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 hëll 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.)
• 
Heh.
Two words:
Nevsky’s Demon
…and that was the second book in the series.
Wonder where the first one came from.
Playing a complete Devils Advocate here for the moment, I wonder how Peter would have reacted had he encountered the manuscript for Finnegans Wake in the slush pile?
No doubt he would dismissed it with the same wide eyed disbelief as he did Where Man Josh.
Ever heard of “The Steps Experiment“?
Jerzy Kosinski’s proze-winning novel Steps, retyped and submitted over-the-transom was universally rejected – including by Kosinski’s own publisher:
And then Ross did it again – with a movie script.
I think there’s a difference between consistently stylishly incomprehensible–I would have thought the author was like Lewis Carroll on crack–and someone who simply didn’t know what the hëll she was doing.
PAD
There’s a school of thought embraced by some (many?) amateur artists (“artists” in the creatvive sense, not just painting) that because some successful people gained fame and acclaim by breaking the rules/norms (like Woody Allen, Van Gogh, and Thomas Pynchon), the amateur can simply do horrible work and think it’s as good because it breaks the rules too. What they don’t recognize is that those artists usually studied and often mastered the rules/norms before choosing to disregard them — they didn’t just start doing whatever the hëll they wanted.
Yes. There is a difference between “nonsense” that actually makes sense when you make the effort, and nonsense that is just pure nonsense.
I’ve run a slush pile before. You have my sympathies, Peter.
(Never ran into a Star Crash situation, though, thank God.)
A few years ago there was an incident where an autthor posted an excerpt from here upcoming work only to have people notice that it was a David Gemmell novel with the names changed. Things got weirder from there including the author saying that the ripping-off has actually been done by the ghost-writer that she had hired for this vanity press project
More on it including her agent threating the site with both lawsuits and witchcraft
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009448.html
I also thought of Finnegan’s Wake
And I also googled “Where Man Josh”, to make sure it was not in some fanfic or similar site
I remember reading this the first time around. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get –
“He hung his hat just a conversation piece away.”
– out of my brain since then either.
I think he hung his hat at a point ideally located, relative to his own body, for discussing it with someone, if it were a conversation piece.
“The book was incomprehensible…. The title alone should have tipped me: Where Man Josh… It wasn’t easy to decipher what the author, a woman from somewhere in the Midwest, was saying in it…”
Years later, the Midwest woman would try again… changing the werewolf’s name to Jacob… and adding vampires…
I kid, I kid.
I only wish that Twilight were that incomprehensible.
“Conversation Piece” sounds like bad thesaurus usage. There’s probably a synonym for “conversation piece” that sounds like a synonym for “short distance”. Like “tchotchke” and “skosh”, or something like that.
I have a few items dotted around my flat that count as conversation pieces (e.g. the sword above my fireplace). So, maybe that sentence was the equivalent of “at arm’s length”, i.e. “imagine a conversation piece, think how big it is, then imagine him placing his hat that distance away from his body”. Even being charitable, it’s not the clearest way to get the point across…
When I saw “ripoff” and “Star Crash” together, I thought of the infamous Italian “Star Wars” inspired movie. That was an, er, interesting experience.
You can say that again… Although, to be fair, there were a few tributes to Ray Harryhausen, so there was that. But on the other hand, David Hasselhoff and Marjoe Gortner played in it. Guess you can’t win them all.
And a tribute to Ray Bradbury.
Can Caroline Munroe.
Argh!
“AND Caroline Munro”
So, tell us something useful as well as amusing, like how better to get a manuscript past the slush pile without going through an agent.
After all, someone like me might know a pretty good yarn about a real superhero who once rescued a real heiress against the backdrop of an entire government collapsing for having blundered onto the wrong side of a CIA plot to steal a nuclear submarine.
Well, it might help to have a brother who’s known the editor since she was eighteen.
But even then, it helps if the book is, like, you know, good.
I would read it as “He hung his hat, just a conversation piece, away.” In other words, he isn’t a real cowboy, but just wears the hat so that people will find him interesting. As someone who regularly edits poor translations for publication, I find that “incomprehensible” writing can often be reconstructed with a bit of effort.
Keith Laumer was not quite as ‘understanding’ when his INVADERS (the 60s Roy Thinnes TV series) novel was repackaged in the UK as THE METEOR MEN, and attributed to Anthony LeBaron without his knowledge or permission. I remember him being rather livid as he commented on this at an early Maplecon.
That could have actually been an accident – a few years later (well, about 1974, don’t know when the UK book was out), i bought a Keith Laumer book; i read about ten or fifteen pages, thought it read rather like a political SF novel, which is something that wouldn’t surprise me to find Laumer writing … at first.
And then i not only realised that it wasn’t a political SF novel – but that it wasn’t even by Laumer.
The entire interior of somebody’s mediocre, would-be “heroic-revolutionaries-against-oppression” thriller (term used advisedly) had been bound with the covers and end pages of a Keith Laumer novel.
I never did find out whose book it was, or what its title was supposed to be – if i had, i would have hunted up a copy of that the book published under that title, too.
His comments were in ’78 so if it was an accident, they never apologized nor compensated him for it because he was still teed off even then.
By the way, anyone here read that cute little bit about NASA working to show the idea of warp drive isn’t so far fetched after all?
An accident? Possibly. But doubtful. His vitriolic comments were made in ’78, long after the book had come out. At the very least, they spoke of a lake of apology or remorse. That’s bad enough even if it hadn’t been intentional.
I used to wonder how it was possible for some people to have no inkling of how untalented they are at writing. But then I realized that it must be a Ed Wood situation – the book is comprehensible and a masterwork in their heads, it’s just not the same book other people are reading.
“My first publishing job was with a small imprint called Elsevier/Nelson, which was a division of E.P. Dutton”
Fun fact; Elsevier/Nelson is now part of Reed Elsevier, the company that owns Reed Exhibitions, which runs the New York Comic Con. Ah, corporate mergers.
Also, apparently the name of the plagiarism was “Star Chase” and the “author’s” name was “Brian James Royal”.
This site suggests that he was using a pseudonym, and had perpetrated this fraud more than once, on more than one publisher!
“In his article on skiffy plagiarism, relating the case of the guy who resold Gardner Fox’s ESCAPE ACROSS THE COSMOS three times under three different names, he has the details wrong: the books were TITANS OF THE UNIVERSE by “James Harvey” or “Moonchild” and STAR CHASE by “Brian James Royal” (1978 Manor pb and 1978 Nelson hc). Dave had the wrong pseudonym paired with wrong title.”
http://ansible.co.uk/books/sexcol.html
Do publishers still accept slush for the pile?
Peter David: 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.
Luigi Novi: Except to aficionados of certain types of mature audiences films, I’d imagine. 😉
Peter David: “He hung his hat just a conversation piece away.”
“He knew he would never forget that offal sight.”
Luigi Novi: You know, Peter, I think this calls for another round-robin story.
We can’t distribute the entire book for satire because that might raise legal concerns if the illiterate author made sure to copyright her book, but you could employ excerpts like these and see where they go.
“He hung his hat just a conversation piece away.”
As the Cowboy sat on a log eating his beans, he noticed two figures approach, silhouetted against the descending sun. He kept eating his beans, comforted by the still-charged blaster hanging from his hip. He knew that he could handle any trouble if these two strangers tried anything. He was relieved as they got closer, as he saw that one was an old man and the other a young man barely out of his teens, little more than a boy. If these two hicks caused any trouble, the Cowboy knew he could take ’em. And then there was his friend, the Hat. As the Old Man and the Boy approached, they sat on a log opposite the Cowboy.
“I need a ship to take me and the Boy to Alderra”, said the Old Man.
“I’m available”, said the Cowboy.
“Is your ship fast?” asked the Old Man.
“The Peregrine? It made the Kessara Run in 12 parsecs”, said the Cowboy.
“A parsec is a unit of distance, not time,” offered the Boy.
“Don’t piss me off, kid”, warned the Cowboy.
“How much to Alderra?”, the Old Man said.
“Ten thousand”, said the Cowboy.
“Ten thousand? I could buy my own starship for that!” said the incredulous Boy.
“Yeah, but who’s going to fly it, kid? You?”, teased the Cowboy.
“Yeah, I could! Besides, who’s your pilot?”
“The hat right there. He’s my pilot.”
“Hiya doin’,” said the Hat.
“What the–you have a talking hat?”, said an even more incredulous Boy.
“Yeah. Picked him up at this school in Scotland. He’s my partner now. That’s why I hung him just a conversation piece away from where we’re sitting,” explained the Cowboy. “In case he had something to say, I need to be able to hear it.”
“Why do you keep referring to units of distance that aren’t really units of distance?’, as asked a confused Boy.
“Kid, you are really starting to piss me off”, said the Cowboy.
The four paused, and then the Cowboy spoke again.
“So what’s your cargo?”
“Just myself. The Boy. And fifty 10-gallon containers of butchered animal organs”, the Old Man responded.
“How’d you come by that? Is it hot?”, asked the Cowboy.
“We came across it at an old abandoned meat processing plant. It was an offal sight.”
“I’ll bet. What does that stuff go for?”
“About 20 a kilo. It goes great with potatoes. Russet Potatoes.”
“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.”
———–
Obviously, PAD, you’re in (or, more accurately, were in) a better position to know but I think that “offal sight” could be a not-altogether wrong phrase. Perhaps the cowboy (if indeed that’s what he was) was recalling a traumatic moment when he found his prized pet calf, Li’l Elsie, slaughtered–one of its hooves pointing towards all its viscera, strewn in such a way that it spelled out “REDRUM.”