Fantastic Metropolis

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Brendan Connell

I remember the first book I bought by Nerval. I was youngish then and had not heard of the author. At a library book sale I stumbled across a nice thin little volume that looked interesting in a limited edition of 250 copies. It was only a dollar, so I bought it. The book was Les filles du feu, and to this day it is one of my most prized possessions. “Discovering” the author on my own obviously added to the thrill… I also like it when I check out books from the library that no one has read for years. I remember checking out Claire Lenoir by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam from the Queens library. It had not been checked out since 1927.

Ian Covell

Too many, none important to anyone else.

John Coulthart

Too many, I think; for now I’ll just mention my first encyclopedia that I received as a gift aged five—a book I remember vividly—and a Thames and Hudson book of photographs of Scotland that I saw in a bin in the street. This became one of my main reference books when adapting The Haunter of the Dark as a comic strip.

Jack Dann

One of my earliest memories of reading was that when I opened a book, all the characters would come alive; when I closed it, they would go to sleep. On some level, I still believe that.

Ellen Datlow

I feel a thrill when I find a particular out-of-print book I’ve searched for for a long time or upon rediscovering (physically) certain books that meant a lot to me as a child. The latter I want to just look at and thumb through and have in my possession (e.g. Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom Planet books).

Alan DeNiro

Wandering the stacks in the University of Virginia’s Alberman library, finding light bulbs between seldom-used shelves burnt out, losing one’s self in the twisty little stairwells that seemed designed for gnomes, getting off on an elevator on the wrong floor and coming across the red carpeted, gilded special collections department, finding random 18th century books in Greek in the shelves in unlikely places. I also lament the fact that books aren’t stamped with due dates anymore, it seemed. Sometimes I’d try to find odd books that might have only been checked out once in the 1920s, or sat on a shelf for eighty years and were never checked out once—there’s something deeply melancholic about that.

Lawrence Dyer

Two or three times in second-hand book shops I’ve come across old copies of much-admired books which I read maybe twenty years earlier at a tender age and experienced the thrill of being reunited with them, like meeting old school friends after many years. Examples are the fantasy novel Jog Rummage (author unknown to me now), An Experiment with Time (author also lost to me but a book literally about experimenting with time travel as an individual in the real world), and Essex author Anne Ashbury’s Miniature Gardens.

Brian Evenson

I collect books, so have lots of stories about books that I’ve looked for for years and then finally found, or books that I’ve found for incredibly good prices, but they’re so personal they’d hardly make sense to anyone who doesn’t collect or doesn’t know me well. Here’s one that’s slightly crazy: When I lived in Seattle, I stumbled by accident across Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s novel Insatiability, which at the time was out of print and very difficult to find. I bought, began to read it. When we drove for a daytrip to Canada, to Vancouver, I took the book with me, but then found myself loath to leave it in a car, even a locked car, because it had been a book so difficult to find. So, I carried the book around all through Vancouver. My wife thought I was crazy, pointed out that of all the things in the car probably Insatiability was the only thing that thieves wouldn’t take. I agreed with her, could understand that rationally, but one often has odd relations to the books that one finds, and I felt, quite illogically, that to leave my book alone in a (admittedly hardly) foreign country would be like abandoning my child.