Lol. I am not one to be cozened by such flattery. It's amusing, Greg is such a devout Tolkien aficionado(we're talking complete memorization of the noble houses of Finwe, Feanor, Fingolfin and Finarfin.) that the few times I've spoken to him about SA I've always sold it as: The Old Testament meets Lord of the Rings with Aragorn replaced with Paul Atreides. He finds it interesting but don't think he's opened up TDTCB at any point, though I know he owns an edition. Compounded oddity is the fact that for him this is just another book to mail me, but for us, this is the One Ring—the holiest of holies, the precious.
Wilshire you may have misunderstood me. There is not a crate of The Great Ordeals in a warehouse in Long Island somewhere—I think my contact has like four or fives copies. I meant that they'll only receive a few copies of ARCs from various publishers and authors and yet the sheer volume of custom they receive is relegated to crates in storage. If you are someone like Adam Whitehead or whomever, you are getting ARCs to actually review!—so of course you will read and share your discourse. A bookstore? Doesn't really factor into their timetable or business model to use them. But they still get them and I will scrounge for my merest fractions.