Okay, in the larger scale of things, this is clearly not a big problem. I mean, it’s not like losing all your keys and having to spend the evening huddled under the garage roof waiting for someone to save you from the cold and dark (done that - lately) or anything. But it’s still a head scratcher.
I’m talking about autographing. Nobody teaches authors Autographing 101. You’re just supposed to figure it out. For some reason, I have these superstitious beliefs about how to sign a book. As well as putting the recipient’s name (if desired) and a message (also optional), I feel it’s crucial that I put the place, the date, and my own signature. For another unknown reason, I think I have to cross out the printed version of my name on the title page and sign my own name (plus date, place, etc.) on that same page. It’s idiosyncratic to me, because lots of writers do it completely differently.
I got to wondering today what the autographing range was. So I started trolling my bookcases looking for examples. My shelves are alphabetized and divided into fiction and nonfiction (plus poetry and kids’ books), so I only got as far as G. (If that seems strangely organized for such an obviously unorganized person, I’ll mention here that my significant other is a former library type; she’s very, very good at the alphabet, among many other skills…) And I didn’t check every single book, so that means I no doubt missed some. I can’t decide if it’s cool that the autographed/dedicated ones are hidden from sight (fun easter egg for anyone who bothers to open the cover) or sad that the special dedications are more or less lost to memory.
Either way, here are some photos, with comments. You can click to make them BIG…
Caroline Adderson’s A History of Forgetting. Caroline signed this English edition for me after I’d reviewed the Canadian edition. Caroline’s the only other person I’ve found (apart from me) so far who crosses out her own printed name to put in her handwritten version - though my friend the poet Jacqueline Turner writes her name directly over top of the printed version. How cool is that?
Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx & Crake. A signature, nothing more. Not surprising this is the same author who’s invented the LongPen so she can avoid signing F2F altogether.
Wayson Choy’s
All That Matters. There’s a lovely bit of text/picture happening in the lower left.
The first of three Douglas Coupland’s. This is for his
Generation X. Go read this book right now. This is from when he signed books by tracing the outline of his hand.
Coupland #2.
Hey Nostradamus! Notice the use of “Hey!” in the dedication. Clever, huh? Sometimes authors fall back on riffing on the title when they’re getting short of creativity - not that I’m complaining. I’m not.
This is the last Coupland. It’s his biography of Canadian hero
Terry Fox. The second autograph/dedication is Terry’s brother Darrell. If your name were Darrell and you signed things “Fab” in many parts of the world, you’d clearly be gay. But Darrell (who’s a super-nice and dedicated guy) is from Coquitlam, where irony hasn’t yet been invented, so he really just means I’m nice too.
My friend Ivan Coyote’s book of stories,
Loose End. I don’t know how many Johns she knows.
Michael Cunningham is le grand fromage of American “serious” contemporary novelists. And fittingly, he wrote a novel-length inscription for
Specimen Days. (These things are relative, of course.)
Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is super-strange and eerie. Anyone who likes Runnerland would probably dig that, though it’s not meant for kids. (I’m not really sure who it is meant for…) His Only Revolutions is so odd you can read it front to back or back to front. I often enjoy very insincere inscriptions - they’re less likely to be untrue, if you see what I mean, because they’re already patently untrue. And yes, I’ll always be “there” in the sense that it’s very unlikely that Mark and I will ever by simultaneously “here” again, that is, in the same place at the same time. Plus, I’m a sucker for coloured markers.
Roddy Doyle, author of many novels made into movies. That’s about as “just the facts, Ma’am” as you could hope for
Oh, Play That Thing. (Isn’t that a great title?) Super-famous/-successful authors can’t be cramping their hands with long heartfelt tracts. Or so I imagine…
Dave Eggers, boy-genius author of
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, painted this for me using paints, markers, and glitter-glue. It’s clearly the coolest dedication I own, plus what he wrote is so kind (see, probably, the insincerity above, but still…) I loved that book and when I wrote a cover story on him and this book, we reprinted the entire Q&A version of the interview on the cover in four-point type, which is very small, in very narrow columns. It was the coolest cover I’ve ever been involved in, and won a design award, as it deserved. That has little to do with this, of course.
Sarah Ellis is such a great writer. The first time we met was for
Back of Beyond. You can tell she’s a tidy person from her inscription.
Two by George Fetherling, who was called Douglas then, with a biography of George Woodcock called
The Gentle Anarchist. Note the “in”. As with Wayson Choy above, I think it’s pretty clever when the author figures out a way to include the title in the dedication. I’m thinking about stealing that for a generation of Runnerland dedications, a kind of limited series maybe…
The second Fetherling, though
Jive Talk is mostly about George, not by him. Good poetic scansion to the inscription. You could dance to it. Self-deprecation never goes out of style…
Last one I could find. William Gibson, “father of cyberpunk” as they like to call him, with
Pattern Recognition. This is what I like: something that makes reference to where we were (a square green room - the same room Atwood and I were in, though you’d never know it from hers), some best wishes, and a signature. A date more specific than “2003″ would be nice; you’d think someone so obsessed with the future would be aware of the need to archive, but see comments of famous authors’ wrist fatigue above.
So there you have it. If I ever find the motivation, maybe I’ll do H-N sometime and/or post a sample of my own style…
“Luza and I are looking for his fathership. He left him a year ago. He disappeared to a place called Costa Oeste, which is millions of kiloarms away. We’re thinking you might know a way to get there turboblast.” That’s Nathan Blue, resident of Plutonia, talking. He’s a lot more interesting, he feels, than Nathan Blue, ordinary kid with a father who won’t grow up or even phone (strangely similar to his invisible best friend Luza’s dad). Stressed and deeply in denial about his deadbeat dad’s inability to parent, Nathan retreats further and further into the world of his imagination, even as he befriends a tramp who suggests that riding the rails will change both their fortunes. Nathan’s inventive language is fun, and his battles with his mother and teachers are vivid and true. The grittier aspects – the absent father, the prospect of running away with a homeless alcoholic – may turn off more sensitive readers.
