Celebrating Jeffrey Ford’s new book Big Dark Hole with a Warehouse Clearance Sale!

Tue 6 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

July 6th, 2021: We are celebrating a new book, Jeffrey Ford’s Big Dark Hole, and 20 years (. . .) of Small Beer Press books with a Warehouse Clearance Sale!

It’s been 20 years since we started publishing books as Small Beer Press and we are going to celebrate in a couple of different ways beginning now and continuing later this summer — mostly by making books or sending even more books out into the world, ha!

First Thing

We are delighted to celebrate 20 years of really rather good books by publishing Jeffrey Ford’s new collection Big Dark Hole. It’s a stoater!

This is Jeff’s sixth collection — seventh, really, as there was a Best of from PS last year — and every one of them is a cracker. We’re already planning our next collection with him — who wouldn’t when you look at this list I grabbed from his site:

The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, 2002, Golden Gryphon Press

The Empire of Ice Cream, 2005, Golden Gryphon Press

The Drowned Life, 2008, Harper Collins

Crackpot Palace, 2012, Harper Collins

A Natural History of Hell, 2016, Small Beer Press

Big Dark Hole, 2021, Small Beer Press, natch, comes out today, July the 6th, 2021, and it is a short, sharp shock of fantastic fiction.

There are a three new stories first published here in this book, “Monkey In the Woods,” “Inn of the Dreaming Dog,” and “The Match.” That third one there will have you stopping what you’re doing and making sure you read the rest of the story before someone interrupts.

You can read one of the stories, “Not Without Mercy,” online, but, really the book is shiny in surprising places and feels good in the hand. Sign up now for Readercon — online in August — where Jeffrey Ford and Ursula Vernon will be the guests of honor.

Second Thing

We’re putting on our first warehouse sale in many years. Long time readers will recognize the screenshot below from our pre-WordPress website — and now 10+ years later we’re basically doing the same thing.

The sale is going to run on the Book Moon website and will have a few rules and limitations:

  • alphabetical buying encouraged but quite difficult given the price-ordered list, but it’ll be fun, honest.
  • no buying over 5,000 books unless you really want to build something interesting out of them.
  • On second thoughts if you want to buy over 5,000 copies, you do you.
  • Discounts range from 0-94% off retail prices.
  • Order some full-price titles (such as the first one on this page,Travel Light, or Big Dark Hole) and we’ll throw free titles from the sale list.
  • Orders on this Easthampton, Massachusetts-based bookshop website will be shipped as fast as we can put them through from the Tennessee warehouse of our fabulous Minneapolis-based distributor, Consortium.
  • Gosh we love these books. We loved publishing every single one of them and right now we’re lining up some surprises and new books for the couple of years. It is true that I am an enthusiast, still, about all this and our warehouse people will tell you that, yes, I am very enthusiastic when I put the print orders in. More joy all round, says I.
  • There are a few books in the sale that are rarer and we will ship them from Book Moon.
  • This Decennial Warehouse Clearance Sale will run for one (1) week, July 6th-12th with the possibility of being extended for one (1) more week.
  • We only ship within the US & Canada.

I imagine if we keep publishing for another 10 or 20 years, we’ll have more clearance sales. Imagine that: 2030. 2040. What funny looking numbers. 2030 looks more like a time than a year. 8:30 already?

Who knows. Maybe by 2040 we’ll all be ordering small pills from Bookland that download the latest story virus into our chips. If you trust Bookland and your shipper, of course.

Anyway, please pass the word around and stock up: it’ll be Jolabokaflod before you know it.

Right, here’s that all important Warehouse Clearance Event link.

Thanks for reading, spreading the word, buying books, and keeping this Small Beer contraption on the road!