I love this. Kathy Acker’s novel Don Quixote as the lead title in the launch list of one time Collins imprint Paladin’s new mass-market paperback fiction list.

This ad was on the Guardian newspaper’s book page (singular, as it was then) of 1 May 1986.

(Yes, really. One page of book reviews per week.)

PALADIN, so the wording goes, promises,

A WHOLE NEW DIMENSION IN PAPERBACK FICTION

Paladin Fiction is launched – with four exciting titles by writers with style, wit and narrative drive

Quite right, of course.

There’s also a great review by Robert Nye of Michael Moorcock’s novel The City in the Autumn Stars that week – see larger image below.

I’ve posted the image before, but it would have been Acker’s birthday yesterday (18 April), so I’m posting it here again in honour of that.

The ad turned up while I was researching my 2012 Chernobyl novella Dicky Star and the Garden Rule in the British Library’s newspaper collection in the old reading rooms at Colindale, north London. Dicky Star (for short) was written using a mandated vocabulary so turned out to be a test piece for The Fountain in the Forest.