817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard
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Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson, co-owner of HOL Press, the brand new press that is not selling books on Amazon.com. L O L maybe we should be L O L Press. As in, what the heck are you guys thinking? Are you trying to lose money? Well, our decision is a bit personal, and no, we're not losing money. So far, we're making money, and we're planting a tree with every unit shipped. Another Personal decision. It's a small press on our terms. To those of you who checked out our first publication, Great Detective, an adventure for two people, at press.history of literature.com, only to find that the book was sold out, fear not. We have more copies available, and we are now open for business in both the United States and the Netherlands.
If you'd like your country to be added to the list of potential purchasers, please let us know. Oh, and in honor of the July birthdays Of Emma and Marcel Proust and myself, you can currently get 20% off your order by using the discount code birthday2026. Okay. Summer blockbusters, they're in my DNA. We've had 50 years of them, and a helpful website, Yard Barker, an author Chris Morgan writing there has an article online that takes us through the Summer blockbusters looking for what was the summer movie of each of the past 50 years. There's usually a definitive movie or two, but he's chosen what was the summer movie from every year. He's basing it on different factors like box office and cultural relevance and so on.
Now, some years they're not great movies, but ever since. Steven Spielberg's Jaws initiated this as a thing, a movie that in the old days would see people lining up around the block to get in, and Hollywood Studios soon adjusted their schedules and their projected bottom lines around the launch and hopeful success of a big budget tent pole summer movie.
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