- Hardcover: 464 pages
- Publisher: Eibonvale Press (January 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9619165217
- ISBN-13: 978-9619165218
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.6 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 322 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,678,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
Welsh writer Rhys Hughes regards this as his favourite book, and with good reason. It is one of the funniest and most intelligent books from the lighter side of macabre writing I have ever seen. It clamours with a cast of pirates, floppy-wristed welsh bards, explorers and inventors, imps, squonks, moving public houses, M R Jamesian revenants, M R Jamesian punctuation, blueberry pies, trousers, noses, clocks, carrots . . . I cant list them all here, there isn't room. Like all the best books, this quirky and surreal collection is hard to classify, but it lies in that region where the macabre and eerie worlds of classic horror and fantasy become a basis for something else - for a dark and original sense of humour filled with unexpected cross-references, homages, satires and black comedy. What makes this collection remarkable is not just the delightfully murky and skewed tales themselves, but the complex and ingenious way they all lock together and interrelate. I was going to say 'tessellate' but if this is a tessellation then it is filled with impossible-sided polygons, non-Euclidean three-dimensional geometry, unexpurgated curves and cracks from which blueberry-scented steam emerges with a screaming hiss. But what is without doubt is that 'The Smell of Telescopes' is a magnificent book and a cornerstone of the rather oddly shaped corner of literature that it occupies. Since the first edition went out of print, the unavailability of this book has been a great crime of literature. And Eibonvale Press is, as always, dedicated to the righting of the world's more substantial wrongs.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Rating the Eibonvale edition, not the writer's work, Mar 7 2012
By Ana W.M. - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Smell of Telescopes (Hardcover)
Eibonvale Press is just one of the most shameless publishing houses you could deal with. Just consider: Tartarus Press, a truly high-class publishing house of limited editions of rare horror and dark fantasy published 250 numbered copies of "The Smell of Telescopes" as a "sewn hardback printed and bound by Antony Rowe in black wibalin cloth stamped in gold, with yellow and black head and tailband". I have many Tartarus' books, but this one I couldn't get before it was out of print. Their volumes are beautifully printed in high quality paper, and the binding and dust jackets are just top-notch! While available at Tartarus' website, this book, in such fine edition, used to cost something around U$ 50. Now I was glad another publisher had released "The Smell of Telescopes" in hardcover, so I purchased this Eibonvale edition. The price: U$ 46. Though a bit less expensive than any Tartarus' release, this price is obviously far from low. Just as a comparison, in the same order I purchased a truly beautiful deluxe edition of Harlan Ellison's "Deathbird Stories" for less than 30 bucks (and that was from Subterranean Press, which is not a particularly inexpensive publisher). So I don't think my hopes were anywhere unreasonable as I expected at least a sewn hardback edition of Rhys' book. But this Eibonvale's expensive volume is as cheap as a hardcover book goes. The pages are GLUED to the spine (which is already absurd for the price), the paper is of a very, very low quality (most paperbacks are produced in a much finer paper, and, moreover, I only found such a dreadful sort of paper within a hardcover book in some Brazilian editions that used to cost the equivalent to U$ 2.50), and the design and typography is poor in the text and horrendous in the "decorative" pages that precede each story. Obviously, I don't have anything good to say about the printing as well. It's just criminal to charge such prices for such an awful job, and I think it's just sad that a much praised author such as Hugh Rhys has now his favorite book being presented in such a poor fashion after they were so carefully produced by Tartarus.
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