Booknews: HM Honors Its Past
Edited by Judy Quinn -- 2/7/00
New life for old titles, thanks to From the Archives series and Walker Evans exhibit
"It was our first instant book!" That's Houghton Mifflin publisher Wendy Strothman's humorous but quite accurate comment about Lawrence Beesley's 1912 The Loss of the S.S. Titanic.
The venerable Boston-headquartered house took only two months from when that great ship went down to publish this survivor's account by Beesley, who, legend has it, stumbled into the doors of Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin shortly after he landed ashore to tell his tale.
And now the timely title sets sail again: it's being brought back into print this April 14 (yes, the date the ship sank) as part of the house's new From the Archives reprint series.
Strothman admits the timing could have been better, however, in rediscovering the book. After all, if HM had had this first-person narrative by the widowed British schoolteacher and father--portrayed in the 1958 Titanic classic A Night to Remember--in print in 1997, the house surely would have garnered some new sales for the book in the wake of James Cameron's award-winning film epic that year.
Still, Strothman believes a new, widely available edition of Beesley's book will attract all those enduring Titanic buffs. And thanks the creation of the From the Archives series, an initiative inspired last year by, no surprise, the then-approaching millennium, it's unlikely other gems will remain lost in the sea of HM's voluminous company archives, housed in the Boston Public Library.
To find books for the new series, HM staffers now routinely make expeditions to the library to comb through dusty shelves looking for treasures to reprint--a good thing, since many of these titles are in the public domain and could be fair game for other publishers. (Amereon Ltd., for example, published a Beesley book reprint in August 1998).
Besides Beesley's book, the series' inaugural list also includes a reprint this April of Arnold Haultain's The Mystery of Golf, first published in 1908. The book has a subtitle that seems to say it all: "A Brief Account of the Game; Its Origin, Antiquity & Romance; Its Uniqueness, Its Curiousness and Its Difficulty, Its Anatomical, Philosophical and Moral Properties; Together with Diverse Concepts on Other Matters to It Appertaining." Fan John Updike provides a new afterword.
The final book of the series' launch this spring is one with particular sentimental value for Strothman: it's a new edition, to be released in May, of HM's 1919 English translation of On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes, a diplomacy guide written in 1716 by an envoy of Louis XIV's court. Strothman's father had once mentioned to her that this was a how-to guide still relevant to businesspeople today.
HM is not providing a uniform look for books in this series, besides putting the house's original rather than current logo on their spines. Instead, the house, which plans to publish a few books in the series each season, will promote the books as individual titles and set print runs according to the interest they generate.
HM is also, of course, not limiting its back-to-press revivals to this series. Its children's department, for example, already has had much success in reviving some of its classics, such as The Birds' Christmas Carol, first published in 1888.
And the From the Archives launch is preceded by another pretty impressive reprint: a hardcover repackaging of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans's famous essay/photo collaboration about impoverished Southern tenant farmers, first published by HM in 1941. The new edition, as well as a first-ever trade paper edition of Belinda Rathbone's 1995 biography of Evans, have been created to tie in to a new Walker Evans exhibit that will travel from New York City (Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 1--May 14) to San Francisco (Museum of Modern Art, June 2--September 12) and Houston (Museum of Fine Art, December 17--March 4, 2000). The exhibit also will be the subject of a PBS special February 10.
While a host of other publishers are also either re-promoting old or bringing out new works on Evans to take advantage of the exhibit, the Agee/Evans classic will receive special attention, with an entire special gallery devoted to it.
Quite a turnaround in fortune for a collaboration that was originally rejected by Fortune and then, in its original HM book edition, sold only 600 copies. Only HM's 1960s edition of the book brought better critical acclaim, and made it a steady backlist seller. Proof indeed, that sometimes it takes a reprint to find a readership.
Second Hurrah For Haruf
Fans of Kent Haruf's current bestseller and NBA finalist Plainsong soon will have two more tales from that novel's Holt, Colorado, setting. In May, Vintage will release (with 17,500-copy printings) paperback editions of two out-of-print Haruf titles, The Tie That Binds and Where You Once Belonged.
First published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1984, Haruf's The Tie That Binds chronicles the bleak life of Holt farm woman Edith Goodnough. The book won several honors, including the 1986 Whiting Award and a PEN/Hemingway citation. In 1984 PW likened the book to "a Midwest Ethan Frome" and noted "there are several strong, graphic passages that promise better things as Haruf's talent matures."
Where You Once Belonged, first published by Summit in 1990, imagines the life of Jack Burdette, a villainous former high school football hero who manages to ruin many lives in Holt. PW's review again compared Haruf's novel to a great work--in this case, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology--and noted, "Not a word is wasted in his brooding drama."
Haruf's work also has captured the attention of Hollywood: CBS has paid a reported low- to mid-six-figure option for Plainsong and, more recently, made a similar deal for TV movie rights to The Tie That Binds as well.
Vintage's Haruf reprints precede its blockbuster promotion for the trade paperback of Plainsong, which will go on sale with a 200,000-copy-plus printing August 29. The publisher plans a 12-15-city author reading tour, as well as regional bookseller show appearances, reading group guides and a poster featuring Plainsong alongside these backlist titles.
Controversy Speeds Sales
The 10,000-copy first printing of Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer's A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual C rcion, originally planned for April 2000 publication, was crashed out to stores January 19, and a reprint is now in the works.
MIT Press made the decision for the bump-up, which bypasses waiting for trade reviews (including PW's), following some very prominent prepub features on the book in the New York Times (on January 15) and USA Today (January 18), among others. A January 18 appearance on CNN by Thornhill, a biologist, and Palmer, an anthropologist, was just the beginning of a broadcast blitz, which included The CBS Early Show with Bryant Gumbel, Good Morning America and Extra.
MIT Press publicity manager Gita Manaktala told PW the house always knew it had a controversial book on its hands--the authors argue the politically charged view that rape is a "natural biological phenomenon as much a part of nature as other undesirable happenings like thunderstorms, epidemics and tornad s," and women are well-advised to consider how they dress and socialize to account for it.
But the press was surprised by how much the science media picked up on the early excerpt of the book, which ran in the January/February issue of the relatively obscure The Sciences, a magazine published by the New York Academy of Scientists.
MIT had thought its major media break would be a planned prepub feature in Newsweek, tentatively scheduled for a month prior to the book's original pub date. When editors from The Sciences, which had planned to excerpt the book in its March/April issue, called to say they needed to bump the excerpt up to an earlier issue, MIT and Newsweek agreed, thinking it wouldn't steal much thunder.
So much for that theory.
A Bio to Di For
What did making the front cover of the January 23 New York Times Book Review do to help sell just released Random House bio Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire?
Quite a lot, and that's even before the review reached most consumers.
Random House ordered three more printings for this first book by Amanda Foreman, thanks to this placement, as well as a growing pile of good media (a starred PW review on December 13, 1999, coverage in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Vogue, W, New York and others). The book's initial 15,000-copy printing is now supplemented by a 25,000 more, for a new grand total of 40,000 copies in print.
Of course, Foreman's book already had a lot of a lot of potential sales hooks: the bio was a bestseller in Britain and won a Whitbread Prize in 1998. And since its colorful, scandalous 18th-century subject is the great-great-great-great-aunt of that perennially bio favorite, Princess Diana, the book has an extra appeal for those already interested in the lives of 18th-century British noblewomen, just given play in the PBS series Aristocrats, based on Stella Tillyard's nonfiction book of the same name.
Angelica Huston is rumored to be close to optioning rights to Georgiana's story, which has all those juicy elements of addictions, adulteries and, oh, of course, history and politics, although some of the arcane bits of the latter elements have been trimmed for this U.S. edition.
And what's next for 31-year-old Foreman, who originally wrote this book as part of her grad research at Oxford? Foreman told PW she's working on a nonfiction book about Brits who came over to fight in the American Civil War. Hopefully, for sales purposes, some Diana ancestors were involved there, too.
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