A Ton of Fun

Friday, July 27, 2022: The day I marked on the Storygraph my first ever Dean Street Press book as "read". That book was The Crime at the Noah's Ark by Molly Thynne. It was not love at first sight, as my reaction at The Storygraph indicates.

Sunday, December 29, 2024: The day I marked on the Storygraph my 100th Dean Street Press book as "read." That book was Harlequin House by Margery Sharp and my Storygraph reaction shows how the times (and tones) have changed. They have me well and truly hooked!

The image below shows all 100 of the DSP books I've completed up to the time of writing this post.

This post is a paean, so what follows are reasons I think Dean Street Press deserve one.

1. Passionate People: it is very clear that Dean Street Press care very much about what they do. They don't just sell books, they sell readers on books, and they sell authors. I bought an entire series of novels by one author solely on the strength of a guest blog post on their website promoting his work. For introducing me to so many authors I now know and love, I am in your debt Dean Street Press.

2. Premium Product: I bought the first book in Brian Flynn's Anthony Bathhurst series from Kobo. It was a budget edition, less than $2NZ, and it showed. Happily the story itself appealed enough that every one of the series I've bought since (also from Kobo) has been a Dean Street Press edition. Their books feature good quality typesetting (NOT a given with ebooks) and the covers are either interesting paintings (their "middlebrow" books) or follow a unified cover image theme in the case of their mystery series. I don't miss paper books, but I do find their covers are so appealing that I'm sorely tempted to get an utterly unnecessary Kobo Libra Colour just to admire them better! Even more impressive than the covers are the introductions. Most of the mystery novels feature excellent introductions providing context and background from crime fiction historians Steve Barge or Curtis Evans, while historian and bookseller Elizabeth Crawford has provided the same for many of the "middlebrow" works by mid-century female authors. All of these introductions add real value and enhance the reading experience. They are a feature of DSP books that I really look forward to with each new purchase.

3. Postage? Pass! All of my recreational reading is exclusively in ebooks, for reasons both physical and fiscal. That Dean Street Press makes all but a tiny handful of their books available as ebooks is a major reason why I have so many of them. I could not have afforded to buy nearly as many paper copies of their books as I have ebook copies, and nor, it seems, would I have been able to. I have never seen a single physical copy of any Dean Street Press book in any physical bookstore here in Aotearoa, and searching half a dozen websites of physical bookstores based here in preparing this post I again came up empty. To obtain physical copies of their books I would have had to buy from Amazon, which leads me to point four

4. Purchasing Possibilities: I switched from Kindle to Kobo more than six years ago, and in those six years I have managed to avoid buying from Amazon almost completely. I hate that many authors find themselves trapped by Amazon's exclusivity demands, and so I love the fact that I can buy Dean Street Press books from Kobo. Kobo's loyalty reward program has enabled me to get some Dean Street Press books for "free" by using loyalty points acquired over time through purchases. For not forcing me to buy from Bezos, thank you Dean Street Press.

5 Parasocial perceptions: Dean Street Press is a publisher, and I am a customer. Realistically, that is our relationship. I know very little about the people who are Dean Street Press. That said, the moving condolences from his collaborators and from his "partners in crime" when the founder died at a too young age in 2023 all painted a picture of someone who really made a success of being a pleasant person, and who was (as said above) passionate about DSP as a project. Those tributes also make it clear that "Dean Street Press" as a social media entity definitely reflects those characteristics of its founder. I've interacted with DSP on social media quite a bit, and enjoyed those interactions greatly. Whoever they are, they have the patience of a saint, as they invariably respond with graciousness and gratitude to my alerts about typos and editorial misses in their ebooks. For putting up with that for two long years, I salute you, Dean Street Press.

6. Panui Pai: Afflicted as I am with an absolutely asinine affection for and absurd addiction to assonance and alliteration, I cheated with this paragraph – "panui pai" is a clumsy rendering of "Good read(ing)" in Māori. This post was written to mark reaching 100 DSP books read. At the Storygraph reading tracker, my average score for those 100 books is 3.94/5, and I have only dropped 7 others. That is an extremely good hit rate of truly "good reads". As I look forward to the next hundred, I say Ngā mihi nui me tino pai rawa atu, Dean Street Press!

The seven individual books featured above are those I've scored 5/5 at The Storygraph, in the order in which I read them. Here are links to what I said about each of them:

The Laughing Dog
The Fortescue Candle
Green Money
The Case of the 100% Alibis
Touch Not the Nettle
Dear Hugo
Mystery Villa