Bookend
Bookbuyer
The Descent of Women by Elaine Morgan, which is in itself a fairly questionable history, already has one. Ernest Hecht got hold of the book here and sold it to Sol Stein of Stein and Day in the US.
It was published first in America. It was serialised by McCalls, featured by Life, and slated by Time, which said that "it replaced another largely fictional work", the Clifford Irving book, in the Book of the Month Club selection. The adjective 'fictional' is considered actionable — Stein is suing — and possibly unfair: Dr Robert Martin of London University, who advised the Observer over their three-part serialisation of it, considers that the book is well worth consideration. Bookbuyer is surprised that any more can be got off the liberationists' bandwagon, but the sales of the book are likely to prove the rule that it is impossible to repeat yourself too often in publishing.
There are many reasons for becoming one's own publisher, as, for example, Philip Roth seems to have found. "Infinity Communications" came into being because the inventors of The Pentagon Game, the Vietnam power game, felt that publishing houses would have taken too long to produce their very topical brainchild. They also knew that established publishers might have hesitated to take on such dangerous material, or else would have modified it for safety. It could create something of a stir; already one bookseller has insisted on a lawyer seeing it before he was prepared to stock it. The publishers would welcome comment from the CIA, whose symbol they have inverted and used, but do not expect any.
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