"Vantastic" Folk Art, Neil Gaiman and The Best of Kiss

What's New at Arty Bees Books.
This is the spot to check out every week, as we bring you the latest on the fabulous, weird, interesting, intriguing, and wonderful books, big or small, mostly square-ish - although not always - that have come into the Arty Bees shops over the past seven days or so.

Well, our Annual Christmas Buying Holiday is over, but only at our Manner Street store.

Courtenay Place will not be buying anymore books.

Ever.

It sounds drastic doesn't it, but the truth is that Courtenay Place is very, very full.

I haven't been able to fit in a bookshelf in over two years and books all over the floor may be cozy to a point (and don't get me wrong, we like that within reason) but sooner or later it stops being cozy and just ends up maddeningly, exasperatingly, claustrophobically FULL.

Oh, and our lease ran out. (And the rent went up (and up again) and did we mention that the building leaks and we hate getting soggy books... Ack stop me now, I could go on and on...)

So the Courtenay Place shop will be closed at the end of March 2009 and with those two prime motivators in mind we managed to secure (and this is the really cunning bit) the space directly upstairs from our Manners Street shop.

And with quite a lot of wrangling engineers, tradesmen and lawyers, and the inevitable getting of Consents, we will cut a big hole in the ceiling, pop in some stairs and Bob's your Uncle. (Or Bob's the Boss in our case!)

Which will leave us with one super duper really big bookshop.

We like to think of it, not as losing a branch, but as gaining another 150 square metres to pack books into (or to be more precise, gaining another half a kilometre of linear shelf space).

Suffice to say we are all very excited and a little exhausted and we haven’t even started moving the books!

Which is why Jessica at Courtenay Place won't start buying again, as anything we buy, we then have to move.

Imagine all those books in one place! Bee Heaven!

~ ~ ~ ~

What's New at Arty Bees Courtenay Place

We have just had a lovely collection of books from The Heritage Press come in. It could be described as the American equivalent of The Folio Society. They do beautiful boxed reprints of established classics. The titles we have are:

• The Complete Household Tales of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
• Eugene Grandet by Honore Balzac
• The Poems of Robert Burns
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• Ressurection by Leo Tolstoy
• Poor Richard’s Almanack by Benjamin Franklin (with illustrations by Norman Rockwell)

Having the time to clear out the mysterious back room storage piles at Courtenay Place has uncovered many amazing and rare, leather-clad books. They are in need of a little love. Some have spines missing or the boards are loose, but this only adds to their charm (and reduces their price). Titles include:

• The History of Greece from the earliest times to its final subjection to Rome , 1860s
• Murray’s Handbook of Travel-Talk: A Collection of questions, phrases and vocabularies, intended to serve as interpreter to English Travellers in Germany, France or Italy, or to foreigners visiting England , 1851
• Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years War & History of the Revolt of the Netherlands , 1846
• A History of Roman Literature from the earliest period to the death of Marcus Aurelius , 1870s
• The Works of Shakespeare , 1877

And as soon as we get it back off Pippa for listing onabebooks.comwe had a set of The Chronicles of Early Melbourne, 1835-1852. Historical, Anecdotal and Personal. Centennial Edition in two volumes by E Finn Garryowen, from 1888.
 

More exciting Sheet Music released on the populace!

• Metallica – contains Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters, The Unforgiven and other classic tracks from James and Lars. No, you cannot play it in the shop, Joe.
• The Best of Kiss – its major selling point is that it does not contain Crazy, Crazy Nights!
• Iron Maiden – Run to the Hills, run for your life!
• Best of Deep Purple – Making our music there, with a few red lights…

Random reading this week starts with a book that we will all need close to the end of March…(if only we had time to read it)

Real Life: Preparing for the 7 Most Challenging Days of Your Life by Dr Phil McGraw

365 Nights - A Memoir of Intimacy by Charla Muller. What do you do when you have a good marriage but are a bit lacking in the other department?…do it everyday of course!

American Gods and Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Mythological Gods in America just walking around with all the plebs… lots of adventure and cameos from Sandman characters.

Dr Bloodmoney and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick. A fetus in fetu (a fetus enveloped inside its twin) with telepathic contact with the dead in a Post-Nuclear War world, plus the inspiration for Blade Runner - both titles are rather hard to track down these days.

And lastly, talking of Great Summer Fiction (ok, so maybe we were, and maybe we weren't talking about great summer fiction - Philip K. Dick is not to everybody's reading taste) we've had some real goodies come in including: World Without End by Ken Follett, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, lots of Jodi Picoult, Judy Nunn's sweeping Australian sagas, oodles of Carl Hiassen, Stephen Leather and Martina Cole.
And if you like a good crime thriller, it might be time to try New Zealand's own Paul Cleave.

What's New at Arty Bees Manners Street

Music books in this week include:

• Music in the Baroque Era - Monteverdi to Bachs by M Bukofzer
• Music in a New Found Land - Themes and Developments in the History of American Music by Wilfred Mellers
• Reqviem Music of Mourning and Consolation by Alec Robertson
• A Short History of Spanish Music by Ann Livermore
• United States, the landmark 1984 work by the famed performance artist Laurie Anderson and illustrated with photographs and drawings from the performance, many in full color.

Huge piles of books, of topics miscellaneous enough to excite almost everybody, have hit the shelves this week and here is a very small selection to whet your appetite...

• Lots of books on knitting, spinning, sewing, weaving
• Syd's Pirates - A Story of an Airline: Cathay Pacific Airways by Charles Eather
• Shunga - The Art of Love In Japan by Tom & Mary Anne Evans
• Love, War and Fancy - The Social and Sexual Customs of the East by Richard Burton
• Sign Language- Street Signs As Folk Art by John Baeder
• Eastern Cultures - A Unesco Courier Anthology by Anila Graham
• Arthropods - New Design Futures by Jim Burns
• Art in the Seventies by Edward Lucie-Smith
• Slum as a Way of Life - A Study of Coping Behavior in an Urban Environment by Jocano F Landa
• Shepherds' Crooks and Walking Sticks by David Grant & Edward Hart (a “how to” complete with tools, materials, methods and designs)
• The Rubaiyat of a Bachelor by Helen Rowland
• A range of books on Ophthalmology covering glasses, contacts, testing your eyes and general eye health – dare I say a sight for sore eyes?
• Faces from the Fire by Leonard Mosley
• The Art of Walt Disney by Christopher Finch

Well, Imogen has made a great start on some of the New Zealand titles waiting to be priced this week including some of the two lovely collections from earlier in January which were predominantly New Zealand Art and New Zealand Flora and Fauna.
There are still a lot of these left (including some real gems like Colin McCahon, Una Platts Nineteenth Century New Zealand Artists and Contemporary New Zealand Painters by Friedlander and Barr) but these should be emerging soon.

• Visitor's Book (A traveller's tale of a 12 month visit from Auckland to London, Scotland, Ireland and places in Europe based on her diary and drawings) by Joan Edwards
• Medicines of the Maori - From their Trees, Shrubs and other Plants, Together with Foods from the Same Sources by Christina MacDonald
• Kingsley Field’s Soldier Boy - A Young New Zealander Writes Home from the Boer War
• Vantastic - A Pictorial History of Caravans in New Zealand by Chris Hunter
• Running Scared, poetry by Sam Hunt
• With Spirit - A Retrospective of Dan Drivers Art
• New Zealand Art for Investment by Fred McLean
• Back and Beyond by Gregory O'Brien
• Welcome to the South Seas - Contemporary New Zealand Art for Young People by Gregory O'Brien
• Substance & Essence - Art Deco - Winter Lecture Series by the Friends of Te Papa
• The Big Picture - The History of New Zealand Art from 1642 by Hamish Keith
• Richard Wolfe’s All Our Own Work - New Zealand's Folk Art
• John Kinder's New Zealand by Ron Brownson
• Missions Moons and Masterpieces - The Giffords of Oamaru by Michael Gifford
• Te Marae - A Guide to Customs and Protocol by H & P Tauroa
• T F W Harris’ Greater Cook Strait - Form and Flow
• Performance by Catherine de la Roche
• A Touch of Nature - Reflections on New Zealand Plants and Flowers by Muriel E Fisher & Elaine Power
• Does This Make My Gun Look Big? By Liz Williams
• Common & Garden Birds of New Zealand by Gordon Ell & Geoff Moon
• The Forest Carpet - New Zealand's Little-Noticed Forest Plants - Mosses, Lichens, Liverworts, Hornworts, Fork-Ferns, and Lycopods by Bill & Nancy Malcolm
• A Stand for Decency - Patricia Bartlett & the Society for Promotion of Community Standards 1970 – 1995 by Carolyn Moynihan
• The Haast is in South Westland by John Pascoe
• A Key to the Genera of New Zealand Ferns and Allied Plants by Brownsey & Galloway
• The Antarctic Today - A Mid-Century Survey by the New Zealand Antarctic Society by Frank A Simpson
• Native Orchids J H Johns
• Goldie by Roger Blackley (hardback mint condition 1999 edition)

Children’s books have been an eclectic mix over the last two weeks with an enormous pile of great Children’s Non Fiction and Picture books, including yet more of the ever popular and fascinating Usborne publications, exciting chapter books for older readers, Children’s Classics for kids of all ages including Enid Blytons, old favourites like The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Biggles and the Pirate Treasure by Captain Johns and rare and collectable titles.
In the last category there is a very rare and beautiful edition of The Gingerbread Man by Leonard Fable with illustrations by the fabulous Willy Pogany and some nice editions of Heath Robinson and Arthur Rackham illustrated titles.

There has also been no shortage of diversity on the fiction front at Manners Street with the staff barely able to keep up with the incoming piles of tales of romance, mystery, adventure and daring-do.

In particular the Science Fiction has seen most of The First North Americans series come in - The People of the Mist, People of the Masks etc by Kathleen O'Neal and W Michael Gear.

General fiction and Literature has had Bernard Cornwell, Marion Keyes, Cathy Kelly, Jodi Picoult, Sophie Kinsella, John Banville, the Bloomsbury guys including The Voyage Out and Night and Day by Virginia Woolf – two very nice hardback editions published by her own press - Hogarth Press in the 1950s and lots of new Granta Literary publications.

New Westerns are also about – well “new in stock” but “classic in nature”, with Zane Grey, the Wagon West series and JT Edisons.

And for the mystery buffs out there we’ve had HEAPS of great new Detective titles in the larger hardback and “trade paperback” (ie hardback sized) formats including bone chilling and bone tickling authors like: Jasper Fforde, Lee Childs, Kathy Reichs, Ruth Rendell, and Minette Walters.

Each week, we bring you the most tragic & fantastic piece of cover art that's crossed our desk.
Apparently absurd song titles are not the prerogative of the younger generations.

Recently arrived new books. To purchase, click here, type in the tag number and your contact details.

To see the complete list of available new science fiction, click here.
To see the complete list of available new detective books, click here.
To see the complete list of available Rare and Antiquarian books at both shops, click here.

Arty Bees Books. 2 Locations.
17 Courtenay Place, Wellington.
Telephone 04 385 1819
The Oaks, Manners Street, Wellington.
Telephone 04 384 5339
www.artybees.co.nz