.com/movies/blog-po...

Mysteryfile.com

Ed here: I ran this back in ought seven. Chuck Runyon has passed by now sad to say but my admiration for Steve Lewis' site is today even stronger. An invaluable history of the entire mystery-suspense genre with such heavyweights as Alan J. Hubin, David L. Vineyard and Francis M. Nevins among the many fine contributors. Not least Steve himself.

The care and feeding of yesterday

While there are many good sites dealing with current fiction, there are only a few that deal with the fiction of past times with any intelligence. Nostalgia is riveting for up to ninety seconds. Then you want much more.

Steve Lewis' Mysteryfile blog http://mysteryfile.com/blog/ is my favorite site for a serious look at the mystery fiction of the past century. Many well-known writers including Bill Pronzini have contributed fine articles about forgotten writers and forgotten books. Virtually every day Steve runs a new piece, often illustrated with book jackets, as he works his way toward the ultimate collection of mystery criticism.

Today he's running a long interview I did with Charles Runyon. Chuck was in the last wave of the Gold Medal suspense writers. For me he was the best of that group. As his interview attests, he's also led a life most of us probably view with a bit of envy and even more of a bit of shock. Thanks to Stark House, one of his best novels THE PRETTIEST GIRL I EVER KILLED will soon be back in print. With others, hopefully, to follow.

Steve recently reviewed an Edward S. Aarons Sam Durrell spy novel. Even though the book was published in 1956, Steve assesses it with the same zeal and insight he would a new novel. No gauzy nostalgia here.

And that's what makes his site so valuable to me. There are so many new books I want to read that I need some guidance into the past. You can waste a lot of time and money on old books that aren't worth reading. But with the Mysteryfile blog you usually get a hepful judgment on the book at hand.

And there's always the bonus that it's just a hell of a lot of fun to read and look at.

Forgotten Books: His Name Was Death by Fredric Brown

HIS NAME WAS DEATH by Fredric Brown



After the big war American lives were in flux. Millions trekked to the suburbs to begin an entirely new way of life. And many of the prohibitions that had been common before the war were now relaxed.

Kurt Vonnegut once remarked that the novels of John D. MacDonald charted the Fifties and early Sixties so well that students of sociology would be able to read them decades later and get a true feel for the era.

I feel the same thing is true of several of Fredric Brown's novels, including His Name Was Death, a novel so cunningly crafted that Anthony Boucher in the New York Times said on publication, "You'll be compelled to read through in one sitting to one of the very few endings that have genuinely surprised me in a long time."

In addition to the stunning story there's also Brown's take on mid-Fifties. His mid-Fifties. While suburban mysteries came into fashion Brown frequently wrote about life in small cities, in this case a Midwestern burg where a series of murders has baffled police and terrified the citizenry. The city resembles aspects of Brown's Milwaukee. The characters likely resemble the people he knew in his earlier life.

Fredric William Brown was born into the working class, educated in public schools and night school as well as a year at college. Brown spent nearly twelve years working as an office worker during the Depression. From there he became a proofreader at the Milwuakee Journal. Given his penchant for drinking and his fondness for bars, Brown certainly encountered the types—if not the actual people—he uses in His Name Was Death.

The prototype for Darius Conn, small-time businessman, might well have been one of Brown's drinking buddies. Successful but not as much as he lets on; likes his nights out with the boys because frankly his marriage has gone stale; and talks a lot about the same kind of dreams heavy drinkers always talk about.

That's the façade Conn presents anyway. In truth he murdered his wife over a year ago. The police accepted it as an accident. And his plan for becoming an important businessman is being financed by his turning his printing business into a forgery operation.

But then one afternoon the fetching Joyce Dugan, his trusted Girl Friday, talks to a man who stops in to see Conn so he can pick up some money Conn owes him. Dugan calls around and finally locates Conn who tells her, yes, use the desk fund to pay him. And then have a nice weekend. Well, turns out the desk fund doesn't have enough so she opens the safe and takes the extra money from there. Not knowing of course that it's counterfeit.

Brown was clearly one of those writers who enjoyed amusing himself. This story could have been told in a straight-forward fashion but it wouldn't have near the power it does. Brown tells his tale from nine different points of view. And with a dark chuckle up his sleeve, he shows how each one of them meets his or her fate because of Joyce Dugan giving the man (an old high school boy friend, as it turns out; and a far more preferable mate than the bullying gambler she married) just a few counterfeit bills. A remarkable narrative structure that Brown used at lest twice again.

In true page-turner fashion, Brown sets up his story in an intricate set of inter-locking cliff hangers. His depictions of raw fear, terror, rage, betrayl are played off against moments of black humor and even sweet romance.

This is one of Brown's true crowd-pleasers and should have been one of his biggest sellers. But Brown, who was often referred to as a "writer's writer," was never a big seller. I once talked to the man who'd been the sales manager of Bantam Books during the Fifties. His favorite writer bar none was Fred Brown. He said he did everything he could to break him out but it never happened.

So I go back to my thesis at the top. Brown did the realistic every day of the working class so well it may have limited his appeal. The time was dominated by private detectives and the romance of the mean streets. Brown's streets were mean all right but they were filled with many of life's losers, the kind of in-laws most of us dread having. Philip Marlowe was handsome, brave and witty. Brown's good guys were sixty dollar a week salesmen whose ambition was to move out of their sleeping rooms into real apartments. Getting laid in a sleeping room ain't easy.

But time has been kind to the best of Fredric Brown's novels and stories. He has yet to develop the cult he deserves but at least his name and discussions of his work are appearing with more and more frequency on websites of film and noir.

This is one of the finest crime novels of the Fifties, a decade rich with many true masterpieces.

--Ed Gorman

News about Hard Case Crime

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From Charles Ardai:

We've got some big news to announce today: After a year's hiatus, Hard Case Crime will be returning to bookstores with new titles in 2011, thanks to a deal we just signed with UK-based Titan Publishing.

Titan is a publisher both of fiction and of gorgeous art books focusing on pop culture such as movie poster art, pin-ups, newspaper comic strips, and Golden Age comic books, and has worked with filmmakers such as J.J. Abrams, Joss Whedon, and George Lucas. Titan has been around for 30 years, has more than 200 employees, and in addition to publishing books also has a magazine division, a retail division (Titan owns the famous Forbidden Planet bookstore in London, and until recently co-owned the Murder One mystery bookstore with Maxim Jakubowski), and a merchandise division that produces items such as t-shirts, sculptures, and accessories. We look forward to exploring ways we might develop some cool Hard Case Crime products with them!

But first things first: books.

Hard Case Crime will relaunch in September/October 2011 with four new books, including CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust (sequel to her Edgar Award-nominated MONEY SHOT), QUARRY'S EX by Max Allan Collins (the latest in the popular series of hit man novels by the author of "Road to Perdition"), and two never-before-published novels by MWA Grand Masters (names to be announced shortly).

Additionally, Titan Publishing plans to acquire all existing stock of Hard Case Crime's backlist from Dorchester Publishing and to resume shipping these titles to booksellers immediately.

New books will be published in paperback (possibly some in hardcover as well!); ebook editions will also be released across multiple platforms. Titan is distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Random House.

We're very excited about working with Titan (indeed, we had offers from five publishers and chose Titan over several that were much larger and better-known) -- they love pulp fiction as much as we do and appreciate that in books like ours the visual dimension is just as important as the storytelling. It's hard to imagine a better home for Hard Case Crime.

If you'd like more info about any of the above, feel free to drop me a note (you can also take a look at the attached press release we'll be putting out shortly). Feel free to grab copies of any of our cover art from our Web site (www.hardcasecrime.com) if you'd like to run something about the news; if you need high-res versions, let me know.

Many thanks in advance for helping us to get the word out that Hard Case Crime is coming back!

Best,
Charles

Harry Whittingyon

Ed here: I saw two short pieces on Harry Whittington so I thought I'd reprint my own from 2006 when Stark House published a Harry two-fer.

------
Back in the 1950s you could run but you couldn't hide from Harry Whittington. Those were the days when many if not most paperbacks were sold in wire racks found in drug stores, grocery stores and what were then called dime stores.

Harry told me that he'd once seen five books of his displayed on the same rack, all published that month. He worked for everybody, from Gold Medal all the way down to Carnival. He did westerns, nurse romances, tie-ins, war stories and of course crime novels. The last was his true calling. There there was no sub-genre of suspense/mystery he didn't like. Or apply himself to.

I mention Harry because Stark House Publishing has just published two of his best in a single attractive volume, A Night for Screaming and Any Woman He Wanted. I should also mention here that I'm a free-lance editor for Stark House, though I'd be reviewing this two-fer with the same enthusiasm even if I weren't.

Harry's world was not one of ratiocination. There wasn't time for that. Most of his white working class protagonists were on the run from cosmic forces that would have given Lovecraft pause. In Night, for instance, the villain is so oppressive you seriously begin to wonder if the protagonist will survive. Seriously. The setting is one of those labor camps where drifters and small-time cons are forced to toil for the local politicians who make money on them. There are two scenes that literally made me wince. Harry knew the Deep South all too well.

Any Woman is a working class nightmare of a different kind. A once crooked cop stumbles on to a situation even he doesn't want to cover up and joins his former enemy the DA in trying to right it. But the DA dies mysteriously and the cop is forced to go after the mob that runs the town by himself. Although this is a familiar 50s theme (the crooked town), Harry throws in a complication that makes the story personal and harsh. Harry always said that he knew how to do two things – plot and create characters. And this book proves that wasn't any empty boast.

Here's the Stark House website: http://www.starkhousepress.com. Publisher Greg Shepard is bringing back the favorites of the 50s including Malcolm Braly, Gil Brewer, Stephen Marlowe, Day Keene, Vin Packer, Doug Sanderson and now Harry Whittington. He needs your support and I feel he deserves it, which is why I'm lending a hand. As I mentioned on my blog the other day, I recently paid $15 for a paperback from ABE. Well, I just got it today. It's yellowed and the spine cracked when I opened it. Stark House sells two-fers (two books per volume) in handsome, sturdy editions for $19.95 that will last much longer than most pbs. I have no financial stake in this, I merely want to see the line thrive. Check out the website.