Distracting the Internet with Frankenstein, Dionne Brand, and Belated MLK Day!

Wouldn’t it make the world a better place if we all randomly searched through our grandparents’ stuff and one day discovered some super important antique book signed by the author?  We could all share our magic book stories with one another, hold hands, and frolic in fields of emerald grass…

Or we could just sell them to one another and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is what this guy did when he discovered a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in his grandfather’s house (one of two inscribed by the author to have survived the evils of time).  We don’t know how
much he sold the book for because the final auction price has been kept private (it exceeded his asking price of £350,000 ($567,000)).  That’s a lot of money, no?

This guy is way cuter than I am, but it’s all the book.  Honest.

The question, for me, is whether I would have sold the book if it had appeared on my grandmother’s shelf.  I’m not sure I would, to be honest.  A good chunk of my book collection is, well, collectible.  I’ve got some 100+-year-old books, lots of signed and personalized ones, and so on and so forth.  I even have a 1st Edition of the U.S. edition of the Silmarillion floating around in this apartment of mine (I think that’s important, but it’s probably not).  But no Frankenstein.  In fact, the most exciting discovery I recently had was realizing that my copy of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return had been signed by the author.  See?

This is me trying my best creepy stalker / seductress pose.  Any tips?

In any case, we now have two sexy copies of Frankenstein to hoo and haa over.  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to see one of them before I die…

And on a completely random note, this:

It’s now Thursday, but Monday was kind of an important holiday for us American people — Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  MLK, I think it’s fair to say, is one of the world’s greatest heroes — I still tear up when I hear his “I Have a Dream” speech.

He also has a unique connection to the genre community through Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original Star Trek.  You can hear her talk about her brief interactions with MLK Star Trek on this repeat episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast.  I just thought it was worth mentioning on this blog, even if the day is over.

What nifty stuff has been going on in your worlds?