Shadow Ticket. Group Read 2026. Extra credit (which means not on the text itself.)..

[Mark Kohut]

I remember them the same way, although I wasn't so close to their
publishing then....

Another detail about Shadow Ticket....booksellers and some bloggers can now
get 'reading' and review
copies digitally for many books but those were a NO! NOBODY for Shadow
Ticket all around.   They did know that with the techie fans
TRP has always had, that any digital copy somewhere even password-coded and
with the usual protections  would be hacked and copied and be all around
the world
and still moving by official pub day.....

On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 1:37 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> I remember the big promotion spreads for M&D (at a bookstore in Brooklyn
> Heights) and for AtD (at Coliseum Books, by that time on 42nd St, near
> NYPL, closed soon after in 2007).
>
> I don't remember IV or BE having such promotion, certainly not ST, at
> least here in NYC
>
> One could argue Pynchon is just not a name that provokes such attention
> anymore, at least with the general reading public.
>
> On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 1:01 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Scheduled to be published October 7, just in time for if---I I think it
>> delusional but not because he doesn't deserve it--
>> he won the Nobel...(awarded the next week)...seemingly all finished the
>> usual number of months ahead--or more---maybe they held it back
>> for this propitious award time? Because good books which sell by reviews
>> and word-of-mouth mostly get planned for Earlier a bit, early september
>> or even get them into stores in August---August is the worst month for
>> reviews---"everyone" is supposedly on vacation--so early sales would be to
>> fans who learned
>> of it and Pynchon has that cult as we know...
>>
>> Remember how rushed was the publication of* Against the Day*....I have
>> publishing guesses about this for another post...)
>>
>> The publisher tightly controlled all reviewers' copies,allowed no reviews
>> to appear until pub date and anyone who got a lucky
>> Advance copy was also approved and had to promise to not talk about it
>> publicly in any substantive way....a common enough practice
>> for important books, esp non-fiction ones full of factual spoilers and
>> medis grabs....
>>
>> The result of so many reviews hitting all at once....be nice to know how
>> many reviews there were and where is ....the early 'Advanced--advance by
>> being ordered in advance--' copies as
>> we called them flew out of the stores and there was an immediate
>> out-of-stock state--even Amazon.  This state usually creates
>> a supply  judgement problem and some lost sales......( Penguin for this
>> one
>> did NOT follow the known lead of the publishers of Mason & Dixon and
>> Against the Day,who overprinted willfully. First editions of Mason & Dixon
>> were on remainder tables years later...
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>