Reading ahead, reading abroad
Hello, friends. I had SUCH a lovely batch of unexpected mail this week! First came Candlewick Press’s spring/summer 2015 catalogue. Its cover (right) is based on the cover of the new Kate DiCamillo novel, Raymie Nightingale, which will be published in April. Hurray!
I had more personal reasons for reading the catalogue, too. It feels like the March publication of Jessica Spotswood’s A Tyranny of Petticoats is one step closer because it appears in these pages. I’m lucky enough to have an ARC and while I haven’t yet read all the short stories (I’m trying to eke them out), some of my favourites so far are the ones by J. Anderson Coats, Elizabeth Wein, and Saundra Mitchell. They’re so great, you guys. SO GREAT! It’s extra-exciting because while is quite well documented, I’d never read anything by either Coats or Mitchell. Now, I’m off to devour their back catalogues.
And then I flipped over a few more pages and had the oddest feeling. You see, the Agency novels will also be re-released this spring. But… I’d forgotten. I really had. So when I turned over to this page, I actually dribbled coffee down my shirt.
So… it’s true. Candlewick will be re-releasing all four books in the quartet with the gorgeous covers first used in the UK and Australia. This is going to sound absurd and implausible and disingenuous, but I also didn’t know that The Traitor in the Tunnel was an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. It’s possible that I’ve taken my decision not to obsess about sales/awards/stats too seriously. Or maybe not. After all, it was the best kind of surprise to read about it in the catalogue.
But my week of postal delights was not yet finished! A smallish, heavy box from Korea also arrived, and I wondered why my Korean publisher was sending more copies of their edition of A Spy in the House. But I was wrong.
You guys, you guys, you guys! Mary Quinn is cross-dressed! She’s holding a model of the clock tower with a little man dangling perilously from it! It’s the Korean edition of The Body at the Tower, and it’s so much more beautiful in the hand than on the screen!
I am not ready to pretend to be calm and dignified. Here are a few more shots.
The spines and the embossed abstract-mechanical motifs on the cover!
The inside cover. The little image of the hat she’s wearing also appears throughout the book, to mark scene changes.
And ohhhhh, those endpapers. I would like to cover the world (or at least everything in my study) with that brick-printed paper.
The rest of the mail this week was the usual mess of bills and dental appointment reminders and subscription offers for magazines we’ll never miss. Pah. If you need me, I’ll be sitting in my study, drinking tea and petting my stack of books and catalogues.
