It's taken us 12 years to do it, but Joe and I are finally reading our last Edgar Rice Burroughs series: The Apache Duology. 1 That's not necessarily the end of our Edgar Rice Burroughs adventures, though, since ERB wrote 20 non-series books.
I have all but 2 of those 20 books 4 (and the "missing" two can be had from the public library--they're a bit pricey to buy in book form and are not available electronically), but I had most of them (15) in Kindle e-book form. Joe and I have gone the Kindle route before 5 ...and it was okay, but it's clear that Joe prefers to read a Real Book. So I thought I'd look around and see if I could find cheap versions of the remaining ERBs.
Since I am not buying used books from Amazon anymore (HERE & HERE), I checked my usual suspects, and found that Thrift Books had most of the ones I was looking for...and at pretty reasonable prices. I also found (much to my surprise) that Walmart had quite a few of those books, also at reasonable prices. So I was going back and forth between those sites and a few others, trying to see what my best deal would be, and as I was scrolling through the Walmart ERB holdings I saw this:
Well. I liked that. Not for the lesbian overtones (not that there's anything wrong with that), but for the pulpy art style. And it was only $8.99. So I hit the button.
Well. It arrived yesterday, and I was kind of surprised at how big the box was. Not thick, but very long and wide. I wondered what kind of bizarre packing Walmart was using for their book orders. And then I opened the package and...it wasn't the packaging. This book was gi-normous. Check it out.
Here's a normal sized book:
Mmm-hmmm. So yes, it is a bit unwieldy. I'm not very happy about that, but I have to admit that it is my own fault. In the details of the listing, it clearly says "Assembled Product Dimensions (L x W x H) 11.02 x 8.50 x 0.22 Inches." (And don't you love that "assembled product" descriptor?) To be honest, I just didn't think to look. Next time, though....
There's something else worthy of note. Going back to the listing on Walmart.com, here's how the title appears:
The Efficiency Expert : The Best Book For Readers (Annotated) By Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Paperback)
I'm a big fan of annotations, so I took a quick look (even though it will be several months before I get to reading this book with Joe). And I was surprised that I did not seen one footnote...and no numbers in the text to indicate that there were any kind of notations, foot or otherwise. So I flipped to the back of the book. And there I discovered that the last 4 1/2 pages of this book (I'd tell you the page numbers, but alas, the pages are not numbered--which is yet another pain in the ass detail) are devoted to something entitled DETAILED
BIOGRAPHY. Strangely, following that title is a parenthetical note:
P.S. The publisher is listed on the Walmart site as "Independently Published," which isn't helpful, but the ISBN-13 is 9781080898398.
P.P.S. Okay, just one more quote from that DETAILED BIOGRAPHY ( Non Readable ): "...the novel is realated to the French revolution and the French war." The novel is set in 1920s Chicago, by the way.
1 For the record, here's a complete list of ERB's series: Barsoon (11), Tarzan (27 2), Pellucidar (7 3), Venus (5), Caspak (3), Moon (3), Mucker (3), Cave Girl (2), Barney Custer (2), and the aforementioned Apache (2). That's a total of 64 books (keeping in mind 3 ).
2 Including the two Tarzan Twins books and the posthumous collaboration with Joe R. Lansdale, The Lost Adventure)
3 One of these 7 is the Pellucidar / Tarzan crossover, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, so it's on both lists.
4 And have read them on my own already, but am ready, willing, and able to have another go at them with Joe.
5 7 times: with the difficult to find for cheap Tarzan Twins books (there are two of them), with not difficult to find for cheap but I'd already bought an e-compilation that had them The Mucker Trilogy, and with the same story as with The Mucker books The Cave Girl duology.
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