Richard McGowan's Blog: Smashed-Rat-On-Press - Posts Tagged "omnibus"

Use a welding glass, at least! Please! Save your eyeballs from certain melt-down! Oh, wait... You mean you missed the launch? It was a thousand times brighter than the sun and visible from two thousand miles away. We had five golden pigs, four marching bands, three French roasts, two mating slugs, and a blue ladybug in red wine.

We had live synchronized llama dancing all along Insectivore Boulevard all day long and well into the velvet night. Ladies snickered and gentlemen swooned.

We gave away thousands of hundred dollar bills to anyone who would take a copy of the book off our hands.

You can imagine what might have happened if we had gone all out.

Barbara Newhall Follett is another writer you've probably never heard of whose talent was smothered by the patriarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara... (OK, fine, that's my possibly biased interpretation of her life; you're welcome to disagree.)

You can read brief bios both here and on Wikipedia, but even brieflier: Follett was a child prodigy, first published as a teen. (Well, her parents were not total nobodies, so one might be not quite so surprised.) The family was devastated by a runaway father during the Great Depression. Eventually, she married, and then she just disappeared one winter day in 1939. Nobody bothered to look for her, and the formerly-adoring media didn't even notice she was gone until 1966... (Wait a sec, how many years is that? Hmmm.)

If you try to buy a used copy of her book The House Without Windows (1927) you'll soon find that it's nearly impossible to obtain on paper, and if you find a copy, you could pay hundreds of dollars for a dubious POD reprint, or something over $1000 for an original. As they say in Santa Banana: fark that shirt.

Since Follett was first published in 1927 and didn't disappear until 1939, this could be one of those unfortunate horror stories of the mid-20th century in which a work that is "still under copyright" basically gets sucked into the black hole of semi-permanent universal unavailability because nobody will touch unprofitable stuff, such as doing the copyright research and re-printing it legally; and yet nobody will pirate it because nobody really cares that much about a (probably dead) writer whose couple of works are not widely read in the first place.

But this story, for once, actually has an orgasmically happy ending. I farking cried when I figured it out. Follett's first novel The House Without Windows has been turned into an e-book, and made available for free by her half-nephew, Stefan Cooke. (There's a download link on the Farksolia home page, and I've even downloaded it myself and cracked open the EPUB, so I know it works.)

Now that is cooking with gas, my friends. What a fabulous example of someone stepping in to fix what could have been an infintely long blackout, providing a wonderful service to a world with some people apparently eager to read Follett's work.

And not only are all of Follett's works (including the shadowy completed-but-not-published works that would ordinarily languish in some dusty archive accessible to 3 people on the planet) being made available for free in electronic form, Cooke has also put together biographical information and a book about Follett's life. What a star!

The experience this week of stumbling over Barbara Follett and her rescue from obscurity has given me one more glimmer of hope for the future in these times of dwindling sanity and imploding "civilization" on our stupid little rock, hurtling as it is through the vastness of empty space...

The official Follett site is linked on her author page here on GR, with downloads available. See also this nifty nugget about her on Youknowhotube: https://youtu.be/3HinZJznlIc?t=320