Congratulations "Monsieur Ambivalence": the $2,000 book!

As owner of the small press that published Thomas Fuller's post-literate fable, Monsieur Ambivalence (IFSF 2013), it gives me great pleasure to announce that one copy of the book is available on Amazon for $2,422.99.

It's a used copy, previously owned as the marketing people say of used Mercedes-Benz's, and is being sold through Amazon by something or someone called, Bronze Classics.

The shipping cost is $3.99, the same shipping cost for the other copies of Monsieur Ambivalence available on Amazon, one for the price of $15.00 and thirteen for the price of $.98.

(I just now Googled, Bronze Classics and was led back into the Amazon website. The copy of Monsieur Ambivalence for sale at $2,422.99 has fallen, in the few minutes it took me to construct the 3 paragraphs above (approximately 5 minutes), to $2,343.00. The 13 other copies of the book available on Amazon are holding steady at price points somewhere between $.98 and $15.00).

I tried calling Fuller to give him the news; no luck. His tendency is to shun publicity or anything remotely close to promotion. He's probably forgotten he'd written the book, having started and finished another novel in the four years since the publication of Monsieur Ambivalence. Fuller's the man, by the way, who said, when I asked him to do a public reading or two on behalf of his novel, "isn't it enough that I wrote it?"

I adore writers in general, as they are both alike and unlike one another as other people are alike and unlike other people, which is to say that no two of them are alike. One loves publicity so much you'd think he or she wrote the book mainly to have it publicized; the other hides either inside or directly behind the book he or she has written.

In Fuller's case, hiding is sport. Monsieur Ambivalence was, after all, a tale about a man who attempted to sit quietly in a room for one hour without driving himself crazy, determined to achieve Blaise Pascal's prescription that all of mankind's ills stem from our individual inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves for at least one hour. Fuller's hero, an American man living in a French village in the middle of nowhere, makes it to 40-plus minutes near the end of the book, but not the full 60. 

Fuller and I had a 50/50 handshake deal on Monsieur Ambivalence; we'd split the profits. Of course there were none, none that amounted to much beyond a nice dinner and bottle of wine together two or three times a year. I, his publisher, always paid, having roughly calculated the sales of the book through the auspices of my distributor, Small Press Distribution (SPD) in Berkeley. If the book sells on Amazon for $2,000 plus, we'll be dining at Chez Panisse.

The last I heard from Thomas Fuller, one of the linchpins in the IFSF family of published authors, two of the others being the poet Dawn McGuire and the memoist Renate Stendhal, he told me he was writing a novel titled, The Classical World, and that the book was, "close to being finished," whatever that means. I haven't seen Fuller for at least 6 months--his land-line is disconnected and the VM on his cellphone is full, disallowing me to leave him a message--and I'd like to put The Classical World on the IF SF booklist for 2017.

Anyone knowing Fuller's whereabouts can reach me at ifsfpublishing.com or by calling my cellphone, 310-766-9823.