"Too often when a publisher entertains an author at the midday meal a rather sombre note tinges the table talk."

{Photo of an erroneous erratum in the Regenstein Library's copy of Richard Stark's Plunder Squad by rocketlass.}

In my recent reading I've happened across three little bits about publishing that seemed worth sharing. First, from Vere H. Collins's Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate (1928), a discussion between the author and Hardy about publishing errata:

H: There are a considerable number of misprints in the Collected Edition [of his poems]. Macmillan has issued an errata slip. Had your copy one?

C: No, but I bought the book when it first came out.

H: I will get a copy of the slip for you. [He leaves the room and returns with an errata slip.] That will save you from having to buy a revised edition. I cannot understand how mistakes occur in a printed book when a proof has been corrected properly.

C: Sometimes a word or line drops out when the formes are being moved and the printer resets carelessly without referring to the proof.

H: I remember Tennyson being very much annoyed because one of his poems was printed with "hairy does" instead of "aery does." On another occasion "mad phrases" became "mud phrases."

I'm disapointed that "hairy does" didn't become "hairy toes" instead; we could have had hobbits decades earlier!

Then there's this scene from P. G. Wodehouse's Uncle Dynamite (1948), wherein a woman recounts how her brother, a small publisher, found himself in trouble after printing taking on a job for a wealthy--and stodgy--old man:

"[H]e said one thing that gripped my attention, and that was that he had written his Reminiscences and had decided after some thought to pay for their publication. He spoke like a man who had had disappointments. So I said to myself, 'Ha! A job for Otis.'"

"I begin to see. Otis took it on and made a mess of it?"

"Yes. In a negligent moment he slipped in some plates which should have appeared in a book on Modern Art which he was doing. Sir Aylmer didn't like any of them much, but the one he disliked particularly was the nude female with 'Myself in the Early Twenties' under it."

If we were were playing "one of these things is not like the others," this last item would stand out like an unindicted tenant in the Illinois governor's mansion, but since I already had the first two passages on the brain it seemed worth appending when I came across it this afternoon. From Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man (1971), a glimpse of a way of looking at the life of a city that's nearly disappeared:

I walked past the closed door of the Wallers' apartment and down the street to the nearest newsstand, where I bought the weekend edition of the Los Angeles Times. I lugged it home and spent most of the morning reading it. All of it, including the classified ads, which sometimes tell you more about Los Angeles than the news.

The Times is still with us, but the classifieds are just about gone; would Craigslist offer Archer the same insight into the hope and desperation of his city?

"The attitude of a crafstman towards a trade, with no tendency to regard the writing of books as an elevated pursuit," or, Talking with Thomas Hardy

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Though I almost exclusively buy my books new--my neat streak working in tandem with a desire to support publishers and authors--once in a while a used bookstore will offer up an utterly unexpected treasure, a book I might never have come across in decades of glancing through bibliographies and following recommendations from bloggers.

Sunday was one of those days: after seeing my friend Carrie Olivia Adams read from her new book of poems, Intervening Absence, at Myopic Books, I wandered to the criticism section, where in search of Hazlitt, I happened instead to find a slim volume entitled Talks with Thomas Hardy. Published by Vere H. Collins in 1928, two years after Hardy's death, it was (inexplicably) reprinted in cloth by Duckworth in 1978, and for a mere $6 I was able to take it home. Callooh, callay, indeed!

As Collins explains in his introduction, he was more or less a nobody: he became of fan of Hardy's novels as an undergraduate, then a fervent believer in Hardy's poetry after the Great War, and,

For many years I had felt as Browning felt about Byron when he said that he would "at any time have gone to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves."

So in 1920, out of the blue, Collins wrote to Hardy, praising his poetry and asking for a short interview. To his surprise, Hardy wrote back days later inviting him to Max Gate; a series of visits followed over the next two years.

Why did Hardy grant this total stranger, who came bearing no credentials or introduction, access to his house and person? Collins traces it, convincingly, to his stated preference for Hardy's poetry over his fiction; though Hardy's poetry has plenty of partisans now, at the time it was still comparatively neglected, his decision to eschew fiction still considered unfortunate. The resulting conversations--in which the second Mrs. Hardy, less odd but possibly more possessive than the first Mrs. Hardy, participated--are at times remarkably light, but in their focus on the poetry and their unguardedness they offer many pleasures.

As I've done with the more extensive (and much more expensive!) volume Thomas Hardy Remembered that Ashagte put out a couple of years ago (and in which Collins doesn't figure), I'll almost certainly return to this book over time. For now, I'll share just two brief passages, neither one focusing on the poetry.

First--this one's for DC Cairns--Hardy's take on early cinema's embrace of his novels:

C: I see that Tess is being shown on the films.

H: I was present at a rehearsal of it in the United States.

C: Are others of the novels to be done too?

H: I don't know. I leave all that to Macmillan. My experience of seeing film plays has been unfortunate. There always seem to be motorcars rushing over cliffs and people jumping out of windows. What effect do you think the cinematograph will have on the sale of books?

C: I should have thought that it would appeal to a public that read only sensational novels.

H: I was surprised that people cared for Tess on the film, for it always seems to be mainly young people who go to see the cinematograph. . . .

Hardy's point about the spectacular nature of silent film sounds like something that might have come out of Bertie Wooster's mouth--only, from Bertie, it would have qualified as praise. I wonder how much Hardy's lack of interest in films came from their silence; as a devoted fan of drama, who had enjoyed seeing, and even participating in, performances of his novels, I could imagine him frustrated by the necessary reduction of dialogue and narration to the brevity of intertitles.

Second, I think you'll enjoy what I found on the page I turned to when I first opened the book, a passage that seemed appropriate to a late March weekend that had been honored by the visit of a thundersnowstorm:

C: I was very lucky to have such a fine day after the gale of the night before. When I was here at Easter it was also extraordinarily mild. I remember your husband telling me of some flowers that were out unusually early. He dislikes cold weather very much, does he not?

Mrs. H: Yes, he says it freezes his brains.

Frozen brains. I think I've identified my problem. But hark! Is that the crack of the bat I hear? The hideous mating call of the umpire? We may just survive this winter after all!