Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams is now available exclusively from The Library of America Web store, ten days ahead of its release to bookstores—including online booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
The list price is $15.00, but the book is available directly from the LOA for $13.50 (10 percent off) and shipping is free within the U.S. Here’s the link. You can also purchase the book by phoning LOA at 1-800-964-5778 and requesting product #410027. Jim Yerkes reports that the price is cheaper if you phone and request the product number than if you order online.
I’m sure I’m not the only one. How many have noticed this year’s first-ever John Updike Conference begins mere days after the fiftieth anniversary of Ted’s final home run in his final career at-bat: the homer Updike witnessed, the one masterpiece that spawned the other? The information is in the first paragraph of “Hub Fans”: September 28, 1960. I was hoping to swing by Boston on my way north from Texas, in the hopes of witnessing whatever commemoration the Red Sox might throw at Fenway–and if there were none, to at least buy a scalper’s ticket and revel in my own private moment, to crack my peanuts and sip my beer. But no: the Sox will be wandering through the Midwest all that week, proof again that baseball keeps on commanding our attention very nearly in spite of how it is run.