Books: "Others are simply too strange and Swedish to ignore."

With e-readers finally making the jump from curio to viable product, the woes of big-box giant Borders, the existence of entrenched sharing tech, and business snake oil gurus hawking a freeconomy (which, to be fair, is excellent timing as so few of us have any money anymore), the band of Cassandras that ritualistically sounds the alarm for the "death of the book" has grown surprisingly large. Though there are certainly those who hold that the material object we call "a book " is an archaic bit of tech that is going the way of the polyspastos; more often than not, what the doomsayers are actually talking about is the end of the book-industry as we know it.

I'm not informed enough to make any sort of claim one way or another. However, I happily note that many of the same advances in production and distribution tech that are supposedly dooming the book are, currently, helping lower the cost of entry for small, niche publishers. I don't know if these odd, obsessive, quirky publishers may or may not be some sort of weather balloon for the coming era of the book-biz, but I do know that they please me to virtually no end.

Take, for example, Bazillion Points Books: purveyor of all things insanely metal. Whether you're looking for "the ultimate blow-by-blow account of Sweden’s legendary death metal underground" or the autobiography of Hanoi Rock's Andy McCoy ("My dad beat my mom, my mom beat my big brother, my big brother beat me, I beat my sister, my sister beat the dog, the dog beat the cat, the cat beat the hamster, and the hamster beat whatever bugs he could find. That was our family’s version of the natural order.") then Bazillion has your next new favorite book.

Even if you're not particularly into rock's lunatic fringe (I, for example, have a medical condition called "kinda being a big pussy" that prevents me from listening to metal's harshest offerings), there's plenty to dig. I know of more than one cult film fanatic who would be happy to receive Daniel Ekeroth's Swedish Exploitation Cinema: An Uncensored Guide to Sweden’s Clandestine Film History. The collected punk zine Touch and Go is pretty sweet too.

Finally, I don't know if it would ultimately bring you joy or grief, but Hellbent for Cooking: The Headbanger’s Kitchen, by Annick Giroux "The Morbid Chef" is fantastic beyond belief.