Vintage book wank exclamation mark
(Apologies for the age of this wank [2007] and the shortage of fights, but the strangeness mostly makes up for it.)

Once there was a man called Nathan Carnes. Nathan really liked exclamation marks and the word “whom”, and he wrote a book called Space Ark! so that he could use both frequently. He also liked rainbows and the Copperplate font, so he created a website to promote his opus, and found a vanity publisher who was prepared to realise his dream of the world’s most amateurish cover.



The opening sentence of the Excerpt page:

Oceana's triplicate synthetic recreation from the Space Ark's enormous registry of binary data was the first Being to be regenerated from the Terrestrial Ark's voluminous digital archives of androgynous doubles and carnal genetic ancestors.

(This is probably my favourite sentence:

For, no one ever grew tired of strolling nightly each month on the trinity of special eves to gaze awestruck skyward to the nighttime heavens if only to delight in their beloved nocturnal spectacle of sacred light.

I think it’s the comma.)

But, of course, if he’d just stopped there, it wouldn’t be a wank. What’s more, he was getting restless. During its 15 years (!) of vanity publication, the book had managed to sell only 2,700 copies (er, he says). Accordingly, Nathan sent what I assume was intended to be a query letter to literary agent Miss Snark [blog is archival], and, further, promised to let her see sample pages for the low, low price of $35!



A copy of the manuscript with digital color cover and inside illustrations is not free to publishers or agents. You MUST purchase a copy of the ENTIRE BOOK via our web site to peruse it. No sample chapters will be sent; no exceptions. No author biography or synopsis will be sent as all such preliminary info. is available at www.spaceark.net... You should be willing to make a minor investment on an item whose potential for manifold return is great! If not, then we're not interested in doing business with you.

Miss Snark was laughing too hard to mock much, but the 146 commenters had quite a lot to say (much of it to do with whether it’s possible for a work to have an exclamation mark in its title and still be good, but we’ve not got space for that). One of them was author Ben Jeapes, who had once worked as a publisher and remembered Nathan Carnes well; Nathan was the one who called him dense, a dumb-ass, a dodo and a dilettante. (Oh, and a jerk and a “wanna-be publisher” as well, but they don’t alliterate.)

you're obviously in the wrong biz; I suggest the law for you in which to dabble next, Mr. wet-behind-the-ears Dilettante, as you like to argue for no apparent purpose except to waste your time writing e-mails instead of looking at web sites which feature authors' books!

PS We can't use ya', sorry... Finally, take note: this is a rejection of you & your puny service which needs to be overtly stated to some one as dense as you... Got it? GOOD!

Regrettably, I’ve been unable to find any more of Nathan’s public utterances. I am disappointed about this because I’m pretty sure every one of them is gold. Oh, well; I shall take comfort from his “reviews”, which feature an ENT specialist, one of the agents condemned by Preditors and Editors and someone who says, “Your vocabulary is one of the richest I have encountered. Wow!” (Hint: there are times when that’s not a good thing.)