Ye Olde Partners Page

*A Collection of Antiquarian Curios & Relics*

"Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?"
--Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

1) HEART AND SCIENCE . . . I would have loved to have heard the initial pitch for the Battleship movie. "Yeah, it'll be just like the boardgame! Giant explosions! Tons of CGI! Aliens attacking! A kid from the wrong side of the tracks will become a man when he joins the Navy!" Hmmm, that's not exactly the Battleship game I remember playing as a kid . . . At any rate, there is a Battleship (9780345535375) 7.99 movie tie-in that was written by Peter David. The bad news is that the movie has performed so poorly that the Shia LeBeouf vehicle Chutes and Ladders and the movie adapation of Hungry Hungry Hippos with Jonah Hill have both been put on indefinite hold at their respective studios . . .

2) THE FROZEN DEEP . . . Apparently, there are so many people climbing Mt. Everest that there have been traffic jams on its slopes. Throw in one of the worst storms ever and I hear that people have been dropping like flies on their way back down. If you are looking for a nice display tie-in, Peter Zuckerman's Buried in the Sky (9780393079883) 26.95 is a survival story of two sherpas on the nearby K2. It will be available next month. Sam also suggested Jon Krakuer's Into Thin Air (9780385494786) 15.00 as a good one. There is a juvenile book called Storm at the Summit of Mount Everest: A Choose Your Own Path Book (9781591932758) 8.95. From what I gather, you are climbing Mt. Everest with your sister, and there is a storm bearing down upon both of you. I am imagining questions like this: You are running low on supplies and you've been separated from the main party in the storm. A) If you push your sister off a ledge to conserve supplies -- go to page 186. B) If you gut your sister and crawl inside her carcass like Luke Skywalker did with Han Solo's Tauntaun to stay warm -- go to page 97. Of course, I've never claimed to be a children's writer . . .

3) THE TWO DESTINIES . . . Speaking of children's writers, Ellen Airgood, author of South of Superior (9781594485763) 16.00 has written her first young adult novel, and it's getting rave reviews. Prairie Evers has been homeskooled and is having a hard time learning to socialize with other kids. She finally finds a friend in Ivy. Prairie also learns from Ivy that home is not always where the heart is. We've already sold out of the first batch, but we expect more copies shortly . . .

4) A TERRIBLY STRANGE BED . . . Mike Barton's new edition of The Mushroom Houses of Charlevoix (9780980102499) 21.95 is a couple of inches taller and wider. There are also 25 additional pages of pictures and text. Come see how the little people live! And oh, how they danced . . .

Odds & Sods

It would seem that a lot more people are reading newspapers than I suspected. The Kluck's Yooper Bars (9780615566214) 19.95 was highlighted in the Detroit News & Free Press this past week and we promptly sold out. We have more stock in now . . .

As Huggy Bear might say, the word on the street is that Partners has the only available stock on E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey (9780345803481) 15.95. Order yours before they are gone . . .

It looks like Chronicle should get Jeffrey Brown's Darth Vader & Son (9781452106557) 14.95 to us before Father's Day. You might want to backorder . . .