Found — Philip Jose Farmer’s PEARLS FROM PEORIA
While clearing out dozens of boxes of old Advance Reading Copies from one of the SubPress basements, we stumbled across a title we thought long out of print. Philip Jose Farmer’s Pearls from Peoria remains not only the longest Farmer title we’ve published (at over 770 pages), but also the most popular. And we have 24 copies of the second trade printing in perfect condition.
If you missed this one the first time around, snag a copy and marvel at the wide variety in the 60+ pieces of fiction and non-fiction that caused Publishers Weekly to give it a starred review: “This colossal scrapbook of scarce, offbeat fiction, poetry and nonfiction from SF veteran Farmer offers fans a smorgasbord of his hard–and impossible–to find work from fanzines and other small publications, spanning the 1940s to the 1990s. Amassed by Mike Croteau, who runs the official Philip Jose Farmer Web site, and edited by Paul Spiteri, who provides brief introductions for each piece, this collection is especially valuable for its insights into the author’s writing methods. For fun, Farmer reinterpreted the adventures of pulp hero Doc Savage, Oz characters, Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. His canine detective, Ralph von Wau Wau, in ‘A Scarletin Study,’ somehow blended Holmes, Sam Spade and, typically, puns. Farmer also reprised vampire, werewolf and Frankenstein stories. About the sale of his first story, ‘The Lovers’ (which won a Hugo in 1952), Farmer says in the autobiographical ‘Maps and Spasms’ that he thought he ‘had the world by the tail. But, as it turned out, there was a tiger at the other end.’ Fortunately for generations of SF readers, he persisted.”