Ketchup

I'm told now that there are any number of book store windows with these scary, eye-grabbing displays everywhere in Spain.

Yes, that's a giant rack of hard cover books behind the posters and the freaky yellow hazmat tape... and I don't know if I've ever seen anything so beautiful in my life! Except, you know, maybe the births of our children. And my wife. Possibly the guy who performed my appendectomy. Oh, and the ski patrol at Bear Valley after I broke my leg in three places between ankle and knee on a lonely hillside down in their extreme Grizzly Bowl.

In fact, my publisher at Minotauro informs me that they created "over 400 floor stands for the most important book shops with a very striking red light in the middle of the gas mask and posters." Almost better, she also writes, "Fifteen days before launch, the book reached journalists and booksellers in a black bag sealed with a yellow adhesive tape on which you can read the words CAUTION. Inside we enclosed a gas mask and the book."

If everyone who was publishing Plague Year was doing it with such enthusiasm, Diana and I would be bazillionaires by now with an assortment of vacation homes in Vail, the Grand Caymans, and the surface of the moon.

Excuse me while I go faint now.

Labels: holy shit, La Plaga, Minotauro, Spain