Brian Lalor tells me that the entire first printing of his illustrated edition of Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol (mentioned a few weeks ago in this column) was withdrawn and shredded by its London publisher, Gerald Duckworth, "for reasons of quality control".
Well, not exactly the entire print-run - about seventy copies escaped the shredder before the publisher got to them and were sold at the launch in Kilmainham Gaol on October 17th last.
Now there's a second printing in the shops - identical, Brian says, to the pulped version, except that inside the black dust jacket common to both, the original had a canary yellow cover, while the new printing is in sky-blue.
Why mention this? Well, recently I instanced some first editions of the last few years that are fetching high prices today (Fever Pitch and Trainspotting among them), and Brian is of the opinion that anyone who bought one of the seventy copies of his Wilde book on the night is in possession of an already rare item.
Incidentally, whether you're a member of that small minority or not, you have only three days left to go along to Kilmainham and contemplate the exhibition of the originals woodcuts for the book.
Having spent the first part of Thursday evening at the launch of Diarmaid O Muirithe's A Word in Your Ear in Four Courts Press's Fumbally Court offices and the next part chatting further to the author in the congenial atmosphere of Fallon's nearby hostelry, I repaired the following day to the country with his book as company.
Splendid company it was, too, this successor to The Words We Use. Both are compiled from Diarmaid's Irish Times column, which is a weekly pleasure, but it's nice to have in permanent form the work of a man who wears his scholarship and delight in language so lightly.
I also took with me his Dictionary of Anglo-Irish, subtitled "Words and Phrases from Gaelic in the English of Ireland" and published by Four Courts last year. They're all here, those words and phrases both of great familiarity and of startling strangeness that down through the centuries have been absorbed from one language and are still being used in another, whether throughout the island as a whole or in isolated areas.
The book is a labour of love, and it's the latter that shines through its pages.
Among the awards made at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair was the Diagram Group's annual prize for Oddest Title of the Year. A tome entitled From Coherent Tunnelling to Relaxation was seriously considered, as was Attractive and Affectionate Grave Design, but the winner was The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition. Ha ha.
Declan Meade writes to say that he and some other like-minded people are planning a literary magazine which will provide "a much-needed forum for new writing".
They're calling this magazine of "poetry, short stories, etc" The Stinging Fly, they intend to bring it out six times a year (beginning next February), and they want it to be "an attractive, high-quality publication that will be sold at an affordable price in cafes and pubs as well as the usual outlets".
Obviously they're interested in submissions from those who write poetry or short stories or etc, and Declan says that these should be sent to The Stinging Fly. P.O. Box 6016, Dublin 8. "There is," he adds, "no submission fee." I should hope not.
The third IMPAC £100,000 Dublin Literary Award was launched in the Mansion House yesterday, and a list of the eligible titles for the 1998 prize was announced - including five from Irish writers.
As in previous years, the whole £100,000 will go to one book, even though many commentators (including a past winner) feel that the amount is excessive and could be better used if divided up to honour a number of books in different categories: fiction, poetry, essays, whatever.
And also as in previous years, the list seems to be weirdly out of sync with the times, singling out books you'd think should have been eligible at least a year earlier. Still, I'm glad to see Ita Daly's fine novel, Unholy Ghosts, on it - the other Irish contenders being Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Edna O'Brien's Down by the River and Colm Toibin's The Story of the Night.
Out of a phenomenal 2,740 short stories entered for this year's Ian St. James Awards, Cork writer Kevin Doyle's "Do You Like Oranges?" is among the ten shortlisted for the overall £2,000 prize, the result of which will be announced next April.
The 36-year-old industrial chemist has previously had stories published in the Cuirt Journal and the Sligo magazine Flaming Arrows, and whether he wins the Ian St. James or not, his story will feature with the others short-listed in a paperback next Spring - thus joining such earlier St. James winners as Louise Doughty and Mike McCormack.