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This is an interview with Samuel S. Vaughan, whose very amusing, sophisticated
story "The Two-Thirty Bird" was read to us in 2nd or 3rd grade. His books are
listed at the end of Part 2 of the interview. One of them, oddly, is about
William F. Buckley and the English language!
http://www.archipelago.org/vol3-2/vaughan1.htm
The interview took place in 1999, when he was 70 or 71. He is the
editor-at-large for Random House and former editor-in-chief, president, and
publisher for Doubleday. The following story presumably took place in 1952 or
1953. One can only wonder how many modern teenage boys agree with him but are
afraid to say so.
Lenona.
.......But Mr. Kinnaird did his best to help me find a job. After I had shopped
around for awhile he said, “Would you like to have a job at the Washington
Star ?” I said, “I’d love it.” He sent me out to Washington, New
Jersey, to a paper there at that time, for a job that I, in turn, didn’t get.
In any case, I made the rounds for months, and, meanwhile, delivered the mail
in Washington Heights, and got a job at Doubleday, in a small arm of their
rights department they called the Syndicate. I came in at the tail end of the
time when books were fairly widely syndicated in newspapers in this country.
The papers carried books in serial form. Doubleday had books that had made a
lot of money by licensing them to outside syndicates, books like Fulton
Oursler’s THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. The money had to be divided 50/50
with the syndicate, and then 50/50 with the author, so the author got 25%, the
publisher got 25%. Then Doubleday, in its wisdom, decided to do it themselves.
So, I got this job preparing books for syndication; also traveling to sell
them. I wasn’t notably good at it, but I got to see the country.
KATHERINE MCNAMARA: How did you prepare them? Did you actually do the editing,
divide them into usable chapters, and so on?
SAM VAUGHAN: You would cut them into a week-long series, or a twelve part
series, and it was learned by doing. It was surgery on the helpless body of the
author. But I think we showed the cut versions to the authors, and they were
usually happy to have some extra readership, publicity, and income.
KATHERINE MCNAMARA: Just for curiosity’s sake, what was the money like?
SAM VAUGHAN: It ranged from $50.00 to a couple of thousand. A paper would buy a
series from us. A big paper in Chicago might pay $2,000; a small paper anywhere
might pay $50.00. You had to give them territorial rights, because big papers
tended to claim everything.
But one of the books my boss got interested in, when I was first there, was one
by a young Dutch girl. He sold it to the New York Post for a small amount of
money before publication. But what we got out of it was that the Post did its
own version. Every day I went down to the Post and got, hot off the press,
their installment. I came back and typed it on stencils. Then we went on the
road to sell it. My boss sent me, naturally, to Philadelphia. I sat down with a
man named Stuart Taylor, of the Bulletin. He was an elegant fellow;
newspapermen could be elegant in those days. Thinking back to what I had told
my boss, I said: “This isn’t exactly good newspaper material, it’s a
diary of a young girl who was a real pain in the ass. Who could love a teenage
girl? I mean, that’s the worst time of life to love someone.”
KATHERINE MCNAMARA: And the book was—
SAM VAUGHAN: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, by Anne Frank. That was its first
title, I believe.
Stuart Taylor listened to my story and bought it from me on the spot, for very
good money. I almost fell off the chair. We in fact only sold it to about ten
or twelve papers; but it was part of the publication “buzz,” as they would
call it these days. I had no idea that the book would last forever. I guess I
had certain sympathy for what we knew of Anne Frank’s life and death, but I
just didn’t ‘feel the mystery’ at that point. That was my first
observation of a publishing phenomenon. It’s an interesting study, a
publishing phenomenon. I don’t mean ‘bestseller,’ I mean books as
phenomena. That was also my first example of a book that passes from the
intended audience to an incidental audience, one of which happened to be young
women.
I don’t mean that they’re incidental, but that nobody said, “This is a
book for young women.” Nobody said, “This is a book for Jewish people.”
In fact, you didn’t say that in those days, not out of any sensitivity, but
because that was before the revolution in which Jewish writers became some of
our most interesting and important writers. We published EXODUS [by Leon Uris]
in that period, which we called “the story of the birth of a nation.” We
published [Herman Wouk’s] MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR, which we described as a
“love story of a young girl in New York,” never saying the word
“Jewish.”
KATHERINE MCNAMARA: Indeed, I remember hearing about those books when I was
coming up, and it never even occurred to me that they were, as it were,
separate from me.
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, “Anne Frank” was published as an adult trade book, and
it sold extremely well as such, but then passed on, over the decades, into the
hands of young people.
That’s a good topic to explore, sometime: the book that, published for one
presumed audience, transmutes itself for another. For example, the book that is
published as an adult book, and gets taken up by kids. Or, the book that is
published for children and gets taken up by adults. There’s a history in
that. |
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