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Still Life with Woodpecker
by Robbins, Tom
- Used
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Very Good- in Good+ dust jacket
- Seller
-
Bishop, California, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
New York: Bantam Books. Very Good- in Good+ dust jacket. 1980. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Solid first edition with minor shelf wear, a few smudges, and minor aging. One smudge on DJ spine and small smudge on end paper. Dust jacket protected in mylar cover. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 277 pages .
Synopsis
Still Life With Woodpecker (1980) is the third novel by Tom Robbins, concerning the love affair between an environmentalist princess and an outlaw. As with most of Robbins' books, it encompasses a broad range of topics, from aliens and redheads to consumerism, the building of bombs, romance, royalty, the moon, and a pack of Camels.
Reviews
On Jan 16 2014, a reader said:
This is a sort of love story, but not exactly. It tells us about a Princess whose father has been kicked out of his kingdom and adopted by the US. The girl starts out very socially conscious. Then she meets her true love at a conference in Maui, and everything else goes by the wayside. This true love is not a criminal, as he explains to her, but an outlaw. Due to the efforts of a CIA spy, he is thrown in prison for a couple of years. The princess decides to put herself in solitary confinement, just like her lover, and retires to the attic with a cot, a chamber pot, and a pack of camel cigarettes, which she doesn’t smoke. As the word gets out that she is doing this, there are a lot of copy cats, and her lover, in irritation, writes her a nasty letter about it. This has the effect of making her decide she is no longer in love with him, and she makes the choice to marry an Arab King instead. Meanwhile, her study of the Camel pack has convinced her that she must know more about the effects of pyramids, so she has the King build her one as a wedding present. The King, no dummy, alerts all other Arab countries that her lover is a bad guy, to be shot on sight. For a while it appears that the Woodpecker (her lover) has been caught and killed. Then, on the night before her wedding, while she is checking out the newly finished pyramid, the Woodpecker appears alive. She is overjoyed, and her fiancé sees her hugging her former lover in the pyramid; so he locks them in and explains to the world that she has been kidnapped by a terrorist gang. Luckily, the cake and champagne for her wedding the next day was already in place, and they subsist on this for about a month. Then the Princess decides to use her lover’s dynamite (which he is never without) to blow open the door, assuming this will kill them both.
This book enlightens us on a number of fronts: we learn the difference between a criminal and an outlaw; we examine the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism; and we learn a lot about the problem of redheads and the pyramids. Meanwhile, we flirt briefly with feminism, ecology, racism, and a lot of other “isms”. Robbins is always unique in his combination of philosophy and comedy.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Range & River Books
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 44779
- Title
- Still Life with Woodpecker
- Author
- Robbins, Tom
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good- in Good+ dust jacket
- Edition
- First Edition; First Printing
- Publisher
- Bantam Books
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1980
- Keywords
- First Edition, MODERN First Editions, Novel, 2024
Terms of Sale
Range & River Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
Range & River Books
Biblio member since 2006
Bishop, California
About Range & River Books
With thousands of books on the shelves, and specializations in the fiction and nonfiction that make our region great, Range & River Books is another treasure of the Eastern High Sierra and a great place to browse. We are working to list more books on-line every day for customers around the world. We specialize in Eastern California, Owens Valley and Great Basin History and Natural History, Mountaineering and Climbing, Western Americana, Literature, Rare and Collectible, Children's, and Cookbooks. Stock in store includes thousands of popular fiction titles, science fiction, mysteries, and an amazing selection of vintage volumes including the colorful People's Book Club editions from the 1930's to 1940's, so contact us if you have an interest in those areas!
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
- Shelf Wear
- Shelf wear (shelfwear) describes damage caused over time to a book by placing and removing a book from a shelf. This damage is...
- Good+
- A term used to denote a condition a slight grade better than Good.