A Nerdish Sort of Coincidence

Kate Atkinson

Okay, this is a story that nerds will appreciate--especially Book Nerds.

A little over a year ago (July 31) I read a small piece in the New York Times about some writers who would be doing some talks, etc. in NYC. I had heard of and read some of them (Jonathan Franzen), but another writer scheduled (Kate Atkinson) was not someone whose work I knew. (Link to that NYT piece.)

So I thought, Well, I'll read one of hers--just to see. And so I ordered a 1st printing of her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), and (to coin a phrase) it blew me away. Clever, funny, Surprising. (Yes, I capitalized surprising on purpose! Readers of Atkinson will understand.)

And so I started reading her other novels--in the order that she wrote them (my custom). (One of them, Life After Life, 2013, is one of the best novels I have ever read.) But I deferred until later her series of P. I. novels about Jackson Brodie, thinking they would be less ... whatever ... than her real novels.

When I finished the real ones, I started the Brodie ones--and, once again, Atkinson dazzled me. They were every bit as good as the real ones, and I realized what a biased fool I'd been.

(BTW: I just fixed a typo in the previous paragraph: I'd written "every bit as god"--actually, I wasn't too far wrong!)

Anyway, I consumed all her work like Snickers bars--including her volume of short stories and her play.

Now ... since that first book of hers, I've been buying signed first printings, and I had a bit of a problem with Transcription (2018). In April I ordered it (via ABE) from a dealer in England, but it didn't come ... it didn't come ... it didn't come.

So (long-story-short) a few weeks ago I cancelled the order, got a refund, and looked around for another dealer on ABE, and I selected Dan Pope, from whom I've bought many titles over the years.

It came yesterday (Pope is fast as well as generous), and with it he included material from the event where he got her to sign it.

It was the very event the Times had mentioned, the very event whose notice had first turned me on to Atkinson in the first place. (See scan below of the relevant page from the program.)

Even better--her signature on the title page has her name, of course, but also the date (September 25) and "NYC." To say I was ecstatic when I saw that is to underestimate/understate the vast dimensions of my book-nerdiness.

I've had a few other Magic Moments in book-collecting (like the time I bought a used copy of David S. Reynolds' book  about Walt Whitman--and discovered it had been poet Mary Oliver's copy and contained many of her underlinings and annotations; I eventually got Reynolds to sign it when he appeared at the Hudson Library, and he was more than curious to see what she had written). But this? The BEST.

Really only one more thing to say: Nerds Rule!