I was flipping through our What's New section and noticed Olivier had added H. Rider Haggard. Since Olivier focuses on book series, and I had never thought of Haggard as a series writer, I jumped to H. Rider Haggard page. I was surprised to find King Solomon's Mines and She were both part of a series. I was especially surprised to see the Allan Quatermain series was fourteen books long. Well, you learn something new every day, even at your own web site.

Then I wondered just how many of these books were still in print? So I started clicking on the titles and quickly discovered why I never remembered Haggard as a series writer. Some titles actually were in print, although they were backordered, and others were out of print entirely.

Ummm..., I thought. Not very sporting of us to tell you about a book series where you can't buy and read all of the books. Clicking the rodent, I sauntered over to Advanced Book Exchange and started searching on some obscure sounding titles. For one title, I was rewarded with about thirty plus books for sale ranging from $20-$500. H. Rider must still have his fans, I thought. To understand the history of the more expensive editions of Haggard check out An Annotated Bibliography by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.

This disturbed me that we were listing books you could click on and be quickly told by Amazon that they were out of print. I dashed off an email to Olivier saying we needed to do something about this. After a flurry of emails, we ended up ordering the Microsoft SQL Server 7 option from our hosting service provider InnerHost. The plan is to start building pages generated by a database.

Thus when we list a hyperlink title, it will take you to a page where we will list the Amazon edition(s) along with links to out of print databases so you can chase down these obscure items. This concept is mainly a dream now, but we're on the job.

Serendipity is a fascinating concept. Right after I had the above revelation, I got the August's issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. Flipping back to the Paul Di Flippo "On Books" section, I read the first paragraph about a UK firm Pulp Fictions reprinting three of Haggard's She novels. Damn, is the universe talking to me, or what?

So Olivier was really on top of things. He has even linked two of three new editions that Di Flippo mentioned on our H. Rider Haggard page. And I'm encouraging him to link the third. Hopefully, in the not so distant future, we hope to provide links to both Amazon and OOP dealers, so you will always be able to find a book we mention.