Agatha Christie - The Complete Miss Marple

A new volume of the works of detective fiction writer Agatha Christie has set a new world record for the book with the thickest spine. Measuring over a foot long, with 4,032 pages, the volume contains the complete Miss Marple stories which means all twelve novels and twenty short stories.

Produced as a special limited edition the volume is bound by Cedric & Chivers Period Bookbinding, cased in Winters Wintan leather, blocked in gold on the front and spine, with head and tail bands, four silk ribbon markers to keep your place. There have been just 500 made and each volume comes complete with a suede-lined wooden box and copy of the Guinness World records certificate.

The Complete Miss Marple contains a newly commissioned map of St Mary Mead by Nicolette Caven who based her map on Christie’s description of St Mary Mead from The Body in the Library with additional details from other Miss Marple works.

The Complete Miss Marple limited edition retails at £1000 and are obtainable from Harper Collins +44 (0)844 576 8112 or weborders@harpercollins.co.uk

HarperCollins have been busy as also up their sleeves is the publication of a book based on the contents of Agatha Christie's 73 working notebooks. Written by Agatha Christie archivist, John Curran, in close conjunction with the Christie Archive Trust which owns the notebooks, this new book not only uncovers the details behind many of Agatha Christie’s famous books but also includes for the first time two complete Hercule Poirot short stories that have never before been published. This book lifts the lid on Agatha Christie’s biggest secret – how her pencilled notes, lists and drafts led to her many successful books, plays and stories. Alternative plots, titles and characters, deleted scenes, even her plans for the books she didn’t get to write – John Curran’s investigation reveals a wealth of unpublished material, including two complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published: "The Mystery of the Dog’s Ball" and the unseen "Thirteenth Labour of Hercules"!

The Olympia Bookfair 4th-6th June 2009

The 52nd Antiquarian Book Fair is at Olympia from Thursday 4th to Saturday 6th June 2009. The opening hours are:

Thurs 4pm to 9pm
Fri 11am to 7pm
Sat 11am to 5:30pm (which is earlier than Saturday closing time last year)

Olympia 2 Hammersmith Road,London W14 8UX

The Bookfair website is here and you can print out a complimentary ticket from here. Ibooknet member Stephen Foster will be there, at Stand 19, which is, he says, about as far from the entrance if you can get.

Sheila Rose

Sheila Rose is one of those classic pony book illustrators: her style is instantly recognisable: quite spare, and swiftly drawn, and she has the rare ability to draw both horses and people. Many pony book illustrators seem to fall at the fence of producing recognisable humanity, though there are those, like Geoffrey Whittam, who have the people alright, but seem to have a block when it comes to horses.

Sheila Rose was born in Bishop’s Stortford on September 26th, 1929, and was educated at Hitchin Grammar School and Harrogate College. She started riding her own ponies, and drawing them, when she was four, and, according to her entry in Who’s Who in the Pony Magazine Annual 1968, “competed at all shows in Hertfordshire between 1940 and 1945.” Allowing for the fact it was wartime, when there were less shows than normal, that still shows formidable determination, especially as she also found time to hunt with the Puckeridge and South Herts.

She illustrated her first book in 1948, although I haven't yet been able to find out exactly what that was. The first book I can find in any of the copyright libraries is Pamela MacGregor Morris's Not Such a Bad Summer, which was published in 1950.

It's quite a brave composition, showing the ponies and children from the back, looking up towards the skyline, but I think she has captured that moment when everyone's attention is attracted wonderfully (though I could quibble with the over thick necks of the ponies on the skyline.)

Very swiftly after this, Sheila Rose started to illustrate the Pullein-Thompson sisters' books, starting with Josephine Pullein-Thompson's Pony Club Team (she did, in fact, illustrate five of the Noel and Henry series). When Collins began to publish its pony authors in the Armada paperback editions, they usually kept the internal illustrations, and so this is probably how many of us will have come to know Sheila Rose's illustrations.

This edition of Pony Club Team is another done from an unusual viewpoint, though I think this is less successful than Not Such A Good Summer - it seems a little awkward.

Sheila Rose illustrated many of the Pullein-Thompson's oeuvre during the 1950s. I am particularly fond of her illustrations for Christine Pullein-Thompson's The Horse Sale, and below is one without any sight of a horse. I think she has the artistic Olga off just right, still hopeful that the second hand book dealer will give her a decent price for her books (alas...)

She also has the cover of this book off wonderfullly: I love the way she has captured the feeling between the boy and his pony:

Most of the illustrations I remember best are those which feature horses jumping: she had a particular gift for capturing the movement of a horse in the air, as in this example from Mona Sandler's Steep Farm Stables:

Besides illustrating new works, Sheila Rose also did new illustrations, in particular for Black Beauty. I like them, but I'm not sure her style was suited to a period piece: somehow the horses seem very modern.

By the time of her entry in the Pony Magazine Annual of 1968, she had done the illustrations for over 80 titles. I can't find any books she illustrated which were published after 1967 (the last was Margaret MacPherson's Ponies for Hire), so I suspect that she died then. If so, it was very young: she was born in 1929. Maybe she gave up because she has a family: but she did, in her time illustrating, make a strong claim to be one of the best pony book illustrators in the post war period.

I have more biographical information on Sheila Rose on my website here, together with examples from the pony books she illustrated.

Bookseller spells and laws of life

When entering a dry period for orders, there are certain things booksellers do to pluck orders out of the ether.

The most commonly used is to moan on the Abe forum about your lack of orders: this will usually result in one or two.

One big advantage to being part of a group of booksellers is that you benefit from everybody else's bookseller spells - though if anyone resorts to strange mixtures of herbs, bits of bat and dancing around at the full moon with a some sacrificial copies of Reader's Digest Condensed editions, they're not telling.

Here are the spells you can use without fear, from those in Ibooknet who know.

• The book you decide you will read, having had it lying around unsold for months, is the one that you will sell that day
• If you can't find a book that has just been ordered, you're bound to get a second order for the same title from a different database
• Decide to re-arrange your books. If you use boxes to store your stock, however you arrange them, you will sell a book in the bottom box
• Go to an author society fair and take your entire stock of that author with you. When you get back, and are sitting there with piles of unpacked boxes, you will get orders for the books you have in the boxes (but not from the people you met at the fair - random individuals from who knows where)
• Give up at the end of the day, and when you are (a) about to watch something you just can't miss on TV or (b) unexpected visitors knock on the door or (c) you're just about to have a long soak in a hot bath several urgent orders will arrive
• decide to clear out old stock to the charity shop. Several urgent telephone calls will happen the next day, desperate for books you have just given away

And briefly, here are a couple of other rules of life you will soon learn if you are a bookseller:

Your broadband connection will collapse overnight when you have two boxes of books which urgently need price checking, leaving you using a tethered Google G1 Android Device as a wireless router, dangling by a piece of string.

You will always be interrupted when nearly at the end of counting the pages of an unpaginated book.

The time you are cataloguing and inspecting your most valuable book is the time the cat, who normally does not come near you, will develop a pressing need to sit on you, or on the book.

I should maybe add, in the interests of Health and Safety, and not being sued, that you should always make sure you observe all normal health and safety rules if you decide to follow these spells (particularly if balancing at odd angles attempting to make the Android Device work) and that Ibooknet can take no responsibility if the spells don't work. Sometimes the buyers just ain't there.

Many thanks to Barbara Fisher (March House Books), Stephen Foster, 95 Bell St, Mike Sims (A Book for All Reasons), Heather Lawrence (Peakirk Books) and Graeme Roberts (Magpie Books) for their contributions. May your sales this weekend be mighty.

More on Amazon

Like many booksellers I legitimately use the 'update product info' button to correct errors in Amazon's catalogue. This is important because it stops customers being disappointed by the wrong edition, a hardback instead of a paperback, an edition by a different publisher etc. Sometimes author's names are not as they appear on the book, or as they are known, and this needs correcting. Last night I corrected four books. For the first time ever one of my updates was refused. The stock email from Amazon was:

Thank you for using the Catalog Update Form to send suggestions
At this time we cannot accept the correction you have submitted for one of the following reasons: - Could not verify - Incorrectly formatted - Provided URL did not confirm - Some data on high-profile items is not editable

So what contentious aspect did I try to change? Well they had the author's first name as 'editor'. It is actually Allan but 'editor' is not even likely. Clearly they have gone from letting whole sale rubbish through as changes which amounted to vandalism, to banning changes which anyone with any commonsense about books must see was right. Why can't changes be reviewed by a human? If that is too expensive how about authorising those with merchant accounts to make changes as merchants can be more easily dealt with by Amazon if they misused the system.

As I have been writing this another of my updates has been refused for a book with only one edition and one publisher but Amazon list the wrong publisher. My correction is declined for the same generic reasons above.

My advice to Amazon buyers would be that if it is really important to you to have a particular edition, or format, or illustrator, or any other variable, then use the enquire facility to check with the seller before ordering. They have the book in front of them and can tell you exactly what it is.

The books that don't exist on Amazon

Many, many bookdealers list on Amazon, and most of Ibooknet are among them. Amazon started off life selling new books, and its transition to selling used and rare books as well has not been without problems.

To give Amazon its due, it has tried to wrestle with the complications caused by a rigid system which only allowed the upload of books with an ISBN (thereby condeming hundreds of thousands of books to the netherworld that was Z-shops). Z-shops are now history, and the bookdealer can now upload any book by creating his own listing.

On other bookselling sites, what you upload is what you upload: so if you upload Agatha Christie's Nemesis as Nemesiss, Nemesiss is what will appear on the site. Amazon is different. It overwrites whatever title you upload a book with the title it has on its database (the matching is done via isbn or similar). It is this database that booksellers can add to or alter.

You might think that that solves all problems: and maybe it might if humanity were perfect. However, a random trawl around a popular title on Amazon (you might want to try Jill's Gymkhana by Ruby Ferguson) will show that humanity has problems when it comes to adding book data to Amazon: look at the tricky question of who actually wrote the book - was it Ruby Ferguson or Caney (the illustrator)? Added to this is Amazon's insistence that you must enter the correct date on which a book was published, and with a popular book that was reprinted several times you will have entry after entry for what is really the same book. You really don't want to try looking for a copy of The Silver Brumby's Daughter, by Elyne Mitchell.

Some people don't like this. They don't like it at all: so much so that they have decided to create listings highlighting the pointless duplication. If that was all they'd done, the problem would not be so serious. What they've also done is edit listings others have already created. Do a search on Amazon on duplication and you will see what I mean.

Many of these listings have been created quite legitimately and were correct: it is not necessarily the fault of the bookseller that other, virtually identical, listings have been created. If you've created a listing for the Beano Book 1977 and someone has changed the title for you to Duplicate Listing 1977, it isn't going to show up on a search for Beano. You won't sell the book, and until someone tells you what's happened to your listing, you're going to remain in happy ignorance.

You would think that Amazon would be worried about this: the descriptions are obviously completely inaccurate; some are defamatory; and there seems an obvious problem with a system that is supposed to be policed. To make an alteration to a listing you submit it to Amazon and a couple of days later you are told whether or not your changes are acceptable. The fact that all these changes have been passed ought to be telling someone, somewhere in Amazon that all is not well.

And they don't do a great deal for those booksellers who have been affected either. Amazon's response to far to complaints has been to ask which listings are affected. If you are a bookseller with 20,000 listings, this means checking each one individually on Amazon to see what has been affected, and of course as the guerrilla hasn't been stopped in their tracks, there's absolutely no guarantee that they, or anyone else who takes it into their heads, can't immediately alter back something you've changed. Checking every single listing every single day doesn't seem the best use of a bookseller's time, and it is of course throwing all responsibility off Amazon's shoulders straight back on to the bookseller.

The person or people making the changes should be easy enough to trace and remove from Amazon, but the main problem that Amazon need to address is policing additions and alterations to book listings. These have to be submitted to Amazon, and they should be checked by people who have been carefully briefed about what to be wary about: Duplication by No Author you might have thought would have rung a bell, but no.

So far Amazon's actions have been less than helpful. Watch this space: Ibooknet are not giving up and going away.

52 Poems