Free Books, Round Five

It’s time for the fifth of my occasional free book giveaways. The usual rigmarole applies: I present ten books, below, and, if you want one of them, you leave a comment stating which of them it is you’d like, and send me an e-mail which includes a mailing address. I decide who gets what - usually it’s first-come, first-served, and is restricted to one book per recipient - and will despatch the books to their new owners within a week or so. I’ll pay all postage costs.

1. Salamander by Thomas Wharton. I picked this one up in Malmö, back in December, but didn’t get around to reading it until last month. It’s a sort of a Borges-lite meets Umberto Eco type book, in which a 17th-Century English printer is summoned to an eccentric general’s Mitteleuropean castle where he is charged with creating an infinite book. Most of it is well-written and imaginative, but the tale just doesn’t quite come together as a resonant whole. My copy is of the UK paperback edition published by Flamingo in 2003; 384pp; ISBN: 0007128665.

2. Moscow Stations by Venedikt Erofeev, translated from the Russian by Stephen Mulrine. This is a short novel tracing its incorrigably alcoholic narrator’s progress along a 2-hour train journey from Moscow to a nearby town. What begins as a rambling apology for its narrator’s, and, by extension, its author’s alcoholism, deepens towards the end of the book, and towards the end of the line, into a genuinely shocking tragedy. My copy is a 141pp paperback published by Faber and Faber; ISBN: 0571192041.

3. ABZ: More Alphabets and Other Signs, compiled and edited by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding. This is a beautiful book which ‘presents, in full colour, a wealth of complete alphabets, emblems and logos, with stunning graphics from avant-garde modernist publications of the early 20th century’, but which, having said all that, is something, having glanced through a couple of times, I’m unlikely to pick up again. It’s a 224pp paperback, lovingly published by the excellent Redstone Press; ISBN: 1870003330.

4. The House of the Hidden Light by A.E. Waite and Arthur Machen, edited with an introduction by R.A. Gilbert. This curiosity is a record of a correspondence between the two authors dating from the first years of the last centuey. The letters are couched in such obscure and allusive language that some commentators have taken it as a manual issued in connection with the Order of the Golden Dawn, of which both authors were members. In fact, we learn, they are more likely just a disguised account of the pair’s social life. I must admit I found little of interest in this book, even as a staunch admirer of Machen’s prose. The book was originally published in an edition of 3 copies, and was reprinted for the first time last year, by the Tartarus Press, in a much larger run of 350, of which mine is one. ISBN: 1872621775.

5. Homo Zapiens aka Babylon by Victor Pelevin, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. From a publisher’s blurb: ‘When Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, he finds he has a talent for putting distinctively Russian twists on Western-style ads. But his success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevera…’. Not my favourite Pelevin novel, but still very much worth reading. This is a UK paperback edition, 256pp; ISBN: 0142001813.

6. Gathering Evidence, a Memoir, by Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by David McLintock. I’ve read (and enjoyed) a couple of Bernhard’s novels, but couldn’t get into this book, which comprises five autobiographical texts by the grumpy Austrian. This is the UK paperback edition, published by Vintage; 352pp; ISBN: 0099442531.

7. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum. I generally prefer Murakami’s more recent stuff, but then again, I’ve never failed to enjoy one of his books, and this exuberantly fantastic novel is still very good reading. It’s a 416pp UK paperback under the Harvill Panther imprint; ISBN: 1860469051.

8. All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland. It’ts been years since I last read anything of Coupland’s, but I quite enjoyed this slice of family life, even though I thought the psychoses were laid on a little too thick, here and there. My copy is a UK paperback edition; 288 pp, published by Flamingo; ISBN: 0007151705.

9. Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel, with contributions by Olaf Breidbach, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Richard Hartmann. I ordered this album of intricate illustrations by the 19th-Century natural scientist after seeing them on-line and then writing about them here. As with book no. 3, above, this is a beautifully-presented book, but one that I’m highly unlikely to revisit. It’s a paperback; 144 pp, published by Prestel; ISBN: 3791319906.

10. The Grammar of Ornament, by Owen Jones. This is yet another compendium of images that I bought, thinking I might use it as a visual reference, but which I have largely ignored. It is ‘the Victorian masterpiece on Oriental, Primitive, Classical, Mediaeval and Renaissance Design and Decorative Art’. I wrote about the book here. My copy is a hefty 380pp hardcover from a 1986 reprint edition published by Omega Books; ISBN: 1850070725.