Ecco Ecco Ecco (1 Viewer)

[Rekrab]

I was at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon today, a gigantic new and used bookstore, and the Bukowski section was almost all Ecco releases. There were maybe only two Black Sparrow Press editions out of 50 books. I've been anticipating the day when the BSP editions would dry up, disappear from the general used market (they'll always be available in the rare market), and it looks like it's almost here. I find the Ecco editions soulless. They look like counterfeit Black Sparrows. Same designs but on crappy paper. Lousy. After I realized the huge mistake I made in selling most of my Buk collection in the 1980s, I went out and bought all the BSP titles again, whereever I could find them, new or used, first or 20th printing, whatever, just to have one of each title in that familiar, beloved format. I'm so glad I did. The only items at Powells today of collector interest were a BSP first paperback of SHAKESPEARE NEVER DID THIS -- haven't seen that in years -- at $45, and one of the New Years Greetings at $9. I should mention they have a rare books room that has highend stuff. But mostly it was just the vanilla Eccos. This made me think of how diverse it was way back when I first got into Buk. You'd find anything and everything in good used bookshops like Powells, and cheap. Probably the coolest thing I saw back then was a long row of maybe twenty copies of POEMS WRITTEN BEFORE JUMPING OUT OF AN 8 STORY BUILDING, all brand new, at $2 a throw. This was at Powells. It was the Litmus 1975 edition, with the light blue cover. I bought one, later sold it, need it again. My best find in an all new bookshop was also in Portland, 1970s, when I found 3 mint copies of CRUCIFIX IN A DEATH HAND, at issue price of $7.50. Even then, a great bargain. I bought one (should have gotten all three), later sold it for $50 (dumb), but later lucked into the gift of a second mint copy, which I thankfully did not sell. And the little mags you would find back then were incredible. Sometime I'll tell you about how a $600 gold Cadillac led to my starting my original Buk collection, but this post is already long enough. An old guy muttering about what the world has come to...Ecco my ass. Spend a little on better paper, Ecco, please. Honor the writer who's lining you pockets. You'll sell more copies and get richer yet.

David

 

[mjp]

Honor the writer who's lining you pockets.

I agree wholeheartedly that there is a difference in feel, as stupid as that sounds, between the BS and Ecco editions. I would disagree though that Ecco is making any substantial money on Bukowski's work. Substantial to you and I, yes, but remember, this is HarperCollins. They deal with books that sell a million (or more) copies. I think Bukowski is chicken feed to them. What's interesting is they have a mandate somewhere, at some corporate level, to maintain a catalog of literature. Maybe to counteract all the crap they publish, I don't know.

Yeah, Ecco/HarperCollins will make money publishing Bukowski, but really, for a giant publisher like that to have an interest in keeping Bukowski in print is kind of amazing, and speaks to an actual love of books over there, and not just money.

 

[Olaf]

I am not sure if you are aware of this but Charles Bukowski has sold milliosn of books all over the world. Many times...

 

[Rekrab]

mjp: you might have something there. I never even considered that Ecco might be doing it for anything besides the money, but perhaps they are trying to class up their catalog. And Olaf's right: Buk's sold zillions of copies. The Ecco books do have a feeling of being a token effort, of putting them out but skimping on the details. Maybe that's short term and they'll get tired of pikers like us taking potshots at them and upgrade to a product they can be proud of. Sure, when pigs fly.

David

 

[oneiros]

Now now.

I am one of the younger generation Buk fans, and I find the Ecco editions to be fine. What's so wrong with the paper? I have a BSP first printing of Pulp, and the paper in that is actually worse than on, for example, Factotum (Ecco edition).

And when it's mentioned that HarperCollins deal with titles selling in the millions, I think Rekrab meant millions of copies per year. Not in the last forty.

Face it; Bukowski is not mainstream. And thank heavens for that! The mainstream world is rotten, and we all know it.

 

[cirerita]

B is kind of a mainstream POET if we compare his poetry book sales to any other poet's.

 

[oneiros]

Yeah, but poetry is not mainstream.
This line I write solely so that I am not one of those guys who only post one liners.
This one as well.
Hah, now this is actually getting somewhere!
Oh yeah, baby.

Yeah, ok, I'll just go and make my macaroni now.

 

[Rekrab]

When I whine about the paper in Ecco editions, I'm thinking mainly about the cover stock. Black Sparrow Press spoiled us old fans with that heavy, art quality stock, with it's richness of texture and appearance. There's nothing inherently wrong with Ecco's cover stock. It's slick, flat, semi-glossy like many other trade editions. Okay, if that's all you've ever known. But if you've grown to love the BSP editions, Ecco is a comedown.

Buk is mainstream now, no doubt about it. How many films have been made already? That in itself makes him mainstream, as with Philip K. Dick. Poetry is almost by definition not mainstream, as a genre, but Buk is the exception to that rule. He sells and sells and sells.

Does anyone know how many copies of Bukowski Ecco sells per year? The last figure I saw was Black Sparrows' sales, and that was ages ago.

Now I need to do some real work today...

David

 

[mjp]

I am not sure if you are aware of this but Charles Bukowski has sold milliosn of books all over the world. Many times...

Yes, I am aware of that. I'm also aware that the first paperback editions of his books were typically put out in printings of 5000, as opposed to a mass market title that might have a first printing of 200,000 (or in some cases, many times that).

My point was not that Bukowski doesn't sell books, of course he does. I was just pointing out that in a huge publishing conglomerate like HC/Ecco, his sales are small potatoes, and the likes of Fante and Bowles, even smaller. So what is Ecco's motivation to publish these books? It can't be purely financial.

Just my take. I'm not an expert on the publishing business. Maybe you can make tremendous profits publishing 100's of books with small sales for each one. Seems more likely though that the big commercial titles pay the way for the small titles. similar to the way the film and music industries have always operated.

 

[Olaf]

In fairness I do believe that the Black Sparrow Press editions are far superior in design than the mass market paper backs. This is not inherenly problematic. The sad thing is...as is true with all mass market comodities...is that you loose the rarity of the design.

The highly stylisied almost craft copies of Buk from Black Sparrow Press...lend the work and extra appeal, the chapbook come homemade quality to those earlier books. It's a shame they don't always sell Bukowskis books in that style.

Bukowski must sell relatively small quantities compared to say The Da Vinci Bloody Code! But I'm sure he still sells in steady flow...

Mind you, we can reassured, that selling millions of books, does not necessarily mean that what has been read has been understood.

 

[Bukfan]

When I whine about the paper in Ecco editions, I'm thinking mainly about the cover stock. Black Sparrow Press spoiled us old fans with that heavy, art quality stock, with it's richness of texture and appearance. There's nothing inherently wrong with Ecco's cover stock. It's slick, flat, semi-glossy like many other trade editions. Okay, if that's all you've ever known. But if you've grown to love the BSP editions, Ecco is a comedown.

You?re so right! I could?nt agree more! The BS book covers had texture. The Ecco editions are slick and the pages are thinner. A real mainstream product. A comedown? - you bet!

 

[HenryChinaski]

You'd find anything and everything in good used bookshops like Powells, and cheap. Probably the coolest thing I saw back then was a long row of maybe twenty copies of POEMS WRITTEN BEFORE JUMPING OUT OF AN 8 STORY BUILDING, all brand new, at $2 a throw.

yep yep, this is very true.

I still have a little price tag sticker on the inside of my 1st Ed. of Dangling In The Tournefortia and it reads....$6.95

that shows you how much the prices have shot up...because I also have a very late edition of Play The Piano Drunk....with a price tag sticker on the back that reads...$22.95.

I guess it could be different prices for different bookstores but that's a huge difference. That, time, and Hanks death are the biggest factors in the prices.

 

[Rekrab]

I've been feeling somwhat guilty for trashing Ecco Press. It's felt like a cheap shot, somehow wrongheaded. I think what I don't like about the Ecco editions us that they aren't Black Sparrow Press. I have that insane allegiance to BSP, even to the paper they use on the wrappers (I prefer their trade paperbacks to the hardcovers, for some reason...maybe force of habit). Anyway, it's no crime not being BSP. So I'm making a pledge not to bash Ecco unnecessarily. After all, they are publishing new Bukowski material. That's the important thing. I'll get used to their bindings and printing. There, I feel better already.

David

 

[grahamcooke]

Be glad you don't live in IRL/UK, where the main publishers of Bukowski are Virgin. Their editions are very cheap compared the the BS or ECCO ones. And they give them stupid titles like "New Poems Book One". Sometimes they split one healthy collection over two books so you spend more. And they are squashed up in printing, poems start a few lines down from the previous one, rather than on a new page. Both BS and ECCO are a pleasure to read compared to these cheap re-hashes. I have to get every new book imported through my bookstore. The strange thing is, even when imported, they work out about the same prive as the Virgin editions. Hmm.

G.

 

[Rekrab]

Yes, I've seen those new UK editions, with their bland titles and cheap-shit look to them. I guess that's how we know Buk has really arrived as a major writer: shoddy mass market editions. The publishers know the books will sell no matter what, on the power of his name alone, so they put very little into production niceties. By the way, I was killing time in a Barnes and Noble bookstore this weekend and discovered that some of the newer Ecco editions have a better paper cover stock than the first ones did. It's textured, more like the old Black Sparrow Press paperbacks. Ecco must have heard the complaints. Also, they have back cover blurbs and poem excerpts, and ads in the back pages for other Ecco Bukowksi titles. Funny how shit changes when you aren't paying close attention, so I'll have to keep checking the Ecco releases out (I mean the ones I already own...of course I have to get each new Ecco Buk title). I've decided it's okay that the Ecco books aren't as nice as the Black Sparrows. As much as I hate change in any form, it's a fact of life and I just have to accept it. Ecco is just one more change.

 

[hoochmonkey9]

I like most of the Ecco hardcovers. maybe not up to BSP standards, but Come On In! is a good looking book.

 

[Joseph K]

Hey guys, did you know google search for "bukowski writing ecco" brings up this entry higher than the HarperCollins website? What's that? You don't care? Well, I don't blame you....

 

[mjp]

This forum and the bukowski.net site have a lot of "authority" in the eyes of Google search, so I'm not surprised. Google looks at hundreds of things, but what they are mainly concerned with are relevance, content and authority (or the 50 elements that go in to what they call authority). Those three things weigh the most heavily because their goal is to give searchers useful links. They don't always succeed, but that's their goal.

I doubt that HarperCollins is sweating over where they rank in Google search results, but I'm still glad we're considered more relevant. ;)

 

[Bukfan]

And Wikipedia even mentions our timeline under external links, but they don't mention Bukowski.net being the most extensive Bukowski website on the net.

 

[mjp]

They kept deleting links to the site for a long time, I'm surprised it's there now. Even though a lot of the info in that "article" comes from the site. I maintain that Wikipedia is a steaming turd of turdiness, and will maintain that until I die.

 

[Bukfan]

Maybe they forgot the link is to bukowski.net because they´ve renamed it Timeline of Bukowski's life and publications.
Not mentioning Bukowski.net by name is indeed an act of 1st degree turdiness. I´ll never understand why they don't want to have that information somewhere in the article for the benefit of their readers. Then again, I´m not a psychiatrist.

 

[mjp]

It isn't because of this site and whether or not they include it that I think Wikipedia is worthless, but it's a good example of why. If you trust the crowd, then it's great. Enjoy it. If you don't, you might want to take the whole site with a grain of salt.

 

[Bukfan]

Right, you can trust the information on Wikipedia 100% because there's errors in some (many?) of their articles.
No wonder, Bukowski did´nt trust the crowd.

 

[Joseph K]

The cycle of what gets used in Wikipedia is kind of interesting. There was a story about George Melly - writer and singer - who got seriously ill in his last years. It was common knowledge and mentioned on TV/radio and his son added a brief line about it to Melly's Wikipedia page. Editors removed it because it had no print source. It was replaced and deleted several times until the illness turned up in a newspaper article... based on the (deleted) Wikipedia entry. Only at that point would Wikipedia allow it to be re-added to the Wikipedia page.....

 

[zobraks]

Sometime I'll tell you about how a $600 gold Cadillac led to my starting my original Buk collection

How about now?