Folio Survey 2012

It's survey time!

The list I got this year:

The Folio Book of Princesses
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Folio Book of Children’s Poetry
Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas Macarthur
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
William Golding, The Spire
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
The Narrow Road: the Complete Haiku of Basho
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
J H Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650
Ovid, Poems Of Exile
Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Charles B MacDonald, Company Commander
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
Njal’s Saga
Heinrich Schliemann, Troy and its Remains
Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus
Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
Joseph Conrad, The Congo Diary
Clive King, Stig of the Dump
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Other Stories
Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid
Isaak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
Bamber Gascoigne, The Dynasties of China
Karen Armstrong, A History of God
Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne
Lucretius, On The Nature of Things
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train
Jung Chang, Wild Swans
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Also, I tried the old trick of changing the final letter in the web address to get the other lists to come up, but no luck. I keep getting the same list, just the currency of the prize changes.

Interesting list. My first pick for the FS treatment would be John Fowles,The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

I had the same list. Only The Blue Flower was a definite buy, about three or four probables. Lives of the artists would be tempting if it were well done, but for five volumes costing towards £200, it might have to be very well done - like the Plutarch, say, but with good painting reproductions.

For me, the Emerson Essays were a definite buy, as well as the Tales from Ovid. Interested in the Book of Princesses and the Children's Poetry, too.

Ah, but did you notice the price tag on the Ted Hughes book? £90, I think, and I can't quite envisage what they have in mind - I wouldn't have thought it merited the fine edition treatment.

Gutted I haven't got one!

To be honest, I didn't really pay attention to the prices. For me, the survey is wish list time, and if/when the books get published, I'll see what I can afford. :)

Although at $180, it's not terrible for a fine edition, and I have fond memories of this book from college. It's hard for me to put a price on sentimental things.

No list here (I have never received one since joining 2009). I would definitely pick:

Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries
Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

I had a different list. Mine included:

William Goldman, The Princess Bride (Guide price: GB£32.95)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Guide price: GB£27.95)
BB, Brendon Chase (Guide price: GB£27.95)
Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (Guide price: GB£32.95)
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (Guide price: GB£75.00; 2 volumes)
Ferdowsī Tūsī, The Shanameh: the Persian Book of Kings (Guide price: GB£75.00; 2 volumes)
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: a History (Guide price: GB£49.95)
Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman (Guide price: GB£29.95)
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow (Guide price: GB£27.95)
Charles Portis, True Grit (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Guide price: GB£32.95)
Claudia Roden, The Food of Italy (Guide price: GB£44.95)
Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Guide price: GB£29.95)
Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled (Guide price: GB£29.95)
Apollonius of Rhodes, The Voyage of the Argo (Guide price: GB£27.95)
D B Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, The Stuffed Owl: an Anthology of Bad Verse (Guide price: GB£27.95)
Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Guide price: GB£39.95)
Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (Guide price: GB£44.95)
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Guide price: GB£29.95)
Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (Guide price: GB£44.95)
Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography (Guide price: GB£39.95)
Henry James, English Hours: A Portrait of a Country (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Horace, The Odes (Guide price: GB£29.95)
George Grote, A History of Greece, Volumes 1-4 (Guide price: GB£150.00; 4 volumes).
Jan Morris, The Venetian Empire: a Sea Voyage (Guide price: GB£34.95)
Ross Russell, Bird Lives! (Guide price: GB£34.95)
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Guide price: GB£27.95)
Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani (Guide price: GB£29.95)
Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism (Guide price: GB£150.00; 3 volumes)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Guide price: GB£32.95)
Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (Guide price: GB£49.95)
H P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories (Guide price: GB£34.95)
H E Bates, Fair Stood the Wind for France (Guide price: GB£24.95)
Plato, Symposium (Guide price: GB£24.95)
James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (Guide price: GB£24.95)

Have received no list.

First immediate choice:

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

The Princess Bride and Brave New World!!!!!

Not even a question there. Those would be automatic purchases, I don't even care what the price is. Kinda wish I'd gotten this list!

The first list posted looks like the same list I got. There weren't any that I saw as must-buys, but there are a bunch of possible buys including the Joseph Conrad and Stig of the Dump.

I was really hoping for another W. Somerset Maugham volume but no such luck.

Different titles here:

Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn - GUIDE PRICE: US$49.95
Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair - GUIDE PRICE: US$49.95
Philip A Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1798 - GUIDE PRICE: US$59.95
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology - GUIDE PRICE: US$79.95
Rudyard Kipling, Kim - 59.95
The Kalevala - 99.95
C R Leslie, Memoir of Constable Composed Chiefly of His Letters - 79.95
Albert Camus, The Rebel - 59.95
Sigmund Freud, Selected Essays - 69.95
L P Hartley, The Go-Between - 59.95
Dava Sobel, Longitude - 39.95
Mary Renault, The Alexander Trilogy - GUIDE PRICE: US$149.95 (3 volumes)
E T A Hoffmann, Tales of the Uncanny - 69.95
Samuel Beckett, Murphy - 49.95
Howard Carter and A C Mace, The Tomb of Tutankhamen - 59.95
T S Eliot, Selected Essays - 79.95
George Eliot, Silas Marner - 49.95
K M Briggs, Hobberdy Dick - 49.95
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth - 89.95
Simone Roux, Paris in the Middle Ages - 49.95
Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar - 64.95
Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune - 59.95
Rumi, Masnavi - Books 1-2 - 99.95
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's - 44.95
Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle - 55.95
Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk - 69.95
Sir Charles Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages - US$199.95 (2 volumes).
Apuleius, The Golden Ass - 59.95
Winston Churchill, River War: The Reconquest of the Sudan - US$240.00 (3 volumes)
Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety - US$149.95 (2 volumes)
Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson - 69.95
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest - 49.95
Donna Tartt, The Secret History - 99.95
L A Carlyon, Gallipoli - US$149.95 (2 volumes)
Norman F Dixon, On The Psychology of Military Incompetence - 69.95
Graham Greene, The Comedians - 55.95
Jonathan Raban, Coasting - 55.95
John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War - 49.95
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 - 99.95
Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme - 49.95

A few titles I really hope they do (Kalevala, Hoffmann, The Man in the High Castle, a few in the so-so category...

100% Haroun and the Sea of Stories! I would LOVE to have a Folio edition of this.

The Princess Bride
Italian Folktales

Wuthering Heights is something I'd love to have from Folio, but if it's anything like the many Austen volumes, I'd probably pass. The classics from women writers tend to have really uninteresting covers, which is too bad.

The Folio Books of Princesses sounds interesting, but I'd have to see what was included.

The Book of Princesses was described as thus:
The sense of the special wonder of the princess is found in the earliest literature, and was probably alive even before books were written. Such Princess stories as those collected by Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm in the 19th century go back almost to the dawn of history. In the late 1800s a number of professional writers began to turn their hand to the creation of new tales, enriching the Princess story of folklore with that of the literary story. Not only did writers for children such as A A Milne, E Nesbit and George Macdonald (the sublime The Light Princess) contribute to this later tradition, but also those better known for their adult works - Charles Dickens (The Magic Fishbone), Oscar Wilde (the tragic The Birthday of the Infanta) - all-encompassing an enchanting range of style, moods and princesses - most good, some outrageous, and one absolutely wicked.
GUIDE PRICE: US$59.95

Well that sounds great!

I was surprised to see another Barbara Pym title as I though I read here Folio wasn't intending to produce any further titles. I welcome it!

Truman Capote, Haruki Murakami, Donna Tartt, and Kurt Vonnegut would be a must buy. I'm excited to learn that they are even considering these writers!

The Theroux, Donna Tart, and Fitzroy Maclean all sound great. Wish I could afford to become a member and make my voice heard.

Each list has a few real goodies, but guide prices on some of them are quite frightening:

In beatlemoon's list I'd go for the Lopez (wonderful!), Fowles,and Grossman. I loved Ted Hughes's Tales of Ovid, but not at £90.
In appaloosman's list the Pevsner, Hill and Braudel stand out - but the Braudel may be well out of my reach.
In AnnieMod's list (which was the one I received), I ticked as 'must buys', the Raban, the Mantel (but price again!) and the Theroux. The Tartt and the Sozhenitsyn would be high on my list too, but not at £50.

>19 jkramb:

But if you can't afford to be a member (a 4 book requirement), you couldn't afford to buy those books anyway, so why do you care if they publish them?

>22 the_bb:

Check your mail? Mine was marked as spam - good thing I check it.

Definites:
Quartet in Autumn
The Stuffed Owl
English Hours
True Grit - the first FS western since The Virginian?
Possibles:
Poems of Exile - yes, if the Peter Green translation
Horace, the Odes - but I'm not sure they can improve on their 1987 Michie/Frink edition
The Blue Flower - but surely, of all her books, they should have started with The Bookshop!
The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
The Symposium
Under no circumstances
The Hippopotamus
The Ode Less Travelled

>21 leonb: Am I missing something?
me a member but hunt in the second -hand market for FS publications..

and on the other hand ..this group's description says "non-members most welcome"

>25 P3p3_Pr4ts:

They are most welcome in the group but I do not see why Folio should listen to people that do not even plan to be members -- second hand sales don't help Folio. That's what leonb meant I suspect (and what I was about to post until I saw he already did).

Just thinking aloud. If someone wants to see titles published by Folio and their voice to be heard, they should really be helping the publisher. Might be just my wrong thinking.

>9 appaloosaman: Wow, great list, happy to see some wonderful titles. It's good to see Patrick Leigh Fermor

26- Considering that jkramb "wished he could afford to become a member" and then express his /her legitimate interest in future publications it still feels a bit unwelcoming to me..

and then no ambassador to Paris myself..:-/..

> 26 "If someone wants to see titles published by Folio and their voice to be heard, they should really be helping the publisher."

Isn't that in tune with what jkramb is saying. This group is for Folio lovers, not just Folio customers, and jkramb has as much right to express a view as anyone else. He/she is not asking Folio to listen to him/her but joining in our conversation. At least he/she is talking about books which is a welcome innovation!

I have the same list as beatlemoon and ticked the "yes please" box for:

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Tales From Ovid - although it would have to be a SPECTACULAR publication, because the price needs a strait-jacket.
Seven Gothic Tales
The Narrow Road (HUZZAH!)

From AnnieMod's list I'd love to see:

Tales of the Uncanny
Breakfast At Tiffany's
Coasting
A Place Of Greater Safety

And from appaloosaman's list please, oh please, may I have:

The Radetsky March
Italian Folktales
Flaubert's Parrot
A Sand County Almanac

Five of these titles I have listed in my suggestions box at Folio so I'm super excited at the moment and have to keep telling myself they haven't actually been published yet, so cool your boots and watch where you swing that coffee cup. I wonder what will make it into print?

>24 featherwate: - I'm glad to see that I am not the only one with a strong aversion to Stephen Fry. :-)

Really excited by the lists, with the move to include some "modern classics" most welcome, even if they are more likely to include controversial titles.
For myself, The Blue Flower would be a definite purchase as it was one I put as a book that wasn't on the list I received that I would have liked including!
Would also buy Breakfast at Tiffany's, Coasting, The Great Fortune and, on reflection, Quartet in Autumn as Pym did live in my village.
I have not read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, but I have enjoyed many of her works and would really have welcomed Beyond Black, which somehow stays in my memory more than Wolf Hall.
Edited to include The Radetsky March as a must buy - I love this book too and was in Vienna last year (although looking at the baby panda more than anything else!).

>24 featherwate:, 31 And another.

>21 leonb:
I buy Folio books secondhand. I'm a 25 year old english teacher working in southern Poland earning a paycheck in PLN. I guess in your mind I don't have the right to be interested in something I can't afford at the moment. 50 GBP is about 273 PLN. That's double what I spend each week on food. Not to mention the costs of shipping books to the US or hauling them to Germany or Russia or wherever I go when my contract is finished.

An attitude like yours actually hurts the publisher. As a classically trained musician, I have seen how snobbery can push away an audience. Treat non-members with contempt and they lose interest in joining. Letting non-members get excited and talk about the product makes them want to join even more.

Part of my interest in the books they publish is also the spread of some titles. The Theroux for example is a fantastic travel book and anything getting it in to the hands of more people is a good thing. Also, some like the Fitzroy Maclean haven't been done in a hardback since like 1949 and I like hardbacks.

Also, the second hand market does help the publisher. Resale value makes the books more attractive to buyers. Not to mention, people sell books to clear space for new ones that they purchase from the publisher.

>25 P3p3_Pr4ts: 28 29 thanks for the supportive words. I have no idea why someone would take my lack of membership so personally.

Does anyone know how many of these titles they will decide to make? I remember seeing a similar list last year which had Black Lamb and Grey Falcon on it and I was hoping they would do that as I love travel writing, but I have yet to see it on the Folio Society website.

Sorry for derailing the thread a bit.

>28 P3p3_Pr4ts:,29

Yeah, I know. I kinda misread 19... What I said above is what I think anyway - just not for this particular user :)

>34 jkramb: Does anyone know how many of these titles they will decide to make?

Between 0 and all of them? Who knows? Not many from the list last year made it into the list that got published.

> 34

Treat non-members with contempt and they lose interest in joining.

Don't sweat it. They also treat some members with contempt: usually Australian, through their inexplicable pricing policy.

>34 jkramb:

There's no telling if, when, or how many will eventually be published. Many of these titles "belong" to someone else; Folio and other fine presses usually have to find the main rights holder and work out an agreement for publishing the material. And because Folio sells to an international audience, this may further complicate things (authors are often represented by different publishers in different countries).

My guess, in the broadest terms possible, is that Folio complies the responses, chooses a certain number of the most popular responses, and then begins the legwork for securing rights. This can be quick and easy in some cases; it can take years in other cases. The ones that they can move forward with go through the various stages of design and then, finally, are published; all of this is also a process which can sometimes go quickly and other times can drag on for one reason or another.

>34 jkramb:

Forgot to mention, my survey had a page in which it asked if I was a member or not. So presumably, some non-members are getting the survey. Former members, perhaps?

> 39

Former members, perhaps?

I did not get it, but perhaps I am unique in the sense that on cancelling my membership I demanded that they delete my contact details from their marketing systems.

Lovely! My suggestion of Peter Brown made the list! A very deserving book. I don't have that many history books from Folio and prefer to focus on fiction, but I would make an exception for this.

Basho, Joyce, Wuthering Heights, Cellini. There's a lot there that I see.

jkramb, I can see how you and others might have misinterpreted my hastily drafted words, which were mildly facetitious, but friendly (in intention). To be honest, I'd forgotten the second hand market, and was genuinely (and stupidly) puzzled as to why you'd care about books you couldn't/wouldn't buy. I welcome all to these boards - Members, second hand collectors, non-collectors who love the books, even non-collectors who hate the books and/or the Society.

I think if you factor in the joining offers (sets or credits), there usually isn't much saving on the newer books second hand, but that's just my unstudied impression from eBay.

34

Hear, Hear! Thanks for posting, and there's always room for a considerate well spoken Folio book lover here.

edited to delete remarks after seeing leonb's, sorry

>39 beatlemoon:

I was initially a bit puzzled by that question (it was early Saturday morning here when I took the survey and my brain doesn't kick into gear until about the third coffee) but given the way that information can be collected via the internet, what we buy, where we buy it, sites we visit, newsletters we sign up for, even blogs followed and so on, there could be any number of factors that could determine who receives the survey. I'd imagine a survey like this is a very good way for Folio to not only decide what will appeal most to their current membership, but which titles would would be most effective in enticing potential new members to take the plunge.

I just filled in mine. I seem to have to received the same selections as in >9 appaloosaman: above.

Definites--

Blood Meridian
Benvenuto Cellini
Joyce
Wuthering Heights
Horace
Italian Folktales
Eastern Approaches
Brave New World (assuming it isn't the same infamous binding of the last incarnation).

I suggested--

The Good Soldier Svejk, War with the Newts, a collection of William Carlos Williams, a collection of Tang Dynasty Poetry, and Dead Souls. I can't remember if I recommended Peter Brown's Late Antiquity (included on another survey but not the one I took).

Don't forget the FS have made the decision to sell openly to non-members. It therefore makes perfect sense to send surveys to "normal" people who are not on the membership or likely-membership radar - even those who may be living in Poland now but are young enough to emigrate to Australia in the future!

>46 boldface:

But of course. I think I should wait until I've had my fourth coffee before posting my "the internet knows what you had for breakfast" theories. Your idea is so much neater :)

>45 menteith:

Love the William Carlos Williams and Gogol suggestions!

>47 letterpress:

I very much want to see Folio offer a more diverse array of poetry. I'm encouraged by the inclusion of Elizabeth Bishop on the last survey that went out and by the inclusion of Basho on this round of surveys.

>34 jkramb:

What sort of FS bargains have you found on the used market? When I was your age and (apparently) in similar financial conditions, I don't think I could have afforded the prices I'm currently paying for used FS titles. (I am picky about the condition, I guess, and maybe that's the difference.)

I got the Annie survey.

My four:

K M Briggs, Hobberdy Dick
E T A Hoffmann, Tales of the Uncanny
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

On other lists I like:

H P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories
William Golding, The Spire
Isaak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow
Charles Portis, True Grit
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

I haven't got a list yet - not sure why, but here are my (wishful thinking) selections from the three:

from beatlemoon's list:

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman ( on my book suggestions list on the FS website)
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train
Jung Chang, Wild Swans
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

From AnnieMod's list:

Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn
Breakfast At Tiffany's
Coasting
A Place Of Greater Safety
Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
L A Carlyon, Gallipoli
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914
Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune

And from appaloosaman's list:

The Radetsky March
Flaubert's Parrot

There seem to be an inordinate number of books already published by FS, including these that I have in earlier FS editions:

The Red Badge of Courage
Lives of the Artists
Wuthering Heights
Brave New World
Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography
Plato, Symposium
Horace, The Odes
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Apuleius, The Golden Ass
Silas Marner
L P Hartley, The Go-Between

>50 cpg:

Well, unfortunately, I can't get many and can't get most that I want. I usually pay $20 or less which limits me to so very common titles in VG like some of the Conrad titles, the Hemingway short stories, Mission to Tashkent, Memoirs of a British Agent etc. I also keep a list of books I really want some day and I just buy them in used paperbacks knowing someday I will be able to buy them in Folio ie. Kafka, Le Carre, Lord of the Flies, Catch 22, The Black Sea, The Great Game etc. Someday I will either be able to afford them new, find them secondhand at a good price or splurge and buy 1 or 2 a year. I think I'm going to splurge on "Empires of the World" by Ostler, a book which I own in a paperback that is all ripped up from traveling all over the world in my backpack.

Oh, hello ... I've been busy with life and come back to this!

Alas, no survey was sent to me (I eagerly checked my spam folder as well), but looking at the ones listed above I would have to put my vote in for:

Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights
Truman Capote – Breakfast at Tiffany's
John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Stephen Fry – The Ode Less Travelled
Stephen Fry – The Hippopotamus
William Goldman – The Princess Bride
Ivan Goncharov – Oblomov
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
Henri Pirenne – Mohammed and Charlemagne
Joseph Roth – The Radetzky March
Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Alexander Solzhenitsyn – August 1914
John Steinbeck – Once There Was a War
Donna Tartt – The Secret History
Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle

In addition to what I wrote above, I'd definitely also purchase Cat's Cradle and Mohammed and Charlemagne.

I didnt realise that people got slightly different surveys.

I put definates for Blood Meridian and True Grit, I would have also put a definate for Breakfast at Tiffany's had it been on my list. I put quite a few possiblys including The Princess Bride and Gulag.

I had The Princess Bride on my suggestions list and got the survey with it on. Result :)

I have to say that the popularity of The Princess Bride is one of life's great mysteries for me (along with, amongst others, Slaughterhouse Five ) But then we all need a good mystery! It would be almost as interesting to see which would be the most 'popular' definite no's on these lists.

>58 Willoyd:

I'm convinced that a person either loves or hates Slaughterhouse Five based on region. I've never met an American who didn't love it, and I've yet to meet a Brit who has been more than lukewarm on it. I admit my sample size is small, but that's what I've encountered.

It's among my top three favorites personally.

I had the selection in >9 appaloosaman:, one problem is several have been Folio-ed already. Not an overly inspiring selection, although Cthulhu surely lends itself to interesting illustrations.

I'm new here, and new to the Folio Society as well. I thought it was fun to have the opportunity to take the survey. :)

> 51 K M Briggs, Hobberdy Dick

I'm glad I'm not the only one who chose this as a definite buy. I'd never heard of it before, but the description is irresistable! My other definite picks from that list were:

George Eliot, Silas Marner
T S Eliot, Selected Essays
The Kalevala

From other lists:

The Narrow Road: the Complete Haiku of Basho
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Other Stories
Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow
H P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
H E Bates, Fair Stood the Wind for France

>59 menteith: Interesting - I've not heard of that possible split before. I would certainly fit your model! If it's so, I wonder why.

>62 Willoyd:

Yes, but my sample size is nine, so take it with a grain of salt. Four Brits--all either lukewarm or cold on it. Five Americans--all quite taken with it.

I wonder why as well.

>59 menteith:

There really are Americans who don't care for Slaughterhouse Five. You might not have met us, but we do exist! See the ratings/reviews at Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, etc., for evidence of our existence.

>64 cpg:

They do exist of course, I just haven't had the pleasure to meet any. Nice to meet you, cpg!

As of this moment there are 537 five-star ratings for SHF on amazon.com and only 34 one-star ratings.

I was in a well-stocked bookstore in Aberdeen a couple of years ago and I noticed that Faulkner wasn't anywhere to be found. The shelves are flooded with Faulkner at bookstores in my area. Perhaps he is another example? I'm sure there are a lot of British Faulkner fans, but perhaps as a whole he doesn't cross the Atlantic very well?

With rare exceptions, I do not see the rationale for the Folio Society republishing a book they have already done in an attractive edition. Only exceptions I can see would be if it were published many decades ago and usually cannot be found in the second-hand market in satisfactory condition or if they have a highly original and unique approach to a prior publication.

That said, the books from the above lists that I would look forward to are:

1. Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman
3. The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
4. Italian Folktales - Italo Calvino
5. The Kalavela

> 62, 63

Don't fit in either category and I think that Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary account and, in general, admire Vonnegut as a great, incisive writer. I'm glad FS is considering another title in Vonnegut's extensive ouvre.

I received the list mentioned in Anniemod's post 13, and these are the titles I put down:

Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair $49.95
Philip A Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1798 - GUIDE PRICE: US$59.95
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth - 89.95
Donna Tartt, The Secret History - 99.95

From Beatlemoon's, I'd pick:
The Folio Book of Princesses
The Narrow Road: the Complete Haiku of Basho
Ovid, Poems Of Exile
Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid

From Appaloosaman's:
William Goldman, The Princess Bride (Guide price: GB£32.95)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (Guide price: GB£75.00; 2 volumes)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Guide price: GB£32.95)

My top four from the combined lists would be The Princess Bride, The Folio Book of Princesses, Italian Folktales, and Tales from Ovid.

I seem to have received a list made up mostly of the books in post 9, with a few from post 13 (I count 8 from list 13). I chose none as definite purchases, as even a brilliant book can be poorly done, though I admit that such mis-steps are uncommon with FS.

As I recall, the ones I said I would probably buy were:
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: a History
Charles Portis, True Grit
Ross Russell, Bird Lives!
Apuleius, The Golden Ass
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914

Though I must admit that some of the prices seemed high, with the usual two U.S. dollars per pound exchange rate (admittedly less onerous than the much-discussed Australian dollar rate).