The strange career of a book

In 1992, a New York publisher, Carroll and Graff (which had earlier published Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions), expressed interest in a long book by me on immigration and related topics. I labored on this vast project through most of the 1990s. The entire projected book as I envisioned it was too big, as long as six or seven hundred pages. It was never finished, but significant parts of it were. But when I submitted it to Kent Carroll in the late ’90s, he had changed his mind and no longer wanted it, though he had earlier committed himself to it. In 2000-2001, my literary agent, the late Theron Raines, a very fine man, submitted the first part of the manuscript, 250 pages, which was mainly about multiculturalism, to several mainstream publishers. They all turned it down. At this point I stopped working on the project. Though friends later urged me to self-publish the finished part, I stubbornly refused, because it was not the entire book. Yet at the same time I had lost the energy or desire to complete the book. So I remained between two stools, and the finished part of the manuscript has sat in my computer, untouched, for the last 12 years, while I have worked on VFR. (Since 2007, when it became evident that no mainstream conservative website would publish my articles, my writing has been directly exclusively at VFR.)

Now a sympathetic conservative publisher has expressed the desire to publish the book. I need to check over the publishable chapters, decide which chapters should be included, arrange them in sequence, write an introduction, and submit the manuscript. I must do this as soon as possible, because I could turn sicker any day and no longer be able to work. In the meantime, which may be as much as a few days, VFR must be relatively inactive, though I will continue posting readers’ comments and some short entries.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 25, 2013 09:50 AM | Send
    


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