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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Paperback heaven

June 2, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Late to the party as usual I’m sure, but I’ve finally discovered Abe Books and am pretty excited. The first thing I did with the site was to search for five out-of-print Reginald Hill novels that I’d skipped over in working through the Dalziel-Pascoe series. This week they’ve been trickling in from five booksellers in five different states, all of this arranged in about ten minutes on the Abe site. Last night I started reading a widely adored one, Deadheads, whose out-of-print status has seemed especially inexplicable, and which arrived in the form of a 1983 Signet paperback that cost more to ship than to buy–but we’re still talking in the neighborhood of $5, and hey, I found it. Already in the first dozen pages I’ve been treated to lines like this:

Dalziel’s eyes glittered malevolently in his bastioned head like a pair of medieval defenders wondering where to pour the boiling oil.

Oh frabjous Abe!

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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