A CONVERSATION WITH MARION BOYARS

Part 2

Obscenity and Taboo. A Book On Trial. (con’t)

McNAMARA: Wasn’t the trial of LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER in 1959? Didn’t anybody learn from it?

BOYARS: Well, they didn’t actually have any other cases. Oh, there were some pornography cases, but nothing that was claimed to be literature. And in fact, some of our witnesses were people who had advised the Director of Public Prosecution not to prosecute.

McNAMARA: Was there any such case afterward?

BOYARS: Oh, yes, many cases; but none of new works of literature, they have never done new works of literature again.

McNAMARA: Can you think of books that might have fallen under the category of obscenity in literature?

BOYARS: Oh, absolutely: I published one of them. I published STORY OF THE EYE, by Georges Bataille. (Books are listed at the end of Part 3.) It’s very short; it’s about children’s sexuality. And Bataille was very subversive. I didn’t want another court case -- you can do that only once in your life, you can’t do it more than once -- and so I put in it an essay by Susan Sontag, called “The Pornographic Imagination.” It’s marvelous, but very general, not about this particular book. Roland Barthes wrote an essay which actually dealt with this; it’s called The Metaphor of the Eye; I had it translated by Jim Underwood. Roland Barthes was of course very respected.

I then also put in a Publisher’s Note: I took responsibility personally. Then we sent it to the printer. He called me about two weeks later and he said, “I cannot print the book.” “Why not?” “Well, you know, the apprentices.” -- there’s always an apprentice. I said, “All right”: because the printer is also the person responsible; certainly in England. They have got the right to say no; and I think one has got to respect that. So I said, “I completely understand, you’re under no obligation to print this book, don’t worry, I’ll find somebody else. -- You do realize, of course, that we’re publishing this book 50 years after publication in France; it’s actually a classic. And you do realize that Georges Bataille was a Catholic, and a scholar, and he was just -- you know, just one of those people who went against the stream. He was not a nobody, you know, not a pornographer.”

I saw that the printer knew all this. I talked about the book and its contents, and Susan Sontag. And he said this, and I said that. And then he called me back the next day, saying he “couldn’t put it down, and we’re going to print it”; and he did. And then, about two months later, Penguin bought it for the Modern Classics series. “Remember,” I said, “it will be a classic.” The printer had said, “I remember your saying that.” Well I’ll tell you: when I told the printer about Modern Classics, he said, “Oh, thank God!” It’s fantastic: it has sold thousands of copies.

The Publisher’s Note reads:

The shortness of this important erotic classic -- now translated into English for the first time fifty years after its original French publication -- enables us to include in this volume two essays that deal with the genre and style of Story of the Eye: Susan Sontag’s essay on aspects of the literature of sex, The Pornographic Imagination (from ‘Styles of Radical Will’, 1967) explores a literary form that is, despite its manifold representation in English and Continental writing, seldom accepted in our puritan Anglo-American canon. Roland Barthes’ The Metaphor of the Eye (from the magazine ‘Critique’, 1963) discusses in depth the language of Story of the Eye, a major example of French Surrealist writing, a movement which is at last beginning to receive serious critical attention in England and the United States.

 

Obscenity, Censorship, and the Avant-Garde.

McNAMARA: The first trial of Hubert Selby’s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN was in 1966. You published Henry Miller [at Calder & Boyars] before that.

BOYARS: But we were never prosecuted for that.

McNAMARA: Why was that, do you think? Was there a reason?

BOYARS: Well, we did something rather unusual: we wrote the Director of Public Prosecutions, who in England decides whether a case is going to go forward or not. We said, “We are going to publish Henry Miller.” McNAMARA: You had reason to think you might be prosecuted.

BOYARS: Certainly: Henry Miller was very dangerous. There were about five other publishers who wanted to publish him. The advance was the same for all of them. We had put in our contract that, if we were prosecuted, we would fight; nobody else was prepared to do that. That is why we got it.

So we wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions and said, “This is what we’re going to do.” He wrote back, two days before publication -- the book was already distributed -- saying he was not going to prosecute. This was 1963, before the Hubert Selby book.

McNAMARA: They didn’t give you a reason?

BOYARS: They thought the prosecution was not going to be successful. They got copies of the book and had a panel of readers, and they wrote their opinion. They couldn’t prosecute then, because we would have produced the letter in court. And that was the end of it. We were the only ones who knew, and we didn’t tell anyone. And then, we couldn’t keep up with the printing!

McNAMARA: Because TROPIC OF CANCER caused such an outrage?

BOYARS: Because we didn’t tell anybody about the letter. They sold the book under the counter.

McNAMARA: And they didn’t have to?

BOYARS: Of course not; but they didn’t know that. The book cost 25 shillings at the time. Thousands of checks were sent us. We lost a lot of money: we didn’t know how to deal with this avalanche of checks and cash, and in England you have to write an invoice for each book, otherwise you’d be cheating on tax. We didn’t have the staff, we had to get people from the street to help us, and they stole money. Still, that was TROPIC OF CANCER. Then we wrote the same letter when we published LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN.

McNAMARA: And they decided to--

BOYARS: No, they didn’t; they said, “We have not decided. Sorry to be unhelpful.” In the end, it was a private prosecution. A Member of Parliament, Sir Cyril Black, brought the charge. Private prosecution was then made unlawful by Roy Jenkins, now Lord Jenkins, who was Home Secretary. He inserted a clause into a criminal-justice bill. I went to see him: a very elegant man, wonderful, friendly, etc. He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll put in a clause.” I said, “Are you going to debate this in Parliament?” “No,” he said, “because there are thousands of clauses; they’re not even going to notice.” And they didn’t.

The Member of Parliament who brought the charge against the book was the object of amusing, and self-defeating bit of mischief made by Maurice Girodias, publisher at the Olympia Press of literature and high and low pornography.

McNAMARA: You knew Girodias.

BOYARS: I adored him!

McNAMARA: Why?

BOYARS: Oh, he was the most charming man in the world, incredibly generous. We used to go to Paris from time to time, Arthur and I, and we’d go and sit down in a restaurant; and we would say, “We’d better leave the third chair empty, because Girodias is bound to find us.” And he always did! Not always, but many times, many times. Whereupon the Champagne would flow, and he would pay the bill.

The last time I saw him, he had fallen on very difficult days.

McNAMARA: He also published Terry Southern [as did Marion Boyars: BLUE MOVIE].

BOYARS: Girodias was actually a very naive man. He was not very cautious. He went from Paris -- he was thrown out of Paris publishing -- and he came to England and started an imprint here, and was going to publish a book about Moral Rearmament. The Moral Rearmament Society offered him £50,000 for not publishing the book. Girodias, being a principled man, turned them down. Thereupon -- The Times ran a whole page of bankruptcies -- they printed a page imitating The Times’ bankruptcies page. It was not published by The Times but by the Moral Rearmament people. It declared him bankrupt and said he was shutting down his business. Whereupon, he went bankrupt. He was not rich. Another account of this story, differing in details, but not in essence, appears in John de St. Jorre’s VENUS BOUND.The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers (1994.)

He then went to America and started another imprint there, and somehow didn’t make it work. One of the things he did was to publish a pornographic book, and he called it SIR CYRIL BLACK. Sir Cyril Black was the Member of Parliament who had started the case against us over the Hubert Selby book. The book Girodias published was not about him, but Girodias called it that. Then he wrote to me about it. I said, “Argue! (They were bringing a libel case against him.) Why don’t you argue that by sheer chance this is something you invented? ‘Is there a Sir Cyril Black?’ -- that sort of thing.” “Oh, no,” he said, “I am defending you! I did it on purpose, as a revenge!” Well. So, he was very naive. Did you ever meet him?

McNAMARA: I’ve only read about him.

BOYARS: You would have liked him. He had a nightclub in Paris -- this was unbelievable. This was very early in our acquaintance -- It was a lovely evening, a private room, and I was a very naive young woman. He told me about flagellating people, and described all sorts of sexual practices. (Laughs) He was a kitty-cat, he didn’t try to seduce me. But I didn’t even know about these things, you know, I thought he was very amusing, to try and frighten me. I liked him very much. And he was very unhappy in New York. He married a Cabot or a Lodge, can’t remember which one. [She was a Cabot.] She was a doctor.

He went back to Paris in the end. He said to me once....

We’re not talking business. This is a lot of gossip.

McNAMARA: It is, but we’re getting to issues.

The discussion turned to the internet -- she has had some copyright problems with Microsoft over a book which she had published and which they later re-published on CD-ROM without her permission -- and various Western governments’ attempts at censorship particularly in the matter of pornography, which is apparently thought by non-users to be rife, and available at the click of a button.

BOYARS: It’s the people who like to control things who do this, you know. It really doesn’t harm you very much. We saw a film in New York called Chasing Amy. It will never come to England; we have film censorship, and this film is very explicitly gay, sexually. Every film has to be licensed, you see, before it can be shown. It was true in the theater, until the 1960s: you couldn’t bring a play to the stage without the approval of the Lord Chamberlain. It took years to abolish that part of the law; but we still have film censorship.

McNAMARA: What do they censor for?

BOYARS: Sex and violence, you know: sex and violence. Actually, they are less interested in sex these days. I don’t know about the United States: is there censorship there?

McNAMARA: People don’t like to use that word. There is a rating system--

BOYARS: Of course they don’t like to use it, because it’s an explosive word: but that’s what it is!

McNAMARA: Actually, there is a phrase edging its way around the book-publishing world: “market censorship,” meaning that publishing decisions aren’t editorially determined. Indeed, very good books are often turned down, because editors are basing decisions to publish on estimated “markets.”

BOYARS: I’m a censor, in a way; we’re all censors: we do not publish certain books. We don’t necessarily not publish them because they are too explicit sexually, although we have been known to do that. In the LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN case, there were a number of English publishers who kept their distance. One very kind publisher actually tried to collect money for us -- it’s very, very expensive to defend yourself, you know -- and some very distinguished publishers nearly refused. We were asked by some publishers to withdraw the book, or not to appeal.

But, an interesting thing happened. The solicitor Lord Goodman, whose firm defended us in the first two trials, was Chairman of the Arts Council. He convened over 100 people and proposed a scheme whereby there would be pre-publication censorship, because he felt that what happened to us should not happen to other people. I mean, his motivation was perfectly good; and all the people in the arts were there: the filmmakers, the theater people, the publishers, the writers: it was really a most distinguished gathering of people in the arts. And they talked -- he talked -- for about an hour and a half: about forming a committee of the arts, to censor beforehand, so there wouldn’t be such a trial again.

Eventually I stood up and said: “It doesn’t matter how benign the censorship body is, it is still censorship, and that is something we don’t want.” Goodman was a rather big, bulky, important man, and he collapsed. He was so angry with me he didn’t speak to me for two years. Because, suddenly, everybody thought about it and said, “Well, this is in fact pre-publication censorship.” You see, they had just got rid of theater censorship.

And as a result of my intervention a committee was formed at the Arts Council. He was so angry about the whole thing that he put the partner who had defended us in charge of this committee; he had been our solicitor. He was a wonderful man: I’ve never admired anyone quite as much as him. And, after two years of discussion, he went against the committee. And so Goodman did not prevail; but he almost did. Because everybody could see that the publishers were all in favor of it: they didn’t want to have the enormous expense of defending a book, and they all thought this “pre-publication review” would protect them. But of course, it would have done exactly the opposite. And it was very easy to change the feeling of the meeting. I said: “All censorship is bad, even benign censorship. I’m very much against it, in any form.”

McNAMARA: You’ve said you were an avant-garde publisher.

BOYARS: I’ve said, “I used to be an avant-garde publisher; now, I’m old-fashioned in my ways, because publishing has changed.”

McNAMARA: You also said, “Language develops because of literature, it doesn’t develop because of television.” I said that was arguable; and you said: “Yes, that’s why I said it: because it can be argued.” You were speaking of what is called obscenity and forbidden subjects, taboos, and about bringing -- or not bringing -- them into art.

BOYARS: The artist is doing it.

McNAMARA: The artist is doing it. Through art people can be made aware of these subjects, in a mental context: the artist makes them available through our higher facilities. Am I overstating the case?

BOYARS: No, not at all. I think art has a way of changing something that could be very vulgar, into something that is cerebral.

McNAMARA: What if this makes a false change. Is that possible?

BOYARS: That’s bad art. If there is no artistic integrity, I don’t think it’s going to work, I don’t think it’s going to make anyone aware of anything except what is disgusting: and that’s bad art.

McNAMARA: You published avant-garde writers, for serious readers. I myself don’t think there is an avant-garde anymore.

BOYARS: I agree with you.

McNAMARA: And so, if erotica and obscenity were a way of opening the mind to what it refused to know, as Miller and Selby did; then, that seems not still to be true. So, what do you think, now, would be our taboo subjects?

BOYARS: War. Suicide. Incest. Racism, in two ways: what’s happening with black people; the way the Chinese are spoken of, now that they are considered a rival for markets.

Genocide. There are things going on in the world that are like the Holocaust; extraordinary cruelty is still going on. The Holocaust literature certainly has shown us what we must know. But one of the terrible things is that people who are exposed to genocide now are denied. The plight of the Jews is something that has been told time and time again, and I still find it shocking. But, if people were really that shocked I don’t think it could go on, yet it does.

Now, very often we are told about these things in a newspaper article, and then we seem to forget. Television is too fleeting, as a matter of fact. You see, the goalposts have been changed. It’s very difficult to shock people these days, except with actual life. Life is very, very shocking now. I am often very indignant, and that has to work itself out, somehow. Language should shock.

Commerce.

McNAMARA: What makes a book commercial?

BOYARS: Ah. Ho. I don’t know.

McNAMARA: How do you gauge a market?

BOYARS: I don’t know how to do it -- it’s no good, I know, but I can’t gauge a market. There are publishers, I know, who look at a book and weigh it. We have published quite a few books that sold well -- ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, which is my all-time best seller, was out of print. I thought it should be in print. I certainly didn’t know the whole world was waiting for somebody to attack the structure of asylums; but there it was.

The truth is, I don’t know any other way. I can read a manuscript and love it, but I cannot tell if it will sell. How do they know; how do they do it? I’d like to know.

There were things I thought should be in print, forbidden subjects. LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN was one of those books. I must have published it because I wanted to shock the world. I was shocked.

McNAMARA: What was your shock?

BOYARS: Well, my knowledge of the Red Hook district of Brooklyn was nil. My knowledge of homosexuals was nil. This is simply not something I know about. It was my instinct, somehow, that this should appear, and that it was all very authentic. I never questioned the veracity of that book. And you know, it was very powerful.

McNAMARA: There is a cohesiveness and an intelligence to your list: it seems to me the literature of a refined or observant taste.

BOYARS: Well, it has quality. That is always hard. These are things I like; fortunately, enough readers agree with me. Of course, there have been many failures.

McNAMARA: Esthetic failures?

BOYARS: No: I’m not sorry I’ve published any books that are on the list. I’ve published books I thought would sell well, and they didn’t: I still find them interesting. There has been some attempt by me to share something that I like, and shape the culture.

One of my best authors is Ivan Illich (MEDICAL NEMESIS, etc). He shares my ideas about authority and responsibility. What he says is not: “You shouldn’t go to the doctor.” What he says is: “You are responsible for your own health.” He doesn’t attack doctors, he attacks the medical establishment.

A lot of people minded that he wouldn’t tell them how to live. They came to him with problems; he said: “You solve it.” That’s all. I admire that, because it was so easy, so easy, to have done the opposite, when he could have become president of the world at the time, he was so popular. Extraordinarily modest man. Yet, Cuernavaca was the most undemocratic place you can imagine. He’s very authoritarian. He’s very severe, in many ways. But also, the people around him would of course take care of him, protect him.

We published his recent lectures a little while ago [IN THE MIRROR OF THE PAST: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990]. He’s putting together another volume, and I said, “Yes, I’ll publish it.” He’s such a beautiful man. And it was a terrific adventure, publishing him in an active way. But it was also very hard work.

McNAMARA: What is hard work, to a publisher?

BOYARS: In the first place, you are getting involved with money every minute of the day. I find that such hard work. You have to be careful, but terribly precise, and there must be no mistakes. And so, we proofread, and proofread.

You have to try and sell the books. That is more work. And I have to do the money again. Publishing really exists, you know, as a business, and the money aspect I find wearying. I’ve always found it hard; most people do. You see, if you work for a large company you don’t have to earn the money first to pay expenses, all you have to do is have a bloc of money to draw upon in advance. It’s much harder work to own your own house.

McNAMARA: Do you work with agents?

BOYARS: I understand the agents, and the authors’ going to them. I work quite happily with agents, because I see them, I have lunch with them, and the whole thing is kind of domesticated. They think I’m slightly eccentric, publishing books no one else wants; but they know my word is good.

McNAMARA: How are contracts important? Did you ever do anything on a handshake?

BOYARS: I don’t believe people have good enough memories for that. It’s got to be done properly. Though my office doesn’t look tidy, I can find anything in it. I keep careful records. I know exactly what I’m doing at any time.

But I have superb books coming in. I hope it doesn’t matter that the times are hard.

I used to have commissioned salesmen. That wasn’t working properly; and then a firm of representatives, who were part of a huge distribution contract, offered themselves. I called all my reps and I said: “Look, this offer sounds good,” and they released me to this new contract. But they’re not selling, either. I asked why, and never got an answer, after 15 tries. One question, asked 15 times. This is what it means to work with a big firm.

McNAMARA: How long do you keep books in print?

BOYARS: It’s very rare that we don’t reprint a book. I have an awful lot of books with very small printings; but we reprint. We re-jacket books, and we paperback them. It’s very rare that I don’t re-do a book. It’s actually a list that should go on.

McNAMARA: I’ve been told that other publishers admire your books and try to get the authors from you. Is that true?

BOYARS: Who told you? Yes, it’s true. It’s mostly the agents who do that, but sometimes the editors, as well. I had published Tim O’Brien: two books, IF I DIE IN A COMBAT ZONE and NORTHERN LIGHTS. His publisher was Sam [Seymour] Lawrence. Sam sent GOING AFTER CACCIATO to me. I wanted to publish it and I made an offer. Tim called me and said: “Marion, please, what did you offer?” “Three thousand pounds.” Not a fortune, by today’s lights. “Is that all right?” I said. “I swear it will be all right,” he said; “I don’t want to leave you, but Sam told me he had accepted an offer from someone else.”

I called Sam and asked what was going on. “What makes you think that?” “Tim called me.” “Tim called you? You have no business talking with him!” I said: “Hey, hold it. You introduced us. I worked with him on NORTHERN LIGHTS. I bought the first book and the second book: why shouldn’t we have become friends? Why shouldn’t he have talked to me?” He put the phone down, and I put the phone down.

What Sam Lawrence had done was call Tom Maschler, who was at Jonathan Cape, and said: “Marion has offered £3,000.” Tom had a lot of money. He said, “Triple it.”

Sam Lawrence finally said to me, “Will you forgive and forget?” I said, “Forgive, willingly; but forgetting is impossible.”

Very few authors come back after an event like that. Michael Ondaatje -- well, it’s my fault it happened. He sent me a manuscript of RUNNING IN THE FAMILY. I read it and thought it was wonderful, though a little precious. So I wrote him a letter, and I said: “I think you should, etc. ... wonderful, etc. ... be sure to send me a revised copy.” The agent was very angry, because I criticized. Actually, it didn’t harm my relationship with Michael very much. He’s a very nice person, he’s got a major publisher now, and he won the Booker.

So, these things do happen. They’re bound to happen. I don’t like them much.

McNAMARA: How many new books do you publish each year?

BOYARS: About 20. The back list is very long.

McNAMARA: Is there a typical press run?

BOYARS: Well, I don’t do many books under 2,000 copies, and we don’t do many over 5,000. But COMPUTER ONE, [by Warwick Collins], for instance: we’ll probably print 10,000. Everybody’s very impressed with it. And I under-print, rather than overprint, unfortunately. So that means that I reprint, and then all the books come back again. The publishing industry is the only one that accepts full returns. Sheer madness!

Buying Rights. Selling Books.

McNAMARA: I’d be interested in your opinion about publishing rights on the internet, generally and specifically. Let’s say a book is published in more than one English-speaking country, and I want to reprint something from it, an essay perhaps. I’ve got the author’s agreement; he understands that no money is involved; now I need the publisher’s permission. I think it good to get permission from the other English-language publishers, as well as from the US, because our readership is international; especially if the author involved is not American. This is assuming that the publishers have electronic rights. What do you think about this sort of thing?

BOYARS: Well, I think this whole thing has not been resolved. And when an exchange of money is involved -- not in your case, but in mine, for example [reference to a pending dispute] with CD-ROM reprints -- I maintain that the law has not been tested. I maintain that it’s like xeroxing, quoting, etc. I get hundreds of letters about this sort of thing. They say, “We would like to reprint such-and-such an essay from one of your books. We will not distribute in England, therefore we want only North American rights.” I would say, “That’s fine,” and I would quote a fee; and they pay it, and distribute in North America. On the other hand, they may plan to distribute world-wide in English. In that case, I say, “Yes, you have permission for world use, and the permission costs more money than in England only.” Or they say, “We only want to distribute this in England”: there is an alternate fee for that. Or they say, “The main thrust is in America, but we want to sell a few copies in England.” “Fine,” I say, “in that case I will make it cheaper for you than I would if it were originating in England.” And in my opinion, that is how it should work; but it hasn’t been tested. In other words, there is no case law. There was no case law with xeroxing until Kinko’s fell into a trap. At NYU, professors asked for xeroxed copies of published materials for the students in their courses. Kinko’s xeroxed material without permission and had a huge court case because of it. They are very cautious now.

We make quite a lot of money, actually, from xeroxing. The author gets half, we get the other half. In England, they have two organizations for xeroxing: one looks after the publishers, the other looks after the authors. When I first started, I would divide it and give the author half. The authors just put it in their pocket, until I found out that actually they had already got their half. So, next time, I only wrote a statement, no words were exchanged.

But I think one should ask for the rights. Now, the other bone of contention is that contracts written before, say, 1990, do not specifically say “electronic” rights. And some agents maintain that, because it doesn’t say so, you don’t have the rights. But I say, It is exactly the same as reproduction and therefore I am entitled to these rights. Because the future, in my opinion, is that books will go on, but in much smaller quantities. There will be smaller print runs, and more CD-ROMs. Or, it will be as you are doing, publishing on the internet.

McNAMARA: What rights does a publisher expect and feel entitled to have?

BOYARS: We call them “volume rights,” which means “text rights.” You have the right to publish the text in any form. You can then publish in hardcover, in paperback, you can authorize excerpts of that text. This is a contentious point. Some people take the phrase literally, to mean you have the right to publish the text as a book. But “publish” means “to make public.” The writer creates the text; the publisher makes it public. I hold that that text is what the publisher should make public, by whatever means are available to him. The bookseller-publisher once only bought book-rights. But “volume rights” means, I contend, that the publisher should have the right to share in the proceeds of that text reproduced in its unadulterated form: as a book, or a xeroxed copy, on the internet, or when libraries scan the book. I think that if the book is read on-line, or is downloaded, somebody should pay for it.

Now, film rights are not an automatic extension of volume rights. Changing the text is not an extended right. If a novel is made into a play or a film, that is the author’s right: the text belongs to him; he is in charge of what can be done to alter it. When I buy English rights, in most cases I don’t have film rights. In the case of this chap [Mark Fyfe, ASHER], I do even have film rights. And we sold an option on it to a producer: with, of course, the author’s approval.

I bought this on the strength of, oh, 50 pages, and then he wrote it under my guidance. I didn’t write it, you know: but we discussed it day in and day out. “This should stay in, and this should go out. Why not make this a bit more clear,” etc. It’s a complex process. I wanted clarity; my editorial criterion is clarity. If you want to say something, say it: don’t expect the reader to put it in himself. A lot of new authors think the reader should sit down and work it out, and then read it again, and then read it again. Those days are over.

McNAMARA: Joyce thought that. Faulkner thought that.

BOYARS: Well, a lot of writers think that. But people won’t: if it’s not clear, they don’t read it.

McNAMARA: What is the job of the publisher, if he buys volume rights?

BOYARS: You have to try to sell the book! I mean, you have to exploit the book; you have to do something for it. You don’t get response to it for nothing. That stack next to you is 50 advance copies of the futurist novel COMPUTER ONE [by Warwick Collins]. We have great hopes for the book, we’re going to pepper the world with publicity. I’ve already offered it to mass-market paperback publishers, and I’ve taken it to places like the New York Times Book Review. They need to have the book about five months before publication. The pub. date is November. It’s ready to go to press; it’s just that it’s only been announced, the catalog isn’t printed yet, and it’s not in our current catalog.

I need a lot of lead time, and I’m going to do a lot of things with it to interest people in it, interest them in the author. I work very much with the author: he has ideas, I have ideas. One is really trying to make the book known, and so you use everything you’ve ever done on the book, if you have great confidence in it, which I do.

(End of Part 2.)

Part 1 / Part 3 / Endnotes