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A Book With Yellow Pages
Sep. 27th, 2006 07:43 amThere are a lot of writers on my friends list, and they are in mourning for John M. Ford this week. I am not a writer, not a professional one of that type. I never knew, never even met, Mr. Ford.
But I am a member of that faceless, often annoying, and usually tasteless mass of humanity known as the book-buying public and so, on the desk in front of me, is a book. The production values weren't the best, so the pages are yellowed. It was a favorite in its day, so the edges of the covers are chipped and white. There's a wrinkle down the spine but, amazingly for its age, the pages are still tight to the binding. It is, in short, still readable.
It lives in a bottom shelf of my cluttered library; I had to dig to find it, and as I did so, I realized that my facile comments earlier this week of "I never bought another TOS tie-in, they couldn't be so entertaining" was an utter lie, because there they were, all the old favorites. The books on the tie-in shelf, particularly the ones old enough to have gone yellow, are all favorites. They had to be, or they wouldn't have been worth packing up for the multiple movings that finally led me to Holly House.
When I first heard about Mr. Ford's passing, I had a moment of vague sadness, but I didn't associate his name with anything in particular; not until people started listing titles. I only recognized two of them, and those two rocked me.
101 Stories, a printout of which resides in my 9/11 file and which still brings me to tears.
And a battered, yellow, beloved book that was worth packing and unpacking lots of times.
I'm not an SF writer. I'm more of an editor than a professional writer at all. But I'm a reader, and so the best memorial I can give John M. Ford is momentarily put down the Doctor Who and the knitting, to dig through the detritus of forgotten fandoms, and to pick up an old, fragile mass market paperback and begin:
The Officer's Mess of the starship USS Enterprise was a small, rather cozy room...
But I am a member of that faceless, often annoying, and usually tasteless mass of humanity known as the book-buying public and so, on the desk in front of me, is a book. The production values weren't the best, so the pages are yellowed. It was a favorite in its day, so the edges of the covers are chipped and white. There's a wrinkle down the spine but, amazingly for its age, the pages are still tight to the binding. It is, in short, still readable.
It lives in a bottom shelf of my cluttered library; I had to dig to find it, and as I did so, I realized that my facile comments earlier this week of "I never bought another TOS tie-in, they couldn't be so entertaining" was an utter lie, because there they were, all the old favorites. The books on the tie-in shelf, particularly the ones old enough to have gone yellow, are all favorites. They had to be, or they wouldn't have been worth packing up for the multiple movings that finally led me to Holly House.
When I first heard about Mr. Ford's passing, I had a moment of vague sadness, but I didn't associate his name with anything in particular; not until people started listing titles. I only recognized two of them, and those two rocked me.
101 Stories, a printout of which resides in my 9/11 file and which still brings me to tears.
And a battered, yellow, beloved book that was worth packing and unpacking lots of times.
I'm not an SF writer. I'm more of an editor than a professional writer at all. But I'm a reader, and so the best memorial I can give John M. Ford is momentarily put down the Doctor Who and the knitting, to dig through the detritus of forgotten fandoms, and to pick up an old, fragile mass market paperback and begin:
The Officer's Mess of the starship USS Enterprise was a small, rather cozy room...
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