Stacking the Shelves (380)

I picked up some interesting books this week. Especially since Audible had a sale – again – and I had a $5 Audible gift card burning the proverbial hole in my pocket.

But the book I really want to talk about isn’t exactly new, not even to me. But maybe it will be to you. I read The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford when it first came out back in the early 1980s. I still have my original paperback, because I just loved it so much. It was the perfect blend of history with fantasy, focusing on a historical period that I had studied excessively because I adored it. It was the Wars of the Roses, but with wizards and vampires. It’s one of those books that lived in memory, and I always intended to read it again but just never got a round tuit. Ford was a writer who was quirky and beloved and who died much too soon. Then his work – except for his Star Trek novels which were marvelous – disappeared. After a long but ultimately fruitful investigation into “where the books went” or “where the rights to the books went”, outlined in Slate last November, the tangle was finally unwoven, and Tor Books is able, at long last, to bring Ford’s work back in print and finally bring it into ebook. Which I pre-ordered as soon as available. That dragon has been waiting a long time, and I’m finally going to get to visit him again.