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sfbooks
P. O. Box 2419
Vashon WA 98070
Howdy, I'm Alice Bentley,
and for fifteen years I owned and ran The Stars Our Destination science
fiction specialty bookstore in Chicago. I also bought and ran Weinberg
Books, a specialty mail order bookstore run by Bob Weinberg for
decades. As part of that I published a monthly catalog that listed
everything that had arrived in the previous month.
Now I’ve moved on, selling both businesses to DreamHaven
Books and relocating to the
Seattle area. I’m not really interested in opening another
bookshop - for one thing Seattle is particularly well supplied - and
the growth of the internet has meant that people have more options for
both information and purchases than they did when I opened in the
‘80s.
But one of the things I really miss about the shop was going through the listings of upcoming books, spotting the authors I follow or just letting someone know their favorite series was about to have a new addition. Irreplaceable resources like the quarterly Upcoming Books listing in Locus and the many fine websites maintained by publishers, bookstores and readers help get the information out there, but don’t provide the all in one place buyers overview I hanker for.
So here is my first stab
at a newsletter, listing soon-to-be-upcoming books, in this case
January 2007. Not a review zine, although the occasional review may
well sneak in, but more of a overall listing with the publisher,
format, price and ISBN as well as a short description. The goal is to
provide a handy and not too overwhelming reference to help navigate
through the roughly 100 books that come out each month.