thievingmagpiebookstore.com Blog

Well, if you’re going to insist on giving books as gifts–and we hope you are–you might want to think about this one:  

Rope Dancer Falling in Love

THIS Christmas story, of Josh, Marie, and the birth of their child, is brand new and published just in time for the holidays by the small but ambitious Amsterdam imprint, Weiw Publishers. The luminous watercolor illustrations by Anija Seedler and the quirky story by Ulla Mothes make this a unique Christmas charmer. We have brand new, unopened copies, fresh from the printer.

We’ve put a short catalogue of Christmas Books up on our website. And, now that it’s there, we’d like to draw your attention to three titles in particular:  Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas In Wales, Paul Auster’s Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story, and Catherine Salton’s Raphael And The Noble Task. These are three very handsome books and the Thomas is one of the glories of English prose, but that’s not really the point. In fact, the publisher has given our copies of RAPHAEL a prominent black marker stripe along one edge, rendering it a tad less special as a gift than it might be otherwise.    

You might want to consider mixing up some eggnog, warming up some gluhwijn, putting out some popcorn or the last of the peppernoten, getting together with your family, your friends, your best sweet patootie, and reading one of these together, out loud. You just might find yourself doing it all over again next year. 

Of course, we ARE in the business of separating you from your cache of Euros, so you can safely purchase any of these for any purpose you wish, no questions asked. Other new arrivals are, as always, posted in the usual place.

In case you’ve been dead or otherwise indisposed for the past week, Sinterklaas, Amerigo and you-know-who got off the boat from Spain on the fifteenth. Our feelings towards Piet are still rather ambivalent — probably a sign that we haven’t been here long enough yet. Piet has found his way into our new arrivals, where he can’t mess up too badly.  

The bad news is that the latest versions of the free Adobe Reader (Version 9) and Internet Explorer (Version 7) no longer work together the same way as in the past — and currently break our web site. Sigh! Under IE7, the new Adobe Reader won’t open in a web browser window but opens a new instance of the Reader, instead. This is supposed to have something to do with increased security. Fair enough. But, after noting that the new version can’t work inside a web browser window, it discards the parameters that were passed with the HTML code, when it would have been so easy to simply pass them to the Reader, itself. We are using the method published by Adobe, so we have to believe this is a bug in the current implementation and will be fixed sometime in the future. In the meantime, linking to the catalogs will open the PDF file at the beginning and may not search for the title.

Please bear with us.

Now in our windows — Art, Halloween, and new arrivals. As always, the latest catalogues of new arrivals are posted here.

Now in our windows — Mysteries, Food & Wine (including Jancis Robinson’s HOW TO TASTE), and THE SOLZHENITSYN READER. As always, the latest catalogues of new arrivals are posted here.

We received an interesting comment in our e-mail yesterday:       

[C]an’t say you screwed up, per se, but browsing the books by the author’s surname would be much better than by the author’s first name… no?

Our response is an unequivical “Maybe, maybe not.” When you’re in the By Author tab, it’s possible to browse the books by either the author’s first name or surname, or any part of either. We agree that our approach is unconventional, but we don’t think that the usual conventions are always of much help. After all, one person’s “Bioy Casares, Adolfo” is another’s “Casares, Adolfo Bioy”. It’s possible to browse successfully, or at least appropriately, without having to make that choice – or to find that novel by Philip Roth when you’re all set to type in Phillip Roth. Why frustrate someone needlessly? We provide a list of books and the stuff you’re not interested in is just filtered out automatically as you type.

Oddly enough, we also think our way of browsing can be faster, as well. You can have your answer before you even finish typing in the name you’re looking for! If you’re really opposed to all those authors’ first names, start by tapping the space bar to filter most of them out. The process is really versatile. Check out this short tutorial and give it another chance.

Don’t read Dutch yet? Shame on you! And shame on us, too.     

But, we are committed to buying English translations of Dutch authors when we see them available. We have three terrific novels to start off with:

Simon Vestdijk’s The Garden Where the Brass Band Played, Harry Mulisch’s Siegfried, and Cees Nooteboom’s Lost Paradise.

Dutch Grandmaster Hans Ree is not a novelist but a prolific and respected chess journalist. The Human Comedy of Chess is his first book to be translated into English.

If you’re reading this in English and you don’t read Dutch, chances are your Croatian isn’t too good, either.  We’re pleased to offer the English translation of our fellow expat Amsterdamer Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry Of Pain.

To read more about any of these books, just follow the links to our catalog. To learn more about the authors, you can follow these links to their biographies on Wikipedia: Simon Vestdijk, Harry Mulisch, Cees Nooteboom, Hans Ree, Dubravka Ugresic.

We’ve gotten a lot of books in recently, or should I say that we’ve got a lot of boxes of books in recently? We’ll find out just how many books are in those boxes as time allows!   

We should draw your attention to the great fiction titles that we’ve just received, including three novels by Phillip Roth and work by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Peter Handke. Check out New Arrivals. And we are particularly pleased with a good assortment of terrific titles on astronomy and space exploration from Cambridge University Press that we now have on hand at really big discounts.

We put a catalog of children’s books up on the web today. We certainly hope that you enjoy looking through it but we are particularly hopeful that you will use our Browse page to get at it. One of the neat things available there is the ability to comparison shop by following the link to Google Books. We think you’ll be pleased with the results.