I am travelling in the US at present, so a little detached from UK book releases. However, I see that Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers, has just been published in hardcover by Heinemann. In the last couple of years, Tinkers was the surprise success of US literary fiction, winning the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and being hailed as a masterpiece by many critics. It also had an unusual publishing history and has become very collectible, although the boat has been well and truly missed so far as the US editions are concerned.

Harding (born 1967) is a Boston-based author and musician (a drummer), who has taught writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He grew up on the north shore of Boston in the town of Wenham, Massachusetts. As a youth he spent a lot of time "knocking about in the woods" which he attributes to his love of nature. His grandfather fixed clocks and he apprenticed under him, an experience that found its way into his novel Tinkers. After graduating from UMass, he spent time touring with his band in the US and Europe. He had always been a heavy reader and while in the middle of reading Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra he remembered putting it down and thinking "this is what I want to do". In When he next had time off from touring with the band he signed up for a summer writing class at Skidmore College in New York. By pure chance his teacher was Marilynne Robinson and through her he learned about the Iowa Writers' Workshop writing program and applied and was accepted. There he studied with Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and later Marilynne Robinson. At some point he realized some of the people he admired most were "profoundly religious" and so he spent years reading theology, and was "deeply" influenced by Karl Barth and John Calvin. He considers himself a "self-taught modern New England transcendentalist".

Tinkers was rejected by several publishers before being picked up by a small independent (Bellevue Literary Press) and published in early 2009 as a paperback (3000 – 5000 copies, according to various sources; currently USD 200-300 from secondary sellers). Of more interest to collectors, there was also a small hardcover edition (500 copies, with a subsequent printing of a further 500), most of which went to subscribers to the First Edition Club of independent Californian bookseller BookPassage (not currently available). This was followed by a separate numbered hardcover edition of 750 copies for Powells as part of Indispensable series (one copy currently available at 1800 USD).

This is a great story of individual success for a writer, and an encouragement for all new authors than (at least occasionally) quality writing will bring success. If Harding goes on to have a long and successful career, Tinkers will be the cornerstone of any collection. However, at the moment it seems overpriced for a recent book and I would expect prices to settle somewhat.

“An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.”

Thanks again to this blog for the article.

• Comments

• 20/07/2010 20:27 hollygolightlyplus1
  " being hailed as a masterpiece by many critics" + "taught writing" + "University of Iowa" = Overhyped Carp
  I know it's the silly season but sorry, surely you can do better than this?

• 21/07/2010 15:03 Trapnel1
  Each to their own! Not sure if you’ve actually read Tinkers from your comments – if so, I would be interested in your considered views. Maybe this will be a book which does not cross the Atlantic well, but readers and reviewers have been overwhelmingly positive about it in the US, and the Pulitzer judges certainly don't share your opinion...
  
  (PS - for more on "Overhyped Carp" see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10693175)
  

• 21/07/2010 15:25 Simon
  There are always two sides to these articles at Hyraxia, one is whether the book will be remembered in the future and the other is whether the book will be collectible in the future. Currently, this book is highly collectible but you might be right, it may not last.
  
  There is something to be said for the mutual appreciation society that exists between critics, academics, authors and other literati and for collectors that often means an increase in price.
  
  It's not always a case of finding the next Harry Potter, sometimes it's a case of collecting contemporaries and sometimes it's a case of turning a quick profit. This may well be overhyped, and for the collector that's generally a bad thing, but a lot of collectors nowadays are sellers too, and for them hype is a good thing.
  
  Only time will tell I guess...

• 23/07/2010 19:17 BookCollecting101
  I am not a huge fan of this book after reading it. I found the author's style to be distracting at best. The book may well prove to be collectible, however. The story of its publication is worth the cost of admission. The author went through the usual rounds of publishers trying to get it printed and wound up at Bellevue Hospital Press who published a very limited first edition. Word of mouth prompted a wider readership than might be expected and this book wound up before the Pulitzer committee where it was the sleeper Putlitzer winner. The author logged on just out of curiosity as to the winner of the prize and discovered that his book took the coveted prize. It was released more broadly by a major publisher and the rest is history. Its limited first release and prize winning status should make the first edition quite collectible. I would be glad to obtain a first edition for my collection and will look with interest to the author's future books.

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