screen shot from Defender video gameTheir Back Pages by Paul Collins is a Village Voice article about authors’ unlikely first books. It seems that before Martin Amis wrote Money, he wrote a little book called Invasion of the Space Invaders with tips on playing Space Invaders, Pac Man, and – apparently Amis’s favorite – Defender.

Amis on Defender – “If you ever see a Defender which bears the initials MLA in the All-Time Greatest column of its Hall of Fame—well, that’s me, pal. I earned it” – sounds shockingly like the reminiscences of Dave Nelson (.wav audio file), the former “pale friendless virgin” played by Dave Foley on News Radio.

It’s apparently a fairly rare book. WorldCat shows 33 libraries managed to somehow avoid weeding this book, including the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the special collections library at the University of Texas at Austin, where I worked as a library school student. [thanks, Jessy]