The Babbington Press and all its publications are pieces of one fiction: The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences, and Observations of Peter Leroy.
To learn more about the Personal History, click here.
|
 |
Print: $16.95 ABOUT THE BOOK
IIf you were there, would the place itself lend you some of its energy? Would it teach you to pick up your pace? Would it impart to you a quickness, a driving rhythm? Would it infect you with its vitality, its eagerness, its impulsiveness? Would it teach you the secret of its endless regeneration?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bertram W. Beath, “BW” to those who know him best, is the alter ego of Matthew Barber, a boyhood friend of Peter Leroy, whose memoirs, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, are a voluminous work of fiction by Eric Kraft.
ABOUT THE LIMITED EDITION
In the Marketplace of Ideas will eventually be incorporated in a longer work. However, this standalone edition is limited to fewer than one hundred printed copies, of which two are designated proof copies and fewer than ninety-eight are for sale.
|
 |
Print: $14.50 ABOUT THE BOOK
If you were to wander through the marketplace of ideas, would the experience be like strolling through one of the arcades of Paris, or would you find that the ideas in the marketplace are like attractively packaged, cleverly marketed, branded and trademarked, seductive, beguiling, bedazzling, and befuddling toys?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bertram W. Beath, “BW” to those who know him best, is the alter ego of Matthew Barber, a boyhood friend of Peter Leroy, whose memoirs, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, are a voluminous work of fiction by Eric Kraft.
ABOUT THE LIMITED EDITION
In the Marketplace of Ideas will eventually be incorporated in a longer work. However, this standalone edition is limited to fewer than one hundred printed copies, of which two are designated proof copies and fewer than ninety-eight are for sale.
|
 |
Print: $17.50 ABOUT THE BOOK
Is there a place where we could go, a beautiful place where the pace is slow, a place where we could catch our breath, where we could stop and think? This seductive book presents such a place, but it presents it with a warning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bertram W. Beath, “BW” to those who know him best, is the alter ego of Matthew Barber, a boyhood friend of Peter Leroy, whose memoirs, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, are a voluminous work of fiction by Eric Kraft.
ABOUT THE LIMITED EDITION
In an Undisclosed Location will eventually be incorporated in a longer work. However, this standalone edition is limited to fewer than one hundred printed copies, of which two are designated proof copies and fewer than ninety-eight are for sale.
|
 |
Print: $17.95 ABOUT THE BOOK
Over cocktails in an opulent setting, two unnamed interlocutors discuss the difficulty of living in the present.
This intoxicating book captures that moment of hesitation and indecision that we have all experienced, when we stand on the brink of something new, wondering whether to take the plunge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bertram W. Beath, “BW” to those who know him best, is the alter ego of Matthew Barber, a boyhood friend of Peter Leroy, whose memoirs, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, are a voluminous work of fiction by Eric Kraft.
ABOUT THE LIMITED EDITION
Just Now, at Present will eventually be incorporated in a longer work. However, this standalone edition is limited to fewer than one hundred printed copies, of which two are designated proof copies and fewer than ninety-eight are for sale.
|
 |
Print: $14.95 ABOUT THE BOOK
In a time when many of us find ourselves asking "Where am I?" this slim book offers better answers than many weightier volumes.
There I Was presents a number of photographs taken by B. W. Beath, along with a brief but insightful text that captures the essential “message” that the images convey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bertram W. Beath, “BW” to those who know him best, is the alter ego of Matthew Barber, a boyhood friend of Peter Leroy, whose memoirs, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, are a voluminous work of fiction by Eric Kraft.
ABOUT THE LIMITED EDITION
There I Was will eventually be incorporated in a longer work. However, this standalone edition is limited to fewer than one hundred printed copies, of which three are designated proof copies and fewer than ninety-seven are for sale.
|
 |
Print: $14.95 Adapted for the screen from the eighth volume of Peter Leroy’s memoirs, in which Peter struggles to win the affections of the toothsome Patti Fiorenza while keeping both his mother’s hopes and his mother’s boat afloat.
Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally-notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme to buy a run-down clamboat and re-invent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the bayside town of Babbington, Long Island. But after they’ve bought the boat, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking.
|
 |
Disc: $17.75 Here is the entire text of Inflating a Dog, complete and unabridged, read by Eric Kraft.
The total time of the reading is nine hours.
The audio files are in the mp3 format; they can be played on a computer or transferred to an iPod or any other digital music player that can play the mp3 format.
“Raucous, wise, and great fun, this is simply not to be missed.”
Nancy Pearl, Booklist
|
 |
Print: $12.95 Peter Leroy receives his sexual initiation at the hands of the Glynn twins, becomes a sketch doctor, listens to many tales about the night the Nevsky mansion burned, learns the value of hope, and discovers the love of his life.
As is usual with Peter's recollections, we are never certain where memory ends and imagination begins—but we are certain that we are reading the work of a brilliant memoirist who reconstructs his past with wry humor, nostalgia, satire, and dazzling invention.
“A witty and wildly digressive epistemological examination in the form of a childhood reminiscence.”
The New Yorker
“Wholly engaging . . . a daring tour de force.”
Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times Book Review
“One of the more hilariously erotic pieces of writing since Lolita.”
Edward Hannibal, The East Hampton Star
|
 |
Print: $12.95 “[What a Piece of Work I Am] centers on the sultry Ariane, who had been the town bad girl in the 1950s. Baring the sexual secrets and bizarre events of her past . . . Ariane pieces together a wild, fascinating tale based on her erotic history. Peter listens as Ariane, who is six years older and more worldly, recounts growing up lower-class and having sex with many boys while the good girls shunned and hounded her for it. He remembers vividly his own puppy love for this luscious older sister of his best friend, Raskol. . . . A rebel before her time, questing, daring yet bumbling in the back seats of guys’ cars, fearless to the point of foolishness, she remains resilient enough to pursue a twisting life’s odyssey that demonstrates her growing sophistication in matters of love and sex."
Mark Ciabattari, Washington Post Book World
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
|
 |
Print: $15.95 “[What a Piece of Work I Am] centers on the sultry Ariane, who had been the town bad girl in the 1950s. Baring the sexual secrets and bizarre events of her past . . . Ariane pieces together a wild, fascinating tale based on her erotic history. Peter listens as Ariane, who is six years older and more worldly, recounts growing up lower-class and having sex with many boys while the good girls shunned and hounded her for it. He remembers vividly his own puppy love for this luscious older sister of his best friend, Raskol. . . . A rebel before her time, questing, daring yet bumbling in the back seats of guys’ cars, fearless to the point of foolishness, she remains resilient enough to pursue a twisting life’s odyssey that demonstrates her growing sophistication in matters of love and sex."
Mark Ciabattari, Washington Post Book World
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
|
 |
Hardcover Print: $29.95 “[What a Piece of Work I Am] centers on the sultry Ariane, who had been the town bad girl in the 1950s. Baring the sexual secrets and bizarre events of her past . . . Ariane pieces together a wild, fascinating tale based on her erotic history. Peter listens as Ariane, who is six years older and more worldly, recounts growing up lower-class and having sex with many boys while the good girls shunned and hounded her for it. He remembers vividly his own puppy love for this luscious older sister of his best friend, Raskol. . . . A rebel before her time, questing, daring yet bumbling in the back seats of guys’ cars, fearless to the point of foolishness, she remains resilient enough to pursue a twisting life’s odyssey that demonstrates her growing sophistication in matters of love and sex."
Mark Ciabattari, Washington Post Book World
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
|
 |
Print: $13.95 Peter Leroy finally completes a junior-high-school science assignment, thirty years late, exploring along the way quantum physics, entropy, epistemology, principles of uncertainty and discontinuity, a range of life’s Big Questions, and his memories of his intoxicating science teacher, Miss Rheingold.
“Warm . . . thought-provoking . . . charming . . . delightful.”
Library Journal (starred review)
“A book designed to leave its readers—and it deserves many of them—as happy as clams.”
Walter Satterthwait, The New York Times Book Review
“Luminously intelligent fun.”
Time
|
 |
Print: $15.95 Peter Leroy constructs a plausible adult life for his grade school chum Matthew Barber, now living in Boston, where he is vice-president of a toy company by day, but becomes Bertram W. Beath, restaurant reviewer, when the sun goes down.
Reservations Recommended is a satire of the critical mind; a dark commentary on contemporary culture; a story of midlife crisis; a morality play; and a book that matches bleakness against humor, seasoned throughout with B. W. Beath’s hilariously acid reviews. We watch as Matthew Barber descends from a self-protective superiority into a species of madness, and into the dark night of the soul.
“A brilliant satire.”
LA Life
“A merciless sendup of contemporary American pretensions.’
Janice Harayda, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Wonderfully readable . . . touching and intelligent.”
Richard Gehr, The Village Voice
|
 |
Print: $17.95 Peter Leroy investigates and reconstructs the life stories of his maternal grandparents, Herb and Lorna Piper.
On the surface, Herb and Lorna seem to be a typically sunny 1950s American couple. Herb sells Studebakers to the citizens of Babbington, a Long Island seaside town, and Lorna is his cheerfully coy and clever wife. Their story seems like an American myth: small-town origins, Jazz Age romance, Depression trials, postwar prosperity.
However, this book begins with Peter Leroy’s discovery, after Herb and Lorna have died, “that my maternal grandparents were involved in—virtually the creators of—the animated erotic jewelry industry.” From that moment, the story takes on a tone of mingled awe and delight, propelled by a pair of secrets that dovetail, at the end, into a luscious and bawdy revelation.
|
 |
Hardcover Print: $30.95 Peter Leroy investigates and reconstructs the life stories of his maternal grandparents, Herb and Lorna Piper.
On the surface, Herb and Lorna seem to be a typically sunny 1950s American couple. Herb sells Studebakers to the citizens of Babbington, a Long Island seaside town, and Lorna is his cheerfully coy and clever wife. Their story seems like an American myth: small-town origins, Jazz Age romance, Depression trials, postwar prosperity.
However, this book begins with Peter Leroy’s discovery, after Herb and Lorna have died, “that my maternal grandparents were involved in—virtually the creators of—the animated erotic jewelry industry.” From that moment, the story takes on a tone of mingled awe and delight, propelled by a pair of secrets that dovetail, at the end, into a luscious and bawdy revelation.
|
 |
Print: $18.95 Peter Leroy explores one of his earliest memories, his mother’s tumble from her lawn chair; probes the root causes of his childhood pelecypodophobia (fear of bivalve mollusks, particularly clams); navigates the upper reaches of the Bolotomy River; builds a radio receiver and explores the farthest reaches of the galaxy; ponders the differences between dour foxes and happy clams; falls in love with the girl with the white fur muff; learns the pleasures of skating on ice and taking the long way home; becomes a fan of the Larry Peters Adventure series; and rises to the rank of Aluminum Commodore in the Young Tars.
|
 |
Print: $23.95 Peter Leroy explores one of his earliest memories, his mother’s tumble from her lawn chair; probes the root causes of his childhood pelecypodophobia (fear of bivalve mollusks, particularly clams); navigates the upper reaches of the Bolotomy River; builds a radio receiver and explores the farthest reaches of the galaxy; ponders the differences between dour foxes and happy clams; falls in love with the girl with the white fur muff; learns the pleasures of skating on ice and taking the long way home; becomes a fan of the Larry Peters Adventure series; and rises to the rank of Aluminum Commodore in the Young Tars.
|
 |
Hardcover Print: $37.95 Peter Leroy explores one of his earliest memories, his mother’s tumble from her lawn chair; probes the root causes of his childhood pelecypodophobia (fear of bivalve mollusks, particularly clams); navigates the upper reaches of the Bolotomy River; builds a radio receiver and explores the farthest reaches of the galaxy; ponders the differences between dour foxes and happy clams; falls in love with the girl with the white fur muff; learns the pleasures of skating on ice and taking the long way home; becomes a fan of the Larry Peters Adventure series; and rises to the rank of Aluminum Commodore in the Young Tars.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Peter Leroy recalls an episode from his grade-school years, an episode that he would really rather forget, one of the dark, gritty bits that one finds at the bottom of the chowder bowl of life. It involves the Young Tars, an organization originally intended to raise the morale of students at the new Babbington Central Upper Elementary School, and the treacherous Mr. Summers, a teacher whose armamentarium of instructional techniques featured "humility sessions" and a toy weapon that fired ping-pong balls.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Peter Leroy recalls his childhood affection for the Larry Peters series of adventure books. As a boy, he entered the world of the books so completely that he went from wanting to be Larry Peters to believing, sometimes, that he was. As Larry, he relished the company of his wisecracking sister Lucy and his square-jawed and capable pal, Rocky King. Later, when he had become a grownup, circumstances led to his taking his place as the last in a line of pseudonymous authors of the series, so that, in a way, he really did become Larry Peters.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Peter Leroy recalls the trouble that ensued when a well-meaning teacher appointed him director of Babbington’s annual fourth-grade production of King Lear. Three of his classmates wanted the role of Lear’s loving daughter, Cordelia, and each had her strategy for ensuring that she got it. Clarissa Bud, the girl with the white fur muff, used sweetness and charm; Veronica McCall used sex; and Lily O’Grady, known as Spike, threatened to break his foot if he chose anyone but her.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Peter Leroy returns in memory to the fifth grade, where he finds himself gazing at Veronica McCall across the Gulf of Puberty. Remembering Veronica, the hottest little number in Babbington's elementary grades at that time, inevitably leads him to reflect on the many varieties of love and lust to which the human animal is subject, to consider the roots of the animosity between Babbington's clamdiggers and chicken-farmers, to recall the occasion of his first meeting Porky White, who was to become the brains behind the Kap'n Klam chain of bivalve-based fast-food restaurants, and forces him to recreate his attempt to skate on ice.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Leroy recalls his childhood friend Matthew Barber. Peter and Matthew seem unlikely friends. Matthew finds little to like in life, and his outlook is decidedly blue. Peter finds much to like in life, though nearly everything puzzles him, and he is essentially sanguine about his future, no matter how groundless his optimism might be. Eventually the friends find, as most friends do, that each has added to his developing self a little of the other.
"A set of thematic variations (ranging from a Saturday-afternoon cartoon about a happy hippo and an unhappy one to a deadly competition having to do with skipping third grade) that raise complicated farce to the level of calculus."
Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Leroy recalls his maternal grandfather’s attempt to build a shortwave radio, a project that begins with an article in Impractical Craftsman magazine promising "hour after interminable hour of baffling precision work." After many, many hours spent watching his grandfather labor at his basement workbench, Peter at last gets to put the earphones on, flip the switch, and twiddle the dials. Through the crackling and sussurous static he detects the sounds of love and lust, joy and sorrow, hope and loss.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Leroy recalls a childhood journey of discovery that he made from the mouth of the Bolotomy River to its source, traveling with his best (and imaginary) friend Rodney “Raskol” Lodkochnikov. The journey begins with the work of turning a packing case (which Cap’n Andrew Leech intends to use, later, as a coffin) into a shallow-draft boat, it involves encounters with a philosophical vagrant and a gaggle of beautiful nymphs, and it ends with the metaphor of life as a river turned on its head.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Leroy considers the origins of his childhood pelecypodophobia (the fear of bivalve mollusks), meets the imaginary friend who will remain his best friend for life, memorizes the legends of his ancestors in the Leroy line (including Black Jacques Leroy, who “invented beer”), studies his father's nude photographs of family friend May Castle, and enjoys a moonlight swim with Margot and Martha, the Glynn twins, after which he concludes that clams do not bite.
|
 |
Print: $7.95 Peter Leroy explores his earliest memories, which involve a next-door neighbor with a shady occupation, a shapely blonde (a product of his imagination), six kittens and one red wagon, and his mother’s tumble from her lawn chair.
MY MOTHER TAKES A TUMBLE is included in LITTLE FOLLIES. However, it is also available on its own as a pocket-size paperback.
|
 |
Download: $1.95 Small’s Hotel, on a little island off Long Island, is where Peter and his wife, Albertine, have spent most of their adult lives. Albertine runs the hotel while Peter works quietly on his memoirs, but the future of the hotel, and of every gift Peter dreams of giving Albertine, is in jeopardy.
Business has fallen off and the old hotel is falling down. Bills are mounting. Foreclosure looms.
What Peter does to save the hotel, his marriage, and possibly his life involves storytelling, friendship, memory, ghostwriting, real-estate, electrical contraptions, and great, abiding love.
Adapted for television from the novel Leaving Small's Hotel.
|
 |
Hardcover Print: $25.95 Peter Leroy receives his sexual initiation at the hands of the Glynn twins, becomes a sketch doctor, listens to many tales about the night the Nevsky mansion burned, learns the value of hope, and discovers the love of his life.
As is usual with Peter's recollections, we are never certain where memory ends and imagination begins—but we are certain that we are reading the work of a brilliant memoirist who reconstructs his past with wry humor, nostalgia, satire, and dazzling invention.
“A witty and wildly digressive epistemological examination in the form of a childhood reminiscence.”
The New Yorker
“Wholly engaging . . . a daring tour de force.”
Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times Book Review
“One of the more hilariously erotic pieces of writing since Lolita.”
Edward Hannibal, The East Hampton Star
|
 |
Print: $9.95 Small’s Hotel, on a little island off Long Island, is where Peter and his wife, Albertine, have spent most of their adult lives. Albertine runs the hotel while Peter works quietly on his memoirs, but the future of the hotel, and of every gift Peter dreams of giving Albertine, is in jeopardy.
Business has fallen off and the old hotel is falling down. Bills are mounting. Foreclosure looms.
What Peter does to save the hotel, his marriage, and possibly his life involves storytelling, friendship, memory, ghostwriting, real-estate, electrical contraptions, and great, abiding love.
Adapted for television from the novel Leaving Small's Hotel.
|
 |
Hardcover Print: $26.95 Peter Leroy finally completes a junior-high-school science assignment, thirty years late, exploring along the way quantum physics, entropy, epistemology, principles of uncertainty and discontinuity, a range of life’s Big Questions, and his memories of his intoxicating science teacher, Miss Rheingold.
“Warm . . . thought-provoking . . . charming . . . delightful.”
Library Journal (starred review)
“A book designed to leave its readers—and it deserves many of them—as happy as clams.”
Walter Satterthwait, The New York Times Book Review
“Luminously intelligent fun.”
Time
|
 |
Hardcover Print: $29.95 Peter Leroy constructs a plausible adult life for his grade school chum Matthew Barber, now living in Boston, where he is vice-president of a toy company by day, but becomes Bertram W. Beath, restaurant reviewer, when the sun goes down.
Reservations Recommended is a satire of the critical mind; a dark commentary on contemporary culture; a story of midlife crisis; a morality play; and a book that matches bleakness against humor, seasoned throughout with B. W. Beath’s hilariously acid reviews. We watch as Matthew Barber descends from a self-protective superiority into a species of madness, and into the dark night of the soul.
“A brilliant satire.”
LA Life
“A merciless sendup of contemporary American pretensions.’
Janice Harayda, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Wonderfully readable . . . touching and intelligent.”
Richard Gehr, The Village Voice
|
 |
Print: $13.95 Peter Leroy investigates and reconstructs the life stories of his maternal grandparents, Herb and Lorna Piper.
On the surface, Herb and Lorna seem to be a typically sunny 1950s American couple. Herb sells Studebakers to the citizens of Babbington, a Long Island seaside town, and Lorna is his cheerfully coy and clever wife. Their story seems like an American myth: small-town origins, Jazz Age romance, Depression trials, postwar prosperity.
However, this book begins with Peter Leroy’s discovery, after Herb and Lorna have died, “that my maternal grandparents were involved in—virtually the creators of—the animated erotic jewelry industry.” From that moment, the story takes on a tone of mingled awe and delight, propelled by a pair of secrets that dovetail, at the end, into a luscious and bawdy revelation.
|
|
|
