A word about reviews.
[A word from Bapton Books. With luck, this one will not be double-posted.]
People are … well, sometimes you simply smile, shake your head, and remark, like an old granny on the veranda sippin’ iced tea, “Bless yore heart....” (This is the expression used in the South in sympathetic commiseration of the honestly and honorably mistaken, the inept, the misguided, the awkward, and indeed the slower traffic, the sort who can’t always get the whiskey in the right hole. “Jim Ed done his best to get that fence fixed, and he like to done, just ’fore he realized he’d done penned them hogs out instead of in. Bless his heart.” The UK equivalent, I understand, is simply, “Bless.”)
We always welcome reviews, no matter what. They always teach us something. Even if, sometimes, that “something” is that some reviewers aren’t, perhaps, well-matched to some books (bless their hearts). There was, for instance, the reviewer who would have rather liked The Confidence of the House: May 1940 were it not that Herbert Morrison was described as a “conchy”: a man who’d been a conscientious objector in the Great War. Which would be understandable, as objections go, if that had been Gerv speaking, rather than Gerv’s describing what the back benches, and not only on the Government side, thought of the Rt Hon. Member for Hackney South.
Bless her heart.
One I cherish, though, is the review which gave Claymore: a story of Texas four stars and said it would have been five … except that the author, my late father, had died before finishing all the stories included with that novella in that edition, or continuing the Chattan saga after the manner of L’Amour.
I’m actually rather pleased that someone liked his work so much as to resent that death intervened before he could finish it.
And I have resisted the temptation to comment, there, to the effect that Dad – and his humble posthumous editor and literary executor, to-wit, me, his son, who misses him a fair bit – might be thought to be a right smart more disappointed than the reviewer (bless his heart) could conceivably be.
And I do honestly cherish that review. Because, in the end, it’s a compliment, in an odd sort of way, that readers can be disappointed that an author died before he could finish all his work. Bless their hearts....
People are … well, sometimes you simply smile, shake your head, and remark, like an old granny on the veranda sippin’ iced tea, “Bless yore heart....” (This is the expression used in the South in sympathetic commiseration of the honestly and honorably mistaken, the inept, the misguided, the awkward, and indeed the slower traffic, the sort who can’t always get the whiskey in the right hole. “Jim Ed done his best to get that fence fixed, and he like to done, just ’fore he realized he’d done penned them hogs out instead of in. Bless his heart.” The UK equivalent, I understand, is simply, “Bless.”)
We always welcome reviews, no matter what. They always teach us something. Even if, sometimes, that “something” is that some reviewers aren’t, perhaps, well-matched to some books (bless their hearts). There was, for instance, the reviewer who would have rather liked The Confidence of the House: May 1940 were it not that Herbert Morrison was described as a “conchy”: a man who’d been a conscientious objector in the Great War. Which would be understandable, as objections go, if that had been Gerv speaking, rather than Gerv’s describing what the back benches, and not only on the Government side, thought of the Rt Hon. Member for Hackney South.
Bless her heart.
One I cherish, though, is the review which gave Claymore: a story of Texas four stars and said it would have been five … except that the author, my late father, had died before finishing all the stories included with that novella in that edition, or continuing the Chattan saga after the manner of L’Amour.
I’m actually rather pleased that someone liked his work so much as to resent that death intervened before he could finish it.
And I have resisted the temptation to comment, there, to the effect that Dad – and his humble posthumous editor and literary executor, to-wit, me, his son, who misses him a fair bit – might be thought to be a right smart more disappointed than the reviewer (bless his heart) could conceivably be.
And I do honestly cherish that review. Because, in the end, it’s a compliment, in an odd sort of way, that readers can be disappointed that an author died before he could finish all his work. Bless their hearts....
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Away down here....
Musings from the bottomlands, from Bapton Books historian and publisher Markham Shaw Pyle.
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