From: LeonardSMa at aol.com <LeonardSMa>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 09:00:29 EDT

Yes, the authors' side of UN's correspondence was, for the most part, also preserved. Some of those letters may eventually become material for other books. There were a few considerations in choosing not to include both sides in Dear Genius. For one thing, it would have made the book too big to bind! There was also the copyright issue, though I'm sure it could have been resolved. The author of a letter or his or her estate unusally controls the content (intellectual property) of a letter, regardless of who owns the paper on which it was written. To publish the letters of all the authors and others to whom UN wrote would thus have entailed clearing copyright permissions with dozens and dozens of letter-writers. It may be of interest to know that Harper, not UN's estate, controls the copyright to her professional corrrespondence, and that in general the content of any letter written by an employee of an institution belongs to that institution. There was a third consideration, too. The editor's creative role is so rarely highlighted--and, by the nature of the process, so often concealed, that I thought it would be worthwhile to put the spotlight almost entirely on what UN contributed to the making of so many books whose authors are already somewhat familiar to us via their publications. --Leonard Marcus
Received on Mon 10 Aug 1998 08:00:29 AM CDT