I just found out an I had an autographed book from Samuel R. Delany, one of my absolute favorite authors of all time--and it's been sitting on my shelf for two weeks without me knowing about it. When I opened it yesterday to start reading, I noticed there was some scribbling on the title page. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then I saw it was a signature, and I freaked. It's not actually to me, but I'm alright with that.
I bought it used off Amazon. I'm not sure why anyone would sell it. Admittedly, a signature from Delany is more a personal than a monetary thing, but still...
The book itself was 1984 (an obvious, obvious play off Orwell), a compilation of Delany's letters during that year, complete with a "prologue" and "epilogue" from the years before and after. As always, Delany is relentlessly intelligent and writes better than almost anyone else, about everything.
One thing that surprises me is that he could write this many letters during one year--the same year he was working on Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, one of the Neveryon books, and probably something else I'm not aware of--even on the off-chance he didn't draft the original copies. He produced more than three hundred pages (in extremely small type on a relatively large page)--which is more than a lot of authors (particularly myself) manage anyway.
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