{"id":5689,"date":"2026-08-28T15:39:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5689"},"modified":"2026-08-28T15:39:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:39:36","slug":"homage-to-the-ace-double","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5689","title":{"rendered":"Homage to the Ace Double"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like me, they were born in 1952. Unlike me, they died in 1978, though in truth I don\u2019t remembering seeing them after I got out of high school in 1970. The Ace Doubles were two short novels in a single mass-market paperback volume. Back when I was in high school 1966-1970, they cost 60c, and I usually bought them at the long-gone Arcade Bookshop, which was in the basement of the strip mall at Harlen and Foster Avenues in Chicago, almost under the Walgreen\u2019s there. Some were westerns. Some were mysteries. But I think most were SF. Here\u2019s a list<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"Destination<\/a>I bought a lot of them. I have two left. My favorite will always be Destination Saturn<\/em> by David Grinnell and Lin Carter, 1967. Its bookmate, Invader on my Back<\/em>, by Philip E. High, was\u2026so-so. Some of the others I judged as unreadable and threw away; a lot of them just fell apart after I read them a few more times. I\u2019m sure I loaned several to friends and forgot to ask for their return. It doesn\u2019t matter. Once I cleaned out all the SF in my local public library, the Doubles got most of my money and attention. They definitely shaped my early understanding and appreciation of SF. They were not great fiction, but that didn\u2019t matter to me because as a high-school freshman I had very little to compare them to. When I was 14 or 15, they were just dazzling. The covers were sometimes better than the novels themselves, especially after I was older and had read a lot<\/em> more of much<\/em> better SF. (The above cover is a Kelly Freas.)<\/p>\n

So. Zoom forward from 1971 to 2011. I launched the drumlins stories in 2002, with \u201cDrumlin Boiler\u201d in IASFM<\/em>. I had begun The Everything Machine<\/em> in 2006, but didn\u2019t finish it for another 19 years. (Long story, and the long story is not the novel, heh.) I had a concept for a drumlins novel that didn\u2019t have to be monumental. I offered my good friend and author Jim Strickland a chance to write a drumlins novel of his own. At some point in 2011, we got the idea of publishing them together, both in a single volume.<\/p>\n

Then it hit me: We could publish a double SF novel as homage to the Ace Doubles. How? It\u2019s called t\u00eate-b\u00eache<\/em>, which is French for \u201chead-to-tail.\u201d The two novels are published back-to-back, but one is upside-down with respect to the other. Both have covers. The best way to explain this is simply to show you the t\u00eate-b\u00eache<\/em> cover image we used for our double:<\/p>\n

\"Double1CoverFullColorFinal\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The cover was the easy part. It was much tougher to build a complete PDF of the text with half the book upside-down with respect to the other, and pages in reverse order. Jim figured it out, and the body PDF happened.<\/p>\n

I published the paperback on Lightning Source (now owned by Ingram) and a few copies were sold before they canceled the book for lack of sales. However, we knew that the ebook market was catching fire, so we (mostly Jim) created an ebook edition for Kindle, which was published in April 2011. I\u2019ve published most of my SF books in both ebook and paperback editions, but 95% of my sales have been ebooks, even back in the teens. So I wasn\u2019t in a huge hurry to publish the paperback double on Amazon. I never expected to sell hundreds of copies. But I wanted to publish a t\u00eate-b\u00eache <\/em>paperback volume in honor of the cheap SF books I cut my teeth on when I was a high schooler. Cheap, but novel in their way (heh) and in my opinion, a damned clever format.<\/p>\n

Alas, as I found this morning, Amazon won\u2019t accept the paperback for publication. They say they don\u2019t publish \u201cflip books.\u201d Huh? My understanding of flip books<\/a> is that they\u2019re a way of animating images on paper by drawing images that change slightly on each successive page of a book. You flip through a flip book by placing your thumb on the edge of the book, and pressing the book so that the pages appear rapidly, in sequence, animating the image. The only detail I got about the refusal is that parts of the book (almost half of it, in fact,) are upside-down. Well, yeah\u2014that\u2019s what t\u00eate-b\u00eache<\/em> books are: Books that are actually two separate blocks of text upside-down with respect to one another, and covers on both sides of the book.<\/p>\n

So where do we go from here? I\u2019m not sure. My first impulse is to try Lulu.com. I have an account there and published several early books there, including the Carl & Jerry series, which are now on Kindle as paperbacks. I\u2019ll post an entry here if Lulu accepts the book, or if I have to look further and finally find a place willing to sell it onesy-twosy.<\/p>\n

Am I nuts? No. I understand completely that the ebook edition of the double novel is what people will buy. But the Ace Doubles left a mark on me, and I\u2019m honoring them with the t\u00eate-b\u00eache <\/em>paperback of Drumlin Circus<\/em> and On Gossamer Wings. <\/em>I will sell a few\u2014and these days paperbacks are useful to wave around at convention huckster tables or panels, even if what people end up buying are the ebooks. Watch this space\u2014I\u2019ve gone too far with the project to stop now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like me, they were born in 1952. Unlike me, they died in 1978, though in truth I don\u2019t remembering seeing them after I got out of high school in 1970. The Ace Doubles were two short novels in a single mass-market paperback volume. Back when I was in high school 1966-1970, they cost 60c, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,19],"tags":[284,17,283,282,16],"class_list":["post-5689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideasandanalysis","category-memoir","tag-ace-doubles","tag-ebooks","tag-kindle","tag-paperbacks","tag-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5690,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions\/5690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}