tales of beedle the bard

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> Susan:
> > So, who else has been over to Amazon to look at the book cover?
> 
> Pippin:
> Me! Me! There are now two summaries also. 

There are now three summaries. I've bookmarked the site.

The theme drawing at the top of Amazon's page, and on Sotheby's glass
door in a photo, the heart, skull, and rose, irresistibly reminds me
of a Grateful Dead album cover.

> You do realize, this is just fan fiction waiting to happen. 
> It'll be fascinating to see what people come up with. With no
> 'canon' version, these tales will exist only in the retelling, 
> just like traditional fairy tales.

Eventually it will be published, and then there will be a 'canon'
version. I acknowledge that may not be until after Rowling's death,
and she is younger than many of us, and perhaps Harry Potter fandom
will no longer exist. I hope it is much sooner than that.

In general, fairy tales are written in a way much difference from
'good writing', 'good writing' being what much fanfic writers are
emulating. I don't mean literary writing; I mean all that stuff that
makes Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion so very much longer than Lady
Caroline Guest's Mabinogion: what the characters are thinking and
feeling and wanting and expecting rather than a simple list of their
actions, and how events happened rather than simply stating that they
did happen. The 'show, don't tell' cliche. This leads both to modern
writers writing novels and novellas giving their take on a traditional
fairy tale, and to modern experienced readers enjoying the 'elegant
simplicity' of a fairy tale for a change, like visiting a museum
gallery of a traditional Japanese tea-ceremony house. I don't know
from the Amazon reviews whether these tales are written like fairy
tales or like 'good writing'.

Eventually  it should be published as photo-fascimile pages, with the
drawings and with the handwriting doing the things that the Amazon
reviews mention, but the cover doesn't have to have silver and gems,
nor even real leather, on it. It could be a color photo of her cover
or it could be something else. Speaking of gems, I finally saw one in
the last photo on the third page of photos --- they didn't show on all
the other pictures of the cover.

Hardcover books used to be covered with woven cloth. I'm having these
weird thoughts about whether a (the) book could be covered with cloth
that was specially woven with a color pattern. All the old cloth book
covers that I've particularly looked at were woven in the simple weave
where both warp and weft threads show, like gingham. They might have
to change that in order to use a nice pattern...