Where Man Josh

Originally published January 9, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1260

And now, we present: Peter’s True Horror Stories of Publishing.

Before I became the full-time and eminently competent writer I are now, I spent time toiling in the field of book publishing. One of my varied duties in that endeavor was to deal with the public and go through the material that found its way onto what is cheerfully known as the slush pile. This is the term for unsolicited material, over-the-transom stuff that comes in, and no one knows quite what to do with it.

My first publishing job was with a small imprint called Elsevier/Nelson, which was a division of E.P. Dutton. Working within the confines of Dutton was certainly interesting enough. There were the more curious perks, such as the time when I discovered that the original Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toys were sitting in boxes in a closet, awaiting the eventual construction of a showcase in the front hallway. I tracked down the closet, hauled them out, and held the genuine, Christopher Robin Milne-owned Pooh bear on one knee and Tigger on the other. Several years later the animals took up permanent residence in, I believe, the New York Public Library, where they reside to this day. No one gets to play with them anymore which, at heart, I think is a bit of a shame.

My main job at Elsevier/Nelson was assistant to the editor-in-chief. Basically, I was a secretary. Don’t laugh. It paid the bills, and besides, my main job-seeking assets were a journalism degree that I had decided not to use, and a typing speed of 110 words per minute. So what else was I gonna do? But every so often I would tackle material that came into the slush pile, usually when I had nothing else to do. I actually volunteered for the assignment, and got it easily enough; it’s not as other people were falling over each other to bag the job.

The manuscript that I remember most vividly was the single most illiterate piece of… work… I have ever seen, then or now. We received the manuscript typed on erasable bond paper, guaranteed to make it a tricky read to begin with. The book was incomprehensible. It went beyond bad grammar; it was unassailable. The title alone should have tipped me: Where Man Josh. I remember looking at the title page and trying to figure out what it could possibly mean. Was it a question? Was it someone’s name? What the hell was it?

The dedication was extremely memorable. It wasn’t easy to decipher what the author, a woman from somewhere in the Midwest, was saying in it. As near as I could determine, though, she was thanking her husband for saving the book from total destruction. Apparently their house had been burning down, and he ran back into the flames to save the manuscript from perishing in the fire. Now I seem to recall literary anecdotes such as that Robert Louis Stevenson was so dissatisfied with the manuscript for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that he endeavored to toss it on the fire, and his wife salvaged the work. But there are some books which deserve to go up in flames, and Where Man Josh was definitely one of them.

The general rule of thumb is that a book should hook you within the first ten pages. I tried to slog through it and discovered I couldn’t make it past the first three. Words were misspelled throughout. Tense switched from present to past to future, point of view shifted from first person to third, within paragraphs of each other, sometimes within the same sentence. Sentences made no sense at all, and some of them seared themselves into my brain for the rest of my life.

I think—think, mind you—that the beginning involved a cowboy, by himself, settling down for the night after a long day. Ponder, if you will, the meaning of the following sentence:

“He hung his hat just a conversation piece away.”

Read it again. Read it slowly. Turn it over in your mind, try to get at the hidden meaning. Was he planning to converse with his hat? Did he consider the hat something worth discussing with someone else, should they show up? Was it something else entirely?

I never knew for sure. And in addition to the many sentences such as the one above that simply left me with my head scratching, there were those which resulted in unintentional hilarity because she used the wrong word. When the cowboy (I think) dwells momentarily on a traumatic recollection (I believe) the author expresses it thusly:

“He knew he would never forget that offal sight.”

Now obviously, she meant to write “awful.” But somehow describing an “offal sight” not only was hysterically appropriate, but it seemed to summarize the entire book.

So ghastly was this book that I immortalized it in a personal manner. Some years later I wrote a book called Howling Mad which was a satire of werewolf legends. It was about a wolf who transformed into a human being. I’m loathe to call him a “wereman,” because “were” means “man,” so it’s like saying he’s a man-man, which makes no sense. Nonetheless, “wereman” is probably the easiest way to summarize the sense of what I was doing. And for my own amusement, I named him “Josh” after Where Man Josh, the worst book I never read.

But I’ll never forget when something else landed in the slush pile and came to my attention—something that I discovered with a good deal of alarm. It had been shunted over to the slush pile because it was a large manila envelope, but when I cracked it open, out fell an already published book and a cover letter alerting us to the single most blatant case of plagiarism I have ever encountered.

Elsevier/Nelson had published a book called Star Crash, a science fiction novel by some guy whose name escapes me (fortunately enough). And in the envelope was a letter from a reader informing us that Star Crash was a word-for-word copy of another book.

And who was the original author? None other than comic book legend Gardner Fox.

The book was originally published in the early 1960s, entitled Escape Across the Cosmos. The informant wanted nothing for himself; he simply wanted to make sure that justice was done, and had sent along a copy of the book in question in order to prove his point. I cracked open Escape, pulled out a copy of Star Crash, and sat down to compare them.

To my utter horror, the informant was one hundred percent accurate. It was a complete ripoff, absolutely word for word. The only thing that the author of Star Crash had done differently was to put his own name on the manuscript.

And I thought, “My God. We ripped off a legend.”

I went to my boss, showing her the letter and the two books. Immediately determining for herself that one was a repeat of the other, she sought salvation in the possibility that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. “Maybe,” she postulated, “the name ‘Gardner Fox’ is a pen name that this author has used.” In other words, she was hoping that what the author had done was recycle a book he’d had published fifteen years earlier. It’s not like that would have earned him a gold star for decency. It still would have meant that he’d fobbed off an already-existing work as something original. But at least he would have been ripping off himself rather than indulging in the single most despicable crime that an author can perpetrate.

“Absolutely impossible,” I told her flatly. “Gardner Fox is a well-respected author with a track record all his own, plus he’s much older than this guy. There’s absolutely no way this is anything else other than a bald-faced theft.”

“Can you track down this Gardner Fox?” she asked.

I had no idea how to do it. Naturally, I said, “Sure.”

“Good. Find his number. You’re going to talk to him, since you’re familiar with him. I’ll handle our author,” she said, her face darkening with fury. No publisher is pleased to discover that they’ve been hosed. “You tell Mr. Fox that we’ll be recalling the advance that we paid the author, that the entirety of the advance is going to be paid to Mr. Fox instead, plus any royalties that the book generates—and that if the book is ever reprinted, his name will go on it instead.”

I went back to my desk and took the only shot I could think of: I called DC Comics. I have absolutely no idea who I spoke with, but I told them who I was (and they said, “Oh! Peter David! Sure! You’ll be writing Aquaman and Supergirl in about fourteen years, nice to talk to you!”) and explained the situation. As I recall, they wouldn’t give me his number, but they said they would get in touch with him and have him call me.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was Gardner Fox.

I can’t begin to tell you how incredible that was for me. It was the first interaction with a genuine comic book talent that I’d had in my adult life, and of all people! Of all circumstances!

I laid out the situation for him, told him what my boss intended to do in order to make restitution. We were in a delicate area here; after all, if Fox had wanted to make real problems for us, he might very well have been able to do so.

Instead he took the entire thing with remarkable good humor and grace. Since his book had been long out of print, he considered Star Crash to be found money. Here some guy had gone to the work and effort of getting one of Fox’s books back into print. Indeed, he actually seemed a bit sorry for the author of Star Crash. He felt it sad that this guy had been so bereft of his own creative vision or ideas that he had chosen to swipe someone else’s work wholesale.

I relayed my conversation with Fox to my boss, who seemed rather relieved about the whole thing. I wish Fox had lived long enough that I’d had the opportunity to talk to him in person about it.

There’s other fun stories regarding stuff one finds in slush piles. I have some others of my own I’ll touch on in later columns. Also, I’d be more than happy to hear from anyone else within the industry about their own experiences. Certainly there are folks reading this column who have had bizarre run-ins with would-be authors. Send ‘em in to me and I’ll run them in a future column.

Just send them to “Where Man Peter.”

(Where Man Peter, writer of Where Stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)