• The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll’s twin masterpieces annotated by Martin Gardner. Several years ago now I briefly owned a copy of this edition. I showed it to a girl I fancied, on the day I bought it, and she said “For me? How kind!” So of course I said “I knew you’d like it,” and saved my teeth-gnashing for later. Now I have my own copy again. Boekenmarkt Spui.
  • Mens & Machine: Teksten en documenten over Automaten, Androïden en Robots verzameld door René Simmen (“Man & Machine: texts and documents about automata, androids and robots, collected by René Simmen). At this point my mother will be heaving a great sigh, but it’s not (or mainly not) science fiction. Printed in 1968, it has essays on various famous clockwork and steam-powered automata (Hero’s engine, the Mechanical Turk, the eating-and-defecating duck and so on) but also a Dutch translation of Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots (Werstands Universele Robots), a short story by Isaac Asimov and the score for an aria by Offenbach sung by a windup woman; all these are accompanied by b/w illustrations, many reproductions of original engravings, and the occasional photo. As a bonus, tucked inside I found a memo dated May 8th 1968: from the Director-General of the Netherlands branch of IBM, announcing how enthusiastic he was about the opening (by Prince Bernhard) of a new factory complex. All in all, rather a nice find. Boekenmarkt Spui of course.

  • Electric Velocipede issue 11. As always, there are some duds and some gems. “Quitting Dreams”, by Matthew Cheney and Jeffrey Ford, is a standout. Also very strong is “Sweetness and Light” by Nicole Kimberling, which asks the question “What would move into God’s house, if He wasn’t there?” while just steering clear of the obvious answer. A final favourite is Mary Turzillo’s short-short “A Punctuated Romance”. I’m going to excerpt a tiny tiny piece here, to give you the flavour, but if I let myself go I’d be reprinting the whole thing in no time (it’s only a page long, but it’s fairly densely packed with … well, you’ll see).

    In popped the maid, Tilde. “Your case may be more acute than that, my poor darling. Many > is the night I’ve seen you kerning on the porch swing with young Virgule. Law, last night I > thought the angle brackets would give way.”

    In hommage to Dr. Turzillo, that particular usage of “kerning” has found a home in my lexicon. Making the chances of actually achieving any noticeably smaller I suppose, but someday I’ll meet a girl “pretty as a serif”…

    (EV is only $4 US per issue, plus another $4 for international shipping. Zines rock! And Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet has another issue out too…)

  • Flytrap issue 6. I particularly enjoyed the short-short stories of Jon Hansen (okay, these were presented as poetry, but only in the sense of “break the sentences into short pieces and mess a bit with the punctuation”, not for any notable rhythmic reasons) and the offerings by Lavie Tidhar and David J. Schwartz were also pretty good, but nothing stood out quite as much as the EV top entries.
  • Orphans, Tom Waits. What? That’s not a book, you say? Well, smart Alec, I’m happy as Larry and you’re dopey Joe: it is a book, hardcover and all. There just happen to be three cds tucked into the back, that’s all. (The book is mainly lyrics, no notes sadly — but ends with a bunch of b/w photographs which are pretty fantastic. And the design is gorgeous.)