has coming out. Adrian Tierney-Jones has upped the ante with his forthcoming 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die
and Zak Avery is rather reassuringly avoiding the whole death thing with his simply titled 500 Beers
.Even to a dedicated beer nerd and piss artist like myself this seems a bit excessive. I'm only about half way through the first edition of 300 beers to try before you die. I also know it's impossible to finish as some of the beers are no longer made, but knowing I'd never be ready to die was kind of comforting. I've also got a copy of Ben McFarland's recently published World's Best Beers: 1000 Unmissable Brews from Portland to Prague
which has given plenty of ideas for new beers to seek out. Though I always keep an eye out for new beer books, and tempting as it is to combine them into an omnibus edition 'Thousands of beers to drink until your liver packs in' I think I'll have to pass. Even if they overlap a lot, as Roger Protz does with Michael Jackson's Great Beer Guide: The World's 500 Best Beers
(which I also own), I've got more than enough to be going on with.
And don't forget A Beer a Day by Jeff Evans :-)
ReplyDeleteIt's a crowded old market for sure. Repetition is unavoidable. Makes me wonder how they get this past the pitch, unless the publishers are confident the market isn't that crowded. The idea does seem a bit copy cattish whatever way you look at it, though your idea might be a winner.
ReplyDeleteYou're quite right of course, and I'm currently working on a pitch for a book about beer that isn't a list book. Whether a publisher will understand it is another matter.
ReplyDeleteI reckon there's a market for a cooking lager omnibus.
ReplyDeleteEd — 1001 is part of the original series that kicked off this whole list thing, they’ve done wine, films, books, albums etc and I know for a fact that 300 was a post modernist take on the whole thing; what I like to think is different about my book is that it is the opinions of 40 writers around the world, including myself, not just one. And like Zak (one of the writers) I’ve got thoguths for a non list book, but for the moment will content with feature writing (non list).
ReplyDeleteCooking — most definitely, I can see it now on the shelves at Tesco’s.
I'm already writing it, Ade. It's called Cooking lager : 1001 ways to get pissed up that are all broadly the same, not much different from each other and pretty cheap. Which publisher is a soft touch for an advance on this rot?
ReplyDeleteCooking, I reckon you want to try one of the upmarket ones, try Martin Amis’s, after all they might want a bestseller now that young Amis has gone off the boil.
ReplyDelete"Lout - A User's Guide"
ReplyDeleteAdrian – You're tempting me now. Some of my friends have enjoyed ticking off ‘1001 films’ and having 40 writers should get around the problem you can see in Protz’s book that it’s biased to where his tastes and knowledge lie. I still haven’t finished all the beer books I got for xmas so maybe it’s one for next xmas.
ReplyDeleteI don't need to guide to getting pissed though, I can manged that quite well already.