Joyce Thompson's Blog - Posts Tagged "avon-books"
I Want to Be a Paperback Writer!
When I was 21 and looking for a job in publishing, I had three offers:
Typing at Doubleday
Showing out of town authors a good time for Viking
Being a copywriter for Dover Books, way down on Varick Street
I chose number #3.
My job title had “writer” in it, and I knew that’s what I meant to be, even though I wasn’t sure when I applied just what a copywriter does. Too, there was the dress code. Dover didn’t care if I wore jeans to work. If I’d chosen either of the midtown houses, I would have ended up spending too much of my tiny salary on clothes.
Finally, my boss at Dover would be Everett Bleiler, the most erudite human being I’ve ever met. Though he was a shy man, quick to blush and slow to meet one’s eyes, asking him the right string of questions of a mid-afternoon could tease forth an impromptu lecture on any one of the dozen or so subjects of which he had post-doctorate level knowledge—history, medicine, natural history, cartography, music, art, architecture, classics, literature, mathematics, the occult or, his specialty, ghost stories. His official title was VP of Marketing, but it was he, really, who shaped the Dover list and secured the often rare editions it reprinted as elegant, affordable paperbacks.
I have no doubt I learned more about more subjects in the year I worked for him than in the previous four on an Ivy League campus. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that’s where I began to develop my interviewer skills. I know it was Everett and his red pen that taught me once and for all never to dangle a participle. More important, he instilled in me something of his own unique ethos of publishing--a combination of refined taste, curatorial zeal and economic populism that contrasts starkly with the prevailing profit-driven culture machine.
I got to hold in my hands an 1789 hand-colored copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience—one Everett Bleiler had tracked down and purchased in order to reprint. That experience gave me the almost mystical conviction that good work trumps form factor, that what is worthy will rise again. In the course of re-publishing Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for The Yellow Book (1894-1897) as a Dover art book, Everett held forth on the idea that the proliferation of independent publishing ventures marks a time of cultural renewal.
I can still see him in the writers’ bullpen outside his glass-walled cubicle, a stout, owlish man with hair like white feathers, white sleeves rolled up and shirt tail hanging out, glasses sliding toward the end of his nose, imparting his values to the next generation.
Not too many years later, my first two novels were among the first paperback original “literature” that Avon Books published, an initiative that won them the Carey-Thomas Award for Innovative Publishing. (One, The Blue Chair, they presumed to reprint a couple of years later in their Bard classics line.) Both of my short story collections came from small presses. Using production skills I learned working for an educational publisher In Boston, I co-founded a collective to publish a quarterly poetry and fiction tabloid called Dark Horse. We set the type on IBM Selectrics borrowed from our day jobs, did paste up ourselves far into the night and hawked the paper outside the Boston Art Museum on Sundays, when admission was free. For ten years, we rotated editorship and provided an outlet for emerging writers.
Now my sixth novel is coming out as a trade paperback and as an e-book. Thanks to Lethe Press, both editions are elegant and affordable. And I am old enough to know that all editions of all books are ephemeral, the vector that passes story mind to mind.
I’m proud to be a Paperback Writer, one more time.
Typing at Doubleday
Showing out of town authors a good time for Viking
Being a copywriter for Dover Books, way down on Varick Street
I chose number #3.
My job title had “writer” in it, and I knew that’s what I meant to be, even though I wasn’t sure when I applied just what a copywriter does. Too, there was the dress code. Dover didn’t care if I wore jeans to work. If I’d chosen either of the midtown houses, I would have ended up spending too much of my tiny salary on clothes.
Finally, my boss at Dover would be Everett Bleiler, the most erudite human being I’ve ever met. Though he was a shy man, quick to blush and slow to meet one’s eyes, asking him the right string of questions of a mid-afternoon could tease forth an impromptu lecture on any one of the dozen or so subjects of which he had post-doctorate level knowledge—history, medicine, natural history, cartography, music, art, architecture, classics, literature, mathematics, the occult or, his specialty, ghost stories. His official title was VP of Marketing, but it was he, really, who shaped the Dover list and secured the often rare editions it reprinted as elegant, affordable paperbacks.
I have no doubt I learned more about more subjects in the year I worked for him than in the previous four on an Ivy League campus. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that’s where I began to develop my interviewer skills. I know it was Everett and his red pen that taught me once and for all never to dangle a participle. More important, he instilled in me something of his own unique ethos of publishing--a combination of refined taste, curatorial zeal and economic populism that contrasts starkly with the prevailing profit-driven culture machine.
I got to hold in my hands an 1789 hand-colored copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience—one Everett Bleiler had tracked down and purchased in order to reprint. That experience gave me the almost mystical conviction that good work trumps form factor, that what is worthy will rise again. In the course of re-publishing Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for The Yellow Book (1894-1897) as a Dover art book, Everett held forth on the idea that the proliferation of independent publishing ventures marks a time of cultural renewal.
I can still see him in the writers’ bullpen outside his glass-walled cubicle, a stout, owlish man with hair like white feathers, white sleeves rolled up and shirt tail hanging out, glasses sliding toward the end of his nose, imparting his values to the next generation.
Not too many years later, my first two novels were among the first paperback original “literature” that Avon Books published, an initiative that won them the Carey-Thomas Award for Innovative Publishing. (One, The Blue Chair, they presumed to reprint a couple of years later in their Bard classics line.) Both of my short story collections came from small presses. Using production skills I learned working for an educational publisher In Boston, I co-founded a collective to publish a quarterly poetry and fiction tabloid called Dark Horse. We set the type on IBM Selectrics borrowed from our day jobs, did paste up ourselves far into the night and hawked the paper outside the Boston Art Museum on Sundays, when admission was free. For ten years, we rotated editorship and provided an outlet for emerging writers.
Now my sixth novel is coming out as a trade paperback and as an e-book. Thanks to Lethe Press, both editions are elegant and affordable. And I am old enough to know that all editions of all books are ephemeral, the vector that passes story mind to mind.
I’m proud to be a Paperback Writer, one more time.
