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Two more of Random House’s reissues of Ruth Chew’s books are about to be available. Next to be released in paper-and-ink copies (hardcover and paperback and library hardcover) are The Trouble with Magic and Magic in the Park. Released as an e-book omnibus are The Wishing Tree, The Magic Coin, and The Magic Cave, collectively titled Three Wishing Tales.
Order The Trouble with Magic Order Magic in the Park |
Updated website launched!
You may have seen this website looking like the picture on the left as recently as yesterday. But now the design and technology have been updated a bit. Welcome to the new version of the site!
There’s now a MailChimp subscribe widget in the right-hand column. You can sign yourself up for the e-mail announcement list there. If you sign up, you won’t get daily or weekly messages; the list will be used to announce when new books are going to be coming out.
Do let me know if you have suggestions for improvements.
Big news!
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Ruth Chew’s books are going to be republished! Two of them (No Such Thing as a Witch and What the Witch Left) are shipping NOW!
Read the PW announcement: Read Elizabeth Bluemle’s PW Shelftalker interview with Random House v-p and publishing director Mallory Loehr: Buy What the Witch Left Buy No Such Thing as a Witch |
Collection status
The ruthchew.com book collection recently grew with the addition of some new old books and the new Random House books. Here are all of the books in the collection together.
The new books are at the front on the left; the stories not written by Ruth Chew are at the front on the right, and the translations are the leftmost column (those black ones with the glittery spines are all Japanese). The rest are all hardcovers and paperbacks from different years representing Ruth Chew’s 29 stories for children in English spanning the 30 years from 1969 to 1999.
Most of the books in the collection are distinct in some detail; many of the paperback books are similar but have different ISBNs, slightly different covers or cover prices, or have a different print run encoded on the copyright page.
Sometimes it’s tricky to buy an exact edition because online booksellers will list a book for sale under the ISBN of a slightly different edition. This happens especially in the case of the older books, which don’t have ISBNs of their own!
If you’re interested in collecting Ruth Chew books, too, have a look at the information for collectors.
Forthcoming e-book omnibus: Three Wishing Tales
Inside the new copies of No Such Thing as a Witch and What the Witch Left, I saw that there were not one but two e-book omnibuses being promoted.
The second one, which I assume is going to be released with the next two paper-and-ink books in January 2014, is called Three Wishing Tales, and will contain The Wishing Tree, The Magic Coin, and The Magic Cave.
Random House has some more information available here:
Unboxing the six new Random House books
Today I got the six books I ordered from Amazon. Why six? Because for each of the paper-and-ink titles, What the Witch Left and No Such Thing as a Witch, there is a paperback, a hardcover with dust jacket, and a hardcover with no dust jacket (that’s the library edition).
The hardcovers have the original cover art on the covers under the dust jackets (see left!).
The library hardcovers are “case binding”, the kind of binding you think of on textbooks. Glossy paper over cardboard. And, like I said, no dust jackets (see below).
Which should you buy? Obviously if you just want to read the story, you can buy the cheap paperbacks, or even the corresponding e-books, but if you’re nostalgic for the originals, go for the hardcovers!
About the interiors of the books:
The books have a page of teaser text at the front for the story you’re holding, and longer teasers for each other in the back (a few pages from the beginning of chapter 1 of What the Witch Left; all of chapter 1 from No Such Thing as a Witch).
The text has been re-typset; these are not cheap facsimile versions where they basically photocopy an old book and reprint that. It’s a new font and new chapter headings. New linebreaks and layouts and all that.
All the original interior illustrations are there; I checked! Actually, they’ve been given more space on the page than they had before.
There are half-title pages as well as title pages in these versions; frontmatter styles as well as marketing styles have changed in the last four decades. The original dedications remain, either on the copyright page (No Such Thing) or on a separate dedication page (What the Witch Left).
I think the biggest surprise for me was seeing the back covers and spines, because of course nowhere online do you see those. There’s a kind of woven background texture that’s light blue (No Such Thing) or light teal (What the Witch Left). It’s on all three formats.
The spines say Random House, of course, but they look odd to me because I’ve got so many copies of these books that say SBS and Scholastic on the edge!
I still can’t believe they’re real. And there are are more to come!
Paperbacks front and back:
Library hardcovers front and back:
Happy October!
It’s October and people are starting to pick out their costumes for Halloween. Why not get in the mood with a Ruth Chew story? Witches, black cats, flying broomsticks, big cauldrons, and magic, magic, magic!
New old books in the collection
I have ordered and received some used books that will fill in holes in the collection.
Two are really mangled ex-library books, and two are somewhat mangled ex-library books, but some of the hardcover editions are just really hard to get and expensive in ANY condition, so…
The copy of No Such Thing as a Witch is in great shape, though, as are the two pictorial hardcovers and almost all the paperbacks.
Total cost: about US$150, or about $10 each on average, including US shipping.
New books ship today!
Shipping starting today are the first two Random House paper-and-ink re-issues, No Such Thing as a Witch and What the Witch Left, as well as the e-book collection containing Witch’s Cat, The Witch’s Buttons, and The Witch’s Garden!
If you pre-ordered the books, look for them soon!
If you didn’t pre-order them, order now!
New site design
It’s time for an update. I’m shifting the Ruth Chew site into WordPress, so it will look and function a bit differently. I hope you like it!
For anyone of a slightly technical bent, some specifics:
- The site is wider. (Okay, that’s not very technical.)
- It’s on the WordPress platform. (It used to just be some PHP files; primitive templates.)
- The template is the Twenty-Ten theme, but I changed the CSS.
- The pages will still just pull data from the tables I set up in MySQL before.
- I also (sort-of) know how to use Photoshop. I made the new banner.