I've picked up considerably this week despite still suffering from the long tail of a cold... I still have a few sniffles to contend with, but nowhere near as bad as it was. A cold normally lasts 7-10 days—the rule of thumb "three days coming, three days here, three days going" is usually accurate—but this one has hung around for a fortnight. But it's definitely on the way out.
I was very happy to learn that BEYOND THE VOID: THE REMARKABLE HISTORY OF BADGER BOOKS was named as the 2024 Book of the Year by Jules Burt on his YouTube channel. Bizarrely this is the second time Steve Holland has won (and I chose my words carefully) because last year's winner was the art book Steve Holland: Paperback Hero edited by Michael Stradford. Third time if you count the introduction I wrote for Rayguns and Rocketships by Rian Hughes, the 2022 winner.
BEYOND was up against some stiff competition, including issues of Bare Bones, Men's Adventure Quarterly, Phantasmagoria and The Paperback Fanatic, the art book Dangerous Dames and Cover Dolls: The Art of Ron Lesser Vol. 2 edited by Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham and Daniel Zimmer, the updated biography/bibliography Basil Copper: A Life in Books, edited by Stephen Jones, and the anthology Weasels Ripped My Flesh! edited by Robert Deis & Wyatt Doyle, with Josh Alan Friedman.
I thought maybe the art book, Dangerous Dames, or the anthology, Weasels, might beat out my Badger Books history... but in the last few minutes of Jules' video BEYOND pipped everyone at the post. Here's the announcement and I'll put in the full video below...
I'm back to work for the next two weeks, although I've been quite lazy this week, spending some time putting together the John Brunner cover gallery that went up Thursday morning, tidying up some of the books that I'd needed while I was writing and designing DREAMING OF UTOPIA, battling the new online reception area set up by our local surgery so I could sort out a repeat prescription while on the phone to the human receptionist at the same surgery, putting up the Christmas tree, and a hundred and one other odds and ends I'd been putting off until after the book was written/out and after the cold had abated.
I've put in a little time on the next batch of books, but I've also pulled together a piece for someone else's magazine and written up a blog post for another site, although I'm waiting on seeing a scan of a book before I can finish it off. There's another article about an old author that I need to finish off, too.
And I'm looking ahead to future projects, including another index, and, floating around in the background, is yet another project that I suspect I'll have to give away, but it needs to be done for 2026 in order to celebrate an anniversary. This particular project has been waiting in the wings since 1979, so it will only be 47 years late... I really need to get going with that!
Hope you're all looking forward to Christmas as much as I am.
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