Lan D. Ho!
"At least I know now how not to impress you." //
I Came to Game
June 19, 2011
Maybe the cultural marketplace makes it unlikely that we will find undiscovered treasure:1When I was fifteen and sixteen I scoured Brooklyn's used bookstores and thrift shops for the hardest-to-find [Philip K.] Dick titles, trying to complete a shelf of the thirty-seven-odd published works. This was 1979 and 1980, before Dick published his last three novels and died, and before the posthumous publication of a dozen or so manuscripts. Locating Vulcan's Hammer was a notable triumph. I'll always remember dowsing it out of a crate of moldering paperbacks that had been pushed beneath a shelf, dusting its glorious, hideous cover (Dick's biographer Lawrence Sutin describes it as occupying "deserved purgatory as half of a 1960 Ace Double") and more or less pinching myself in disbelief: Vulcan's fucking Hammer! I'd found it! Of course, then I had to go and read the damn thing. The irony is that out-of-printness served the purposes of exploring the [oeuvre] nicely: the easiest books to find, and therefore the first I'd happened to read, were mostly Dick's masterpieces ([The Man in the High] Castle, Ubik, [The Three] Stigmata [of Palmer Eldritch], Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). This was because the better books had received comparatively many reprintings, whereas the dreck was always the rarest essence. The problem nowadays is that Vintage's uniformly prestigious shelf of clean, authoritative editions disguise these natural hierarchies absolutely." (Jonathan Lethem, "You Don't Know Dick," from The Disappointment Artist, 79–80)
1 In our native culture, at least.
