Tuesday, April 19, 2011

103/365 Wednesday 04/13/2011

A friend gave me a copy of the paperback edition of the first book my mother wrote that she had found in a second-hand bookstore. You can see it in the picture on the left. The funny thing is--this is a copy of the defective first edition of the book that was printed en masse with about 10 pages of the end of the story missing!
And guess who was the one to find this out? My mother, the author of the book, who was sent a copy  in Germany many many years ago. I can remember her panic when she opened the back of the book and couldn't believe her eyes!  This was way way back before email etc... and we didn't even have a phone. (Yep thats right our family never had a car and did not even get a home phone till I finished high school). I remember my mother pondering her next move--which turned out to be a trip to the local post-office where she sent a telegram to her literary agent Virginia Kidd that ended with the memorable words: "Please raise hell!" -- which is I think more or less what happened. The whole edition was ditched and eventually a new edition with the much prettier cover and the complete text appeared.  So that was that.
It is a bit funny that the faulty edition still turns up in stores and on eBay--I always wonder what people must think about the ending--in the incorrect edition the book ends with a sentence that is a question --and thats it--it is obviously unfinished.
Eventually it would be nice to own a copy of every edition of all 11 of my mother's books. And at some point I'd like to set up a website that consolidates all the info on her that is available out there on the web, plus the info I have together in one place. 

2 comments:

  1. A number of her books are available on paperbackswap.com. I'm not sure if that's a method by which you could see yourself acquiring them, but I suspect you could get quite a few of them there.

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  2. Oh I'll definitely check it out - thanks for the tip! The tricky thing will be getting the editions from different countries-the first trilogy (the one that takes place on a planet called Torin, which is inhabited by the marsupial-like Moruians) was published in the US and England and maybe elsewhere. Quite a few of her books were translated and published in Germany too. And there might be other editions out there.

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