How to use this Page

I'm in Cologne, in Germany, in a hotel that seems to have been built
inside a giant water tower, and am paying an astonishing amount for
internet access. I don't have flu so far, and have had no travel
disasters.

There's a reading and a signing tomorrow -- details at:

http://www.litcologne.de/va/160307/gaimankoester.php

Dear Neil,Today I wandered into an EMPiK bookstore and picked
up a paper informing about you booksigning in Kraków and Warsaw. (for
wchich I can't wait, by the way.)There was an article about you, and
it said that you're "linked to Poland" because your grandparents came
from Lodz. It that true, or did they completely make it up?I live in
Lodz, so you can pretty much imagine my amazement.Love from,Sylwia
G

My paternal great-grandfather was thrown out of Lodz, where the family
owned a department store, for being the black sheep of the family. I'm
not certain whether my grandfather was born there or born in Belgium
on the way to England. (I do know my grandfather never had a passport,
and was, until he died, considered a "stateless person", which is the
kind of thing I would have put into Mr Punch if I'd known it
then.)

Hey Neil:After some investigative work, I determined that (1) a while
ago, you said that the reason you don't have a LibraryThing account is
that you don't have the time and (2) recently, you have been blogging
about how you are entering your book collection into a database. So I
said to myself, wouldn't it be sweet if Neil were to put his library
on LibraryThing? Because even if he doesn't have time to tag most of
those books, we could still see what he owns. Which would be beyond
sweetness.

That's definitely the plan. Tim offered me a LibraryThing account or two
ages ago, and when everything's on a database I'm looking forward to
importing it to LibraryThing and getting it up there.

This isn't a question, I just thought I'd let you know that on
one of [adult swim]'s commercials last night, in which they bemoaned
the death of Captain America and exclaimed how Stan Lee would never do
something so stupid an attempt to be "deep and meaningful", they
attached a "P.S. Neil Gaiman already has deep and meaningful covered".
Or it said something like that. All right, hope you have a lovely
day!

And they show Futurama. (People have asked if I'm jealous of
Alan Moore for being on The Simpsons, and I'm not. If he were
a head in a jar in Futurama, on the other hand...)


Hi Neil,I read this blog nearly daily and have no idea how I
missed info on "M is for Magic" and "Interworld." What are these
books? Are the stories in "...Magic" found in your other collections
or are they new?And have no clue about "Interworld." Please help out a
longtime fan. Cheers,Greg Trax

Interworld is a novel I wrote with Michael Reaves in about
1998. We wrote it because we had an idea for an animated series, and
we kept explaining it to TV people who got confused, so we wrote a
treatment, which seemed to confuse them even more, so we wrote a novel
-- a sort of transdimensional romp. (First mentioned on this blog at
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002/01/handed-in-narrative-draft-of-ramayana.asp.)

You can see the cover up at http://www.jamesjean.com/illustrations/interworld.html

M is for Magic is for school libraries and such. Most of the
stories in it have been collected, although some of them aren't easy
to find (like http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/shortstories/blackbirdstory)
and there's one story that's never been collected ("How to Sell the
Ponti Bridge" from 1984) and a new one, "The Witch's Headstone" that
will appear first in the Dann/ Dozois WIZARDS collection.

...


I now have a corporate website! I've always wanted a corporate
website. When I was a small boy and adults would ask what I'd like for
my birthday I would sigh and say "Can I have a corporate website?" and
they would explain, in that irritating way that adults had, that I
wasn't a corporation and the interwebs had not yet been invented and
frankly they were still reeling from culture shock from the arrival of
transistor radios and what the hell was wrong with a tub of silly
putty and a Whizzer and Chips Annual anyway, and no, I couldn't have a
catapult either, you can put someone's eye out with one of those.

Most of the content isn't there yet, but it's evolving http://www.blankcorporation.com/
for the curious. And it wasn't written by me either, but is just the
sort of thing I wanted it to be.


...

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Bees-How-Keep-Them/dp/0395883245

Hello-- Sue Hubbell's book is a wonderful first book for new
beekeepers -- or for people who think they might want to keep bees.
Sue has a deep empathy for bees and approaches relating to them with
such grace, She therefore often does things differently from the bee
textbooks or procedures of the commercial bee keepers. She
demonstrates a humane and bee-centric approach to beekeeping.

As new beekeepers, Sue's perspective was the most valuable thing we
gleaned from all the books we read on keeping bees. Her love and deep
appreciation for bees left a lasting impression on us and in how we
relate to our bees. And it is a fun read for "arm chair" beekeepers as
well.

Our local bee club (www.pugetsoundbees.org) has
"beginner" bee keeping classes before each meeting. The instructor
looks out at the room with a few beginners amid scores of veteran
beekeepers and dutifully asks "Are there any beginners here tonight?"
and invariably the entire assembly raises their hands.
Good luck -- it is so much fun!

I read the Hubbell book on the plane, and loved it.

Lots of nice messages from people letting me know about today's New York Times, of which this is an example:

Hi Neil,
Just in case no-one has made you aware of this or you haven't seen it yourself, your son is quoted in an article about Google's bus service. You can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html?ex=1331182800&en=272d04d67d29e1f4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Sounds like he's found himself an awesome place to work! Christopher

It does, doesn't it? (And the people at Google fixed the gmail bug for me, and did stuff to make up for it.) I have rather wonderful children.

Maddy, mind you, while still wonderful, has gone down with influenza, something that we've sort of been waiting for since her two best friends went down with it earlier this week. So we're watching Howl's Moving Castle on the sofa together right now, which is a sensible sort of thing to do when someone is sick and feverish.

Not really a question - I just saw your cuecat/readerware comment. I find for the older books that using the library of congress number works very well. You have to change from just the default amazon service, and you often have to muck with the edition more, but it's a great shortcut for getting author names and titles and whatnot in.Failing an LC number, Amazon also has a surprising number of old editions through their bookseller associates, as does ABE. I find trolling those sites a lot more productive (not to mention interesting) than hand-cataloging.

Good suggestion, and I was thrilled to discover it worked.

I'm finding entering books curiously addictive. I'll pick up a few books and nip into the library to scan them between doing other things.

I've got a sort of a theory about the library -- there are so many books downstairs and scattered around the house that the upstairs library won't really make much of a dent in them. So I've decided that the books I want in the upstairs library are simply ones that I (or someone else a lot like me) might want on shelves if I was just going to pick something up from the shelves and sit down somwhere comfortable and read for an hour. So right now I'm very aware that half the books we've brought up and scanned or entered will go back downstairs again.


Hello Neil, I was wondering if you knew the for sure, official release dates for "Interworld" and "M is for Magic". Amazon is showing July 1st, while Barnes & Noble's website is showing last week of June. Both are listed in the current Diamond Previews which would suggest more like May.Thanks, Cal

I had no idea, but I asked Clarissa Hutton at HarperChildrens, and she said,

The PUBLICATION date for both is 7/1, while the on-sale date is 6/26. So both Amazon & B&N are sort of right, they're just using different bases. Our official pub dates are always the beginning of the month, while release (when the books ship from the warehouse) and on-sale (when the stores need to have the books on-shelf) vary depending on print dates.

Hope this helps.

And this came in recently too:

Hi Neil,

Hope all's well with you. You might be interested to know that The House Called Hadlows will be out next month and that we've added an excerpt from the first chapter to the website - there's a link on this page: http://www.fidrabooks.com/forthcoming.html. I know this is cheeky, but we have had lots of interest via your support for the books and if you were to mention it on your blog that would be fantastic. And you never know - if we sell enough I might be able to wrestle the unpublished third book from Victoria's grasp!!

Best wishes

Vanessa
www.fidrabooks.com

Consider it posted. (I talked about The House Called Hadlows at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002/10/i-finished-reading-house-called.asp)

Several people wrote to alert me to this -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6430489.stm , and its consequences for various internet radio stations.

Hello, Mr. Neil Gaiman sir.
There are some rumors that on the 17th of March you will be at the 7th Warszawskie Spotkania Komiksowe (which translates to Warsaw Comics Festival or something similar) in, lo and behold, Warsaw. It's not listed in the "Where's Neil" section but it's been reported by some Polish comic book news portals. Any luck it's true? Izydor Ingwar I.

It's true -- and it should be up on Where's Neil soon -- I'll be there from 5-7 pm, I believe.

Hi Neil, I've seen you mention the new third-floor library in several posts. As someone who is slowly infiltrating every corner of his house with books, I'm always interested in seeing other people's libraries, bookcases and the like. Any chance we'll get a peek at the new library? Blu

Good idea. I'll take some pictures when I get a spare minute.

Lots of people wrote to let us know that yesterday's mystery Russian alien was... a guitarfish (although there was healthy disagreement on exactly which kind).

Hi Neil,

I'm a big fan of your work, and I am a big fan of ampersands, so when I decided to get a tattoo of the latter, I wanted the one from the softcover editions of "Preludes & Nocturnes" and "Fables & Reflections". The only problem is, I don't know which font they're in. So, instead of feverishly searching (actually, I already did that), I decided to go right to the source. Do you know what font it's in?

While I didn't know, I figured Dave McKean would, so I asked him, and he said,

The answer to your blogger question about the ampersands:
Which PB editions? Since DC have released 57 versions, I'm not sure which one you mean. If you mean the recent SANDMAN LIBRARY editions, I have a copy of Fables... and this lovely scrolly fancy ampersand is set in MISSIONARY, a font available from Emigre designed by the brilliant Miles Newlyn (if memory serves me correctly). If you don't mean this edition, then can i recommend this empersand anyway, it's the best one.
...

Seeing the Village Voice has just leaked it, and a few of you have written to ask about it, yes, I will be a Guest at the PEN World Voices Festival at the end of April. I can't give you any other details right now, but the curious should go to http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1096 and sign up for the Festival mailing list for more information.

I just finished Peter Beagle's I See By My Outfit, a book I've wanted to read since I was a teenage Beagle boy and learned of its existence in the back of A Fine and Private Place, and I loved it. It's the true story of a two man road trip across America on motor scooters, and it's as much a journey across time now as it is across space: funny, heartwarming and wise. The kind of book you feel a better person for having read.

Too much fun is being had with Readerware (http://www.readerware.com/rwFeat.html) and a cuecat scanner, as books are brought up to the new library upstairs and scanned in or ISBNd or entered by hand before being put on the shelves. Mostly I wish, given the number of old books here, that someone had thought of ISBNs before 1966... And then I wish that the library upstairs was three times the size, as I don't think it's going to make the dent in the basement library that I hoped it was going to.