Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Is Tommy's book really that cheap?

by at 6
I'm just writing a review of Tommy Wasserman's excellent book. I've been sent details of the price by the journal Themelios saying that it only costs £14.15 of USD 28.36. Is it really that cheap? This is cheaper than previously advertised prices and amazingly good value. Everyone should order one. I'm also doing a review for BBR.

6 comments

  1. Anonymous5/09/2007 6:31 pm

    I ordered Tommy's book some time ago from Sweden and even that was cheap, so I bet your info is correct.

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  2. Tommy Wasserman5/09/2007 7:39 pm

    Yes, it is very very cheap, but you then have to order it from that Swedish page www.bokus.com (and there are English instructions). At the very beginning they mistakenly charged a far too high shipping cost, due to some technical error. Now, the list price is 234 SEK which is appr. $33 + shipping. In the EU the shipping is cheap, somewhat more to the US.

    The tricky thing is to order from a Swedish website where you also have to set up an account, but they have English instructions so it should work for anyone. But I have been contacted by people who have not been able to work it out. Then I try my best to help them. Moreover, the publisher Almqvist & Wiksell International will close down next year (this is only a division of a larger company that continues), and therefore there are negotiations with other publishers. What this series needs is one Swedish publisher with some marketing muscles, and some international agents interested in a renowned series in Biblical studies. There are many interesting monographs in ConBNT (and ConBOT), e.g., Samuel Byrskog's "Jesus the Only Teacher." Bauckham interacts quite a lot with Byrskog in his recent work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

    Anyway, thanks for reviewing the book (for two journals?!)!

    Timo, actually I have noticed that my book happens to be available from Finland at a good price at http://www.bookplus.fi in case you have other friends there who want to order it.

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  3. P.J. Williams5/10/2007 9:20 am

    I'm sure prices will not be so cheap when Almqvist & Wiksell are taken over.

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  4. Anonymous5/10/2007 5:50 pm

    "it only costs £14.15 of USD 28.36."

    I take this "of" as an indicator of an anarthrous appositive, indicated in much later texts as "or." The question then arises as to which variant is original.

    Some of those in favor of "or" would assert that the scribe responsible for the earliest extant reading apparently felt a need to insert the horizontal bar into a slightly elongated "r" character; probably due to the controversy over the devalutation of the dollar to less than half a pound.

    Others object that this change renders the sentence ungrammatical, and, preferring the harder reading, assert that "of" is the original reading and "or" would be a scribal smoothing, having nothing whatsoever to do with the value of the pound in dollars.

    Upon further reflection, however, a study of scribal habits reveals that the near proximity of the "f" and "r" keys on a standard computer keyboard (with wide geographical attestation) often results in such variants. Thus we conclude that the harder reading canon has no more to do with the variant than the price of tea in China--or the pound in America.

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  5. P.J. Williams5/10/2007 10:35 pm

    This is a difficult variant. Have you considered the possibility that it might be the Dutch word for 'or'?

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  6. Anonymous5/11/2007 11:28 am

    to add my humourous two cents, PJ Williams' question opens up the case for an "atticistic" corruption :) Now were is J.K. Elliott when one needs him?-)

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