One day I heard the editorial assistants had been told to spend a Friday afternoon dealing with fan mail. They were bribed with pizza and soda to do this about twice a year. I offered to help which surprised them (hierarchy) but won me a few friends.
Letters arrived to romance authors no longer published (or never) by New American Library/Topaz, the mass market division of Penguin, for which I worked. Letters that had the title of the book (some very generic) but no author, which some of these assistants might have recycled without researching, had my stern eye not been on them. There were no laptops or smartphones then so questions on older books required leaving the room and trying to look up the answer. The irony was that the experienced editors who had institutional memory were too arrogant to help out.
There were many letters addressed to Stephen King and Catherine Coulter, two of our biggest authors at the time. Those were easy to separate. I remember one letter addressed to Black Like Me (no author) which I remembered reading in my elementary school library, a nonfiction book by white journalist John Howard Griffin recounting his journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation. He was long deceased by this time but NAL/Signet had published the paperback which was still in print. No one else in the room had even heard of this book and were surprised when I told them how Griffin changed the color of his skin to do research for the book.
Did you know Lois Lenski illustrated the first book in 1963? |
My favorite was one addressed to Black Beauty with a drawing of a horse on the envelope! Now, what parent or teacher would encourage a child to write to a 19th-century horse? There was no return address or I would have sent a 'neigh' back to the sender. It reminded me of my first week at Bantam Doubleday Dell when I was put to work answering fan mail for Sweet Valley High. The most frequent question was: "I'd like to attend Sweet Valley High with Jessica and Elizabeth. Please tell me where it is so I can get my parents to move there!"
3 comments:
That is a very interesting post. Were these just letters that had to be researched or were all fan letters dealt with only once a year? It actually sounds like a fun task, but I guess without computers it could be tedious. When I was young (and without computers), I enjoyed doing research.
Great post. I find it hard to believe that people would mix fact with fiction so easily, but I guess it happens more than we know!
I think the obvious letters like to Stephen King and Paul Auster went right to the appropriate editor or publicist so the box of pending mail was more obscure. I thought it was kind of fun but I remember when I offered to help, my editorial assistant (a sullen young woman from Brown) thought I just wanted a slice of pizza! The hierarchal lines were clearly drawn at Penguin! And pre-internet or very early days of internet, it would have been harder. I recall they did this twice a year. The mailroom was not that interested in accurate delivery: in my first job there I worked from home so when they got a letter for me my name was unfamiliar. When I got promoted and moved into an office, a letter suddenly appeared, from a college acquaintance, dated over a year earlier!
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