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A golden age of publishing on the verge of collapse. For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public created a unique opportunity: Books could be published without an authorâs permission with extraordinary ease. Authors gained fame but suffered financiallyâCharles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a fewâbut publishers reaped enormous profits while readers got their books on the cheap. The literary pirates who stalked the harbors, coffeehouses, and printer shops for the latest manuscript to steal were known as bookaneers.
Yet on the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to protect authors and grind this literary underground to a sharp halt. The bookaneers, of course, would become extinct. In The Last Bookaneer, Matthew Pearl gives us a historical novel set inside the lost world of these doomed outlaws and the incredible heist that brought their era to a close.
On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon two adversariesâthe gallant Pen Davenport and the monstrous Belialâset out for the south Pacific island. Pen Davenportâa tortured criminal genius haunted by his pastâis reluctantly accompanied by Fergins, the narrator of our story, who has lived a quiet life of bookselling before being whisked across the world on his friendâs final caper. Fergins soon discovers the supreme thrill of aiding Davenport in his quest: to steal Stevensonâs manuscript and make a fortune before the new treaty ends the bookaneersâ trade forever.
Yet Samoa holds many secrets of its own, and the duoâs bookish concerns clash with the islandâs violent destiny. A colonial war is afoot between the British, American, and German powers; even as Stevenson himself quietly supports native revolutionaries from high in his mountain compound. Soon Pen and Fergins are embroiled in a conflict larger, perhaps, than literature itself. Illuminating the heroics of the bookaneers even while conjuring Stevenson himself to breathtaking life, Pearlâs The Last Bookaneer is a pageturning journey to the dark heart of a forgotten literary era.
This edition also contains Western Birding by Ear: A Guide to Bird Song Identification
About: The bestselling author of The Dante Club takes us deep into a shadowy era in publishing ruled by a forgotten class of criminalsA golden age of publishing on the verge of collapse.
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