Collecting Highlights

5/15/2006:  Menolly's Sea Songs
by Hans van der Boom

An easy-to-write-up Collecting Highlight this time, with low quality pics but nonetheless a real collectible. The reason that I can be fast with this collectible is that I can hardly find any data or information about it. This posting hopefully might change that as there might be several people among you that own one of these.

The fact remains that I found not even one copy offered for sale on the internet and not even more than one or two relevant mentionings. One of these last was the M. Horvat Collection of fanzines (at Iowa State University) although technically Menolly's Sea Songs is not a fanzine The Horvat collection is the very same Becky (Coelura1) recently came up with as one of the places where some of the Crystal Singer fanzines reside.

Anyway, Hargreaves (chapter on secondary material; page 292) says this "publication" is a joint collaboration by Anne McCaffrey (words) and the reknowed filk artist Joanne Forman (music).
It is a prepublication of sheet music from 1983 that was to be later included in a booklet with somgs called Dragonsongbook (twelve pieces for flute, published in 1985; of which Hargreaves says that is has not appeared (which can't be true as it was published 1985 and his book covers publications up to the early nineties; but that's another collectible and must wait its turn)

The contents of Menolly's Sea Songs are sheet music and text to three songs: My Nightly Craft, The Fickle Wind and O Wide Sea. It was published by Performing Arts Press, Taos, in 1983. The original price was $2.00.
The fact they don't turn up much is due to the fact that the 7 pages were only produced in an edition of 200 copies...

The pictures aren't spectacular and actually this collectible isn't much to look at but as books or collectibles go (hey, I'm a cover art guy ), but it is a real collectible.

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