I've found listings on various other websites where the price ranges from a "low" of $500 to a high of $2,167.75 + $33.20 delivery.
So needless to say I was never going to hold a copy of this lovely thing in my hands.
HowEVER...there are JPEGs of the front cover and the 32 pages of the guide readily available...on the official ERBzine website, of all places. (That's https://www.erbzine.com/mag8/0864.html if you want to take a look.)
I've read all 32 pages, and to be honest, it's not all that much of a thrill. But I was in the throes of completist compulsion, and I wanted to read every piece of work that ERB had published, so I knocked it back. (I also did read every piece of work that ERB had published in "book" form...though I am sorry to say that his many newspaper articles have never been collected, and it would take more work than I am willing to do to track down all of those pieces. I think. Never say never, I suppose. Sounds like an excellent idea for a Kickstarter campaign, though, doesn't it? Hello? Is there anybody OUT THERE?)
And now Joe and I are closing in on the last pieces in the Edgar Rice Burroughs oeuvre. I've been reading ERB books out loud to him at night for over a decade now. It started out as just a "I think you'd like A Princess of Mars thing. And I happened to have that in an omnibus edition which also included The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars...under the banner title Under the Moons of Mars...and Joe wanted to read those as well. When we finished that omnibus, he wanted to keep on, and since I happened to have three other omnibuses, we did just that. At the end of a book, I would always ask Joe if he wanted to keep going or read something else. He always wanted to keep going. So when we finished off the John Carter books, I asked him if he wanted to take on Tarzan. That's a big take: 24 original novels + 2 young adult novels + 1 novel fragment which was completed by Joe R. Lansdale. Fortunately, I had purchased the 24 original novels in one package for a pittance at Half-Price Books one day, already had the posthumous novel (in its original Dark Horse Comics version), and was able to find the 2 young adult novels online for free. So we did that. Then we visited Pellucidar, Amtor, the Moon, Caspak, then the lands of The Mucker, The Cave Girl, Barney Custer, and Shoz-Dijiji. At which point (1) we had read all of ERB's series and (2) we had finished reading 64 of ERB's 84 books.
So again I asked Joe if he wanted to read something else or continue to read ERB books. At this point I had already finished the other 20 ERB bookson my own, so I was kind of thinking it was time to introduce him to Lucky Starr or Tom Swift...but Joe wanted to stick with Burroughs. So we read Minidoka: 937th Earl of One Mile Series M, The Outlaw of Torn, The Monster Men, and The Bandit of Hell’s Bend...and we're about halfway through Beyond the Farthest Star. So with a mere 15 books to go...some of which are very short (in fact one, Beware!, is actually a short story), I decided to start preparing to read the rest of the Burroughs books.
Joe prefers paper books to Kindle editions, so I tried to finish off my paper collection whenever it was not prohibitively expensive. But clearly that limitation would not be possible to avoid when it came time to read Tarzan Clans of America Official Guide, right?
Au contraire mon frère (et soeur, bien sûr).
It's far from perfect, but (1) it's paper and (2) it cost considerably less than $500 to produce.
It was easy to download the JPEGs that ERBzine provided. I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to paste them up so that I could print two pages to the front of a page, two to the back, and arrange it so that when I printed it out it would read like a real book...but I finally figured it out. (How To directions available upon request.) And then I found an old red folder, cut it to size, and all I need to complete the task are two or three staples. Which I am now In Search Of.
I have to admit that I'm pretty excited about this. How excited am I?
Well, guess what I'll be reading to Joe after we finish Beyond the Farthest Star?
No comments:
Post a Comment