From: LeonardSMa at aol.com <LeonardSMa>
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 12:33:06 EDT

As to how I came to edit the book. I first encountered some of Ursula Nordstrom's editorial correspondence while researching my biography of Margaret Wise Brown. I was struck by UN's quick wit and sense of theater, but also by her tact, her readiness to press a writer she revered (and probably also feared) to do better, her devotion and sense of mission. After writing my biography of Brown, I thought it might be interesting to look at bookmaking from the other side of the desk, ie from the editor's side. By then I had also become aware of other aspects of UN's letter-writing, for instance that she circuluated her letters to her staff as a teaching device and that she therefore wrote them in such a way as to make the context of her communications more or less immediately apparent. This meant, I realized, that the letters lent themselves to publication, too. As I read through the files, I came to feel that UN herself might have had publication ultimately in mind, that the letters in essence constituted the only book she would and perhaps could have written about her work. As for how I chose certain letters to include, that's a big question. I should start by saying that I had at least 100,000 letters to choose from. I read them all, over about two years, originally with no specific criterion in mind. I just tried to listen to her voice--for changes in tone, and so on--and to internalize the material as best I could. Eventually, the letters began to fall into genres--the letters of encouragement to an author with writers block for instance; the fan letters written just to be in touch; the cagey letter requesting one last additional revision from a busy and overworked author, and so on--and I tried to choose the most fully realized examples from each genre into the book. I also wanted to give a full impression of the breadth of her interests as a publisher; the range of books she published, including well-known ones and to some extent books that have fallen by the wayside. I wanted to show her engagement with the issue of censorship and, related to that, how she anticipated criticism for controversial material and tried to prepare the way for a more open-minded reception of a difficult book. I wanted to include a representative example of UN as line editor and did no primarily via the two letters to Syd Hoff about Danny and the Dinosaur. I wanted letters in which she indicated her sense of her situation as a publisher of children's books and as a woman in publishing and in business. I think this is really a partial answer to selection question, but it's at least a good start. Leonard Marcus
Received on Mon 03 Aug 1998 11:33:06 AM CDT