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On author's deaths and the effect on their book prices ...

I know this is a rather morbid topic, but I don't think any booksellers can deny that there seems to be an association between the death of an author and the subsequent demand for their books. 

 

I think it might be helpful if we, as booksellers, inform each other of the deaths of any authors that may have flown under the radar.

 

You would think, given the rampant and ubiquitous social media transmitting all sorts of information, that any author's death, no matter how obscure, would not be overlooked, but I was recently shocked to discover that Theodore Hesburgh, longtime president of Notre Dame University and author of several books, passed away on February 26 at the the age of 97.  

 

Knowing his advanced age, I had been holding onto a book signed by him.  Yet, although I consider myself a fairly avid news consumer, I didn't learn of his passing until less than a week ago and that was only when I happened to flip through a month-old Catholic newspaper and saw a story about it.

 

I promptly listed the book, albeit about a month later than the ideal time, and fortunately got a bid on it.

 

However, I think it might be helpful to use this thread to inform each other of the passing of any authors.  Not everyone garners the level of attention of Tom Clancy.    

 

 

 

 

 

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poemsandpaths.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/roger-deakin-epitome-of-english.html?m=1
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Edward Albee, author of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.'

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37394714

 

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A preoccupation with the next world is a clear indication of an inability to cope credibly with this one.
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W. P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe made into the movie  Field of Dreams died at 81 due to physician-assisted suicide:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/wp-kinsella-bc-based-author-of-shoeless-joe-has...

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Jonathan Grobe
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Shimon Peres, the last of Israel’s founding fathers, and author.
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Robert M. Pirsig, Author of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ Dies at 88

 

A couple of years after this book was published a friend recommended it to me. My first thought was "Why in the world would he think that I wanted to read about motorcycle maintenance?" However, since I trusted his book recommendations, I read it and thought it was great. One of those books that I have always thought about re-reading.

 

Coincidently, my spouse and I just returned yesterday from a cross-country road trip, but by car, not motorcycle! From Penn's Woods to San Francisco to visit the West Coast son, with stops in Kansas to visit my oldest brother, to Denver, to Reno where my winnings paid for the hotel, with the return trip to Las Vegas where we had two free nights (one would have been enough), where our losses more than paid for the hotel. Then on to Dallas to visit my Aunt, Uncle and one of my cousins and her children.

 

My younger son had our days there planned so well in SF (we had been there twice before, once before children and once with children). We even was able to have lunch with our New York son who was in wine country on business and had just returned from a 3 week trip to the Orient. Our son had booked us into a grand hotel, the Claremont in Berkeley and our huge room on a top floor had incredible views.

 

While there I met a very interesting woman. We both were early risers and met by chance having coffee. Every day I learned a little bit more about her from being a nationally known speaker, to having a Lifetime movie made about her life, to finally her being the mother of a MVP. When her son accepted the award he cited her as being the 'real MVP" My sons and brothers could not believe that all the while I had been talking about this nice woman I was having morning coffee with turned out to be the mother of one of the Warriors. She was there not just for the game but ESPN was filming her and two other mothers for a special to be shown on Mother's Day. I don't watch ESPN but I will have to check it out now as well as to see if I can watch "The Real MVP". Well, sorry to go on and on but it was such a great trip and the coffee has kicked in!

 

Excerpts from New York Times: Robert M. Pirsig, Author of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ Dies at 88

 

Robert M. Pirsig, whose “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a dense and discursive novel of ideas, became an unlikely publishing phenomenon in the mid-1970s and a touchstone in the waning days of the counterculture, died on Monday at his home in South Berwick, Me. He was 88.

 

Mr. Pirsig was a college writing instructor and freelance technical writer when the novel — its full title was “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” — was published in 1974 to critical acclaim and explosive popularity, selling a million copies in its first year and several million more since. (A first novel, it would be followed by only one more, the less successful “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals,” a kind of sequel, in 1991.)

 

The novel, with its peculiar but intriguing title, ranged widely in its concerns, contemplating the relationship of humans and machines, madness and the roots of culture.

 

Todd Gitlin, a sociologist and the author of books about the counterculture, said that “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in seeking to reconcile humanism with technological progress, had been perfectly timed for a generation weary of the ’60s revolt against a soulless high-tech world dominated by a corporate and military-industrial order.

 

“There is such a thing as a zeitgeist, and I believe the book was popular because there were a lot of people who wanted a reconciliation — even if they didn’t know what they were looking for,” Mr. Gitlin said in 2013 in an interview for this obituary. “Pirsig provided a kind of soft landing from the euphoric stratosphere of the late ’60s into the real world of adult life.”

 

Mr. Pirsig’s plunge into the grand philosophical questions of Western culture remained near the top of the best-seller lists for a decade and helped define the post-hippie 1970s landscape as resoundingly, some critics have said, as Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan” helped define the 1960s.

 

Where “Don Juan” pursued enlightenment in hallucinogenic experience, “Zen” argued for its equal availability in the brain-racking rigors of Reason with a capital R. Years after its publication, it continues to be invoked by famous people when asked to name a book that affected them most deeply — among them the former professional basketball player Phil Jackson, the actors William Shatner and Tim Allen, and the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel laureate.

 

Part road-trip novel, part treatise, part open letter to a younger generation, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” unfolds as a fictionalized account of a cross-country motorcycle trip that Mr. Pirsig took in 1968 with his 11-year-old son, Christopher, and two friends.

 

. . . The literary critic George Steiner, writing in The New Yorker, described the book as “a profound, if somewhat clunky, articulation of the postwar American experience” and pronounced it worthy of comparison to “Moby-Dick” as an original American work. The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in his review, threw in a comparison to Thoreau. In London, The Times Literary Supplement called the book “disturbing, deeply moving, full of insights.”

 

(Not all reviewers were wowed. Writing in Commentary, Eva Hoffman found Mr. Pirsig’s ruminations obtuse. “Beneath the complexity of disorganization,” she said, “the picture of society which the book presents and the panaceas it offers are distressingly naïve.”)

 

One of Mr. Pirsig’s central ideas is that so-called ordinary experience and so-called transcendent experience are actually one and the same — and that Westerners only imagine them as separate realms because Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers came to believe that they were.

 

But Plato and Aristotle were wrong, Mr. Pirsig said. Worse, the mind-body dualism, soldered into Western consciousness by the Greeks, fomented a kind of civil war of the mind — stripping rationality of its spiritual underpinnings and spirituality of its reason, and casting each into false conflict with the other.

 

In his part gnomic, part mechanic’s style, Mr. Pirsig’s narrator declares that the real world is a seamless continuum of the material and metaphysical.

 

“The Buddha, the Godhead,” he writes, “resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

 

Source & rest of article: http://tinyurl.com/ljzeom9

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/robert-pirsig-dead-wrote-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-main...

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Sue Grafton, Whose Detective Novels Spanned the Alphabet, Dies at 77

 

Sue Grafton, a prolific author of detective novels known for an alphabetically titled series that began in 1982 with “A Is for Alibi,” has died on Thursday night in Santa Barbara, Calif. She was 77. Her daughter Jamie Clark, announcing the death on Friday afternoon on the author’s website and Facebook page, said Ms. Grafton had cancer and died overnight.

 

With the publication of her latest book in August, Ms. Grafton’s alphabetical series had reached “Y Is for Yesterday.”

 

“She was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows,” her daughter wrote, “and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”

 

Ms. Grafton’s husband, Steven F. Humphrey, said her illness had prevented her from making any progress on the planned final book in the series, although she did have the title. “She always said that last book would be ‘Z Is for Zero,’ ” he said. “She’d been saying that for 30 years.”

 

Sue Taylor Grafton was born on April 24, 1940, in Louisville, Ky. Her father, C. W. Grafton, was a lawyer who also wrote mystery novels, and her mother, the former Vivian Harnsberger, was a teacher. Ms. Grafton graduated from the University of Louisville in 1961 and tried but quickly abandoned a graduate program, instead moving to California.

 

Her first novel, “Keziah Dane,” was published in 1967. She helped adapt her second, “The Lolly-Madonna War” (1969), into a screenplay, and after that movie was released in 1973, she worked intermittently writing for television. A series she created, “Nurse,” ran for two seasons on CBS in the early 1980s. But she did not care for the dynamics of writing for TV and film.

 

“Ask me if I’d ever sell the film or TV rights to these books,” she said in a 2013 interview with The Minneapolis Star Tribune promoting “W Is for Wasted.” “No, I would not. I would never let those clowns get their hands on my work. They’d ruin it for everyone, me more than most.”

 

She had actually written seven novels before she began the alphabet series. “Of those, No. 4 and 5 were published,” she told The Star Tribune. “The rest are in the trash.” “A Is for Alibi” was her eighth book and, she said, “my ticket out of Hollywood.”

 

The notion of the alphabetical series, she said, was inspired by “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” Edward Gorey’s macabre 1963 rhyming book in which 26 children meet bizarre ends. “I was smitten with all those little Victorian children being dispatched in various ways,” she told The New York Times in 2015. “ ‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs; B is for Basil assaulted by bears; C is for Clara who wasted away; D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh.’ Edward Gorey was deliciously bent.”

 

Her book series features Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator, whom “A Is for Alibi” introduced this way:

 

“My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I’m thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.”

 

Ms. Grafton read the Nancy Drew books and Agatha Christie growing up, but, she said, the first book that really rocked her was Mickey Spillane’s “I, the Jury.” “After Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, what a revelation!” she said, “and it may have been the moment when the spirit of Kinsey Millhone first sparked to life.”


Source & rest of obit:


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/obituaries/sue-grafton-dies-best-selling-mystery-author.html

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Acclaimed Feminist Science Fiction Writer Ursula K. Le Guin Dies at 88

 

Ursula K. Le Guin, the award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer who explored feminist themes and was best known for her Earthsea books, has died at 88.

 

Le Guin won an honorary National Book Award in 2014 and warned in her acceptance speech against letting profit define what is considered good literature. She often criticized the “commercial machinery of bestsellerdom and prizedom” despite being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 — a rare achievement for a science fiction-fantasy writer.

 

Le Guin’s first novel was “Roncannon’s World” in 1966 but she gained fame three years later with “The Left Hand of Darkness,” which won the Hugo and Nebula awards — top science fiction prizes — and conjures a radical change in gender roles well before the rise of the transgender community.

 

Source & More: http://time.com/5115706/ursula-le-guin-dead/

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One of the best.

A beat up old library copy of 12 Quarters sold about an hour after I learned of her death.

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Tom Wolfe, the innovative journalist and author who wrote such best-selling masterpieces as "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "The Right Stuff" has passed away.

 

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/15/news/tom-wolfe-obituary/index.html


Five Essential Tom Wolfe Books You Should Read

 

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g20701943/best-tom-wolfe-books/

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Among the many books that Tom Wolfe wrote was “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968) The jacket design of the First Edition is by Milton Glaser who was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of the Arts (2009). "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" is iconic, although not as instantly recognizable as Glaser's most famous design, the "I 'heart' NY" logo, which has been referenced and copied all over the world. Glaser's cover art for the book reminded me of Peter Max.

 

"This [“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” ]is the book that put Tom Wolfe on the map. His second book follows author Ken Kesey and his followers, the Merry Pranksters, who trekked across American in a painted schoolbus. Along the way, the Pranksters encounter The Grateful Dead, the Hells Angels, and Allen Ginsberg, all while dropping LSD and expanding their consciousness. It's a seminal text in the New Journalism movement, an essential look at the '60s counterculture."

 

From NYT obit: "From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the ’60s hipster subculture,” the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary."

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Funny you mention it. Those two titles are on the shelves at the FOL, (PB) and we just had our sale so they are new donations.

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American Novelist Philip Roth, Author Of 'Portnoy's Complaint,' Dies At 85


Philip Roth, whose novel American Pastoral won a Pulitzer in 1998 but who was best-known for the controversial and explicit 1969 Portnoy's Complaint, has died at age 85.


Read More:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/23/613552180/american-novelist-philip-roth-dies-at-8...

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