NICK HORNBY SONGBOOK - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed by Nick Hornby - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE

Hornby, Nick (Author); Dzama, Marcel (Artist) & Various Recording Artist/Musician/Composers

ISBN 10: 0971904774 / ISBN 13: 9780971904774

Published by San Francisco, CA: McSweeney's Books, 2002, 2002

About this Item

1st Printing. Signed. 147 pages. Published in 2002. The author's collection of essays and prose-poems on music. One of the best books on popular music ever written in our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with the Softcover Edition. Published in a small and limited one-time-only print run as a hardcover original only that sold out shortly after publication. The First Edition is now rare. A brilliant production by Marcel Dzama and Alysha Naples: Regular-sized volume format. Pictorial hard boards with titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Text by Nick Hornby. Original art by Marcel Dzama. CD containing 11 selections attached on the inside back endcover. Printed on archival stock paper in Iceland to the highest standards. Without DJ, as issued. Presents Nick Hornby's "Songbook". An instant hit. Still the best book on popular music ever written in our time, by an ardent fan who is also a brilliant writer. With the exception of Marcel Dzama's "The Berlin Years" (which is an Artist Book after all), this is also the single best book published by McSweeney's in terms of its production values. Highly personal and idiosyncratic, Hornby is singularly qualified to write a book about popular music, having written the novel, "High Fidelity", which became the basis of a fine film (with John Cusack). He has also written music criticism for The New Yorker Magazine. The personal essays on music in "Nick Hornby Songbook" pop off the page with the immediacy and passion of an artfully arranged mixed tape. But then, who better to riff on his favorite songs than the author of that literary music-lover's delight, "High Fidelity"? "And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them and want to sing along to them and force other people to listen to them and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do" (Nick Hornby). Apart from the indispensable accompanying CD, Hornby's pitch-perfect prose is also enhanced by the quirkily beautiful art of the brilliant Canadian artist Marcel Dzama. An absolute "must-have" title for Nick Hornby and Marcel Dzama collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black pen-marker on the title page by Nick Hornby. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a great book. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Nick Hornby signed very few copies through McSweeney's only. Copies available online have serious flaws, are the Softcover Edition, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2003, the first book by McSweeney's nominated in the hotly contested category. Winner of the E. M. Forster Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Two of the finest writer/artists of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER NICK HORNBY TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0971904774.

Seller Inventory # 6566

Bibliographic Details

• Title: NICK HORNBY SONGBOOK - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed by Nick Hornby - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE
• Publisher: San Francisco, CA: McSweeney's Books, 2002
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971904774
• ISBN 13: 9780971904774
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: None, As Issued
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

31 Songs is best-selling author Nicky Hornby's ultimate desert island disks

Through thirty-one songs that he either loves or has loved, Nick Hornby tells us what music means to his life. These personal and passionate pieces - refreshingly free of pretension - are a celebration of the joy that certain songs have given him. Together with additional writings on music from his column in the new Yorker - seen in the UK for the first time - 31 Songs is for Hornby what many of us have always wanted: a soundtrack to accompany life.

Winner of The National Book Critics Circle award, this funny and touchingly personal book, from the author of the million-copy number one bestseller About A Boy, is a must for music fans everywhere.

'Original, well written and wholly lacking in pretension...as good a book about pop music as I have read in many years and the most accomplished of Hornby's books so far' Spectator

'Funny, provocative, immensely readable. It is not simply about music...it is about Hornby, and us, and about being alive. His enthusiasm is such that he makes me want to be a better listener - and I can offer no better compliment. A triumph' Tim Lott, Evening Standard

'Refreshing, candid, very moving. Reminds you why you loved music before you knew enough to explain your love away' Uncut

Review

There is nothing quite so incomprehensible as love: 31 Songs is Nick Hornby's account of a selection of the music that lives deep in his heart and it is beside the point that most of us would make radically different selections. He makes some useful distinctions--these are not songs he loves for their associations so much as particular songs through which he learned more about his capacity for loving songs in general. Along the way, he talks movingly and intelligently about other matters on which those songs impinge--his relationship with his autistic son, his limited but real capacity for spirituality--but the songs rather than Hornby and his life are his real subject. It would be almost impossible to read this book and not get caught up in at least some of Hornby's enthusiasms--where you read thrillers trying not to cheat by looking at the end, here you spend time hoping the discography will be as good as the rest of it, and of course it is. The book is a serious attempt to define what it is about rock and pop that speaks to us in ways other types of music might not; those who either do not share Hornby's tastes or who have more eclectic ones will find it a useful and enlightening explication of what rock and pop do. --Roz Kaveney