Really, this is just showing off - but The Poisoned Pen bookstore is one of my absolute favourites. A great collection of mysteries and thrillers, plus a more eclectic mix of Westerns and SF. Their selections of the latter aren't exhaustive, but their buyers have great taste, so the shelves are always packed with stuff I want.
Blood Ocean... I'm obsessed with getting a completely signed collection of Abaddon books, so I had to pounce. Ochse actually lives in the area, I think.
I've never read anything by Hal Duncan, but Vellum seemed a good place to start. Plus, how can I second-guess the British Fantasy Awards unless I've properly stalked the judging panel?
Mr. Shivers (signed, first) was a bit of a treat - what a great find.
Railsea is because we're completists, and god forbid that there exists, anywhere in the world, an edition of a Miéville book that we don't have. (Also, I kind of prefer the US cover, it is less serious and more YA-y.)
Flaming Zeppelins is Joe Lansdale's Weird West collection which I've (somewhat embarrassingly) never read, but am quite excited by (also signed - apparently he's a regular). I actually looked for unsigned Lansdales, figuring I'd get him to scrawl on something at FantasyCon, but, really, there weren't any (except for paperbacks of Vanilla Ride, and I'm still pretending that book never happened).
The Sarah Caudwell - The Sibyl in Her Grave - just seems really good - plus an Edward Gorey cover (!). It is a fact, plain and simple, that no book with a Gorey cover has ever completely sucked.
The Straight Razor Cure is, somewhat ironically, the British edition, but it is a signed copy, and since he's based in the US, I figured, eh, I might as well.
Jay Russell is a grossly unappreciated master of urban fantasy - finding a proof copy of Burning Bright (1998!) was a real find. In case of fire, I'm grabbing this and Mr. Shivers on my way out the door.
Not shown: a stack of Elmore Leonard Westerns.
Bizarrely, The Poisoned Pen has several copies of both Sophia McDougall's Savage City and Sam Sykes' Black Halo (the latter is less bizarre - he's an Arizona native, except these were the UK editions...). In both cases, the books were signed, lined, dated and, in a couple cases, scribbled. Some American collections are going to be very happy when they find those.
No idea how I'm getting these all back to London...
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