Thank you an uncountable number of times for setting up this wonderful and informative site. I read Jerusalem Poker in 1986 when I was 18 and being idealistic on an Israeli kibbutz. It was a beaten-up old paperback edition from the kibbutz library, and I took it with me on a visit to Jerusalem and read most of it there, at various spots around the Old City. I was tempted to keep it when I eventually left for home, but decided that it would be wrong to deny other travellers the pleasure of discovery. Besides, there were guards at the gate with Uzis, and I wasn't entirely clear what their search policy was... The book stayed with me, though, in its kaleidoscope of images and stories and characters and enormous lies and staggering truths. Stunningly (or perhaps stupidly...) I didn't discover until last year that that EW was an unsung megastar of truth-telling fantastical history literature, that there were other books, that it was a quartet - and that it was virtually impossible to get hold of any of them unless you had spare limbs to barter with. And then today I read your Amazon.com reviews, and found my way here, and read that the books are going to be reissued... and now I'm just in a happy happy haze and feel that a circle of my life that I didn't even know I was drawing is finally coming to a close. Or will do just as soon as I get my hands on those Old Earth editions. And I will indeed go through that Melbourne bookshop you mentioned, so thank you for that too. You've done me and hopefully many others a fine service here. Congratulations, and thank you again. Robert Cook
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Message Thread Oasis discovered in cyber-desert! - Robert Cook October 9, 2001, 4:20 pm
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