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FREE sample excerpt from Secret Histories
Posted by Paul Raven on May 29th, 2009 at 12:58
If you’ve been following along here recently, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been talking about Powers: Secret Histories a lot – and with good reason.
Not only is Secret Histories easily the most ambitious book that PS Publishing has ever produced, but it’s a unique artefact – not to mention a staggering labour of love and obsession for its editor John Berlyne, and a monument to the work of one of the most influential living writers of genre fiction. I had the fortune to meet Tim Powers at the launch event in London a little while ago, who remarked in a flattered but slightly rueful fashion that it struck him as “the sort of book that only ever gets written about people who’ve already died”…
We’re so proud of Secret Histories that we want everyone to know what it’s like. So we’ve made up a 24-page high resolution sampler PDF file that you can download for free.
It includes a chunk of the bibliography section that lists every edition of Powers’ seminal The Anubis Gates, as well as China Mieville’s tribute to the novel, examples of Dick Berger’s exclusive artwork, excerpts and notes and doodles by Powers himself, and much more – and it still represents just a fraction of what the book itself contains.
And it’s totally free; you can download it as many times as you like, you can send copies to friends, you can even print it off for yourself (if you’ve got a decent colour printer). Copyright of the work remains under the ownership of its creators, though – this isn’t a Creative Commons release, just a gift from us to you. So click on the link below to download; it’s a shade over 10MegaBytes, so it might take a minute or two on a slow connection, but it’ll be well worth the wait.
Download the Secret Histories Sampler – 10.2Mb PDF file
And that’s it – no strings attached! Enjoy!
Of course, should you find your appetite whetted, you can order yourself a copy of the physical book. The trade edition stands alone as a 600-page behemoth, but for the die-hard collector there’s the slipcased edition – which comes with The Waters Deep, Deep, Deep, an 80-page unfinished novel bound separately, plus one signed poster-size reproduction of Dick Berger’s artwork – or the deluxe and extremely limited three-volume edition – which adds a second of Dick’s prints and a 500-page hardback-bound facsimile of the original manuscript for The Anubis Gates. Yes, the actual manuscript, doodles, scribblings and notes and all, the sort of document that only an editor would ever usually see. There’s only five of the deluxe edition left though, so make your move fast to avoid missing out.
Here are the links to the catalogue pages:
- Secret Histories – ultra-limited deluxe three-volume edition – £495 [US$742.50 approx]
- Secret Histories – slipcased two-volume edition – £195 [US$292.50 approx]
- Secret Histories – limited single-volume edition – £40 [US$60.00 approx]
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:34 am
A bit of information about what the book is about might not be amiss…
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Sorry, Jay – that’s why I linked to the catalogue pages, as I didn’t want to spend ages talking about the book before mentioning the giveaway!
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
The links aren’t working Paul!Each one brings up “Error: HTTP404 – Page Not Found”
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Hmmm – they were fine when I wrote the post; looks like the URLs changed for some reason. I’ve changed them so they work again, but I think I need to have a word with Mike about this…