When I found the book was condemned as soon as the book was printed, or rather as soon as it was set up ready to print, I held it in plates for a year nearly, waiting to see what would come out of all this discussion.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.
I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.
One of the advantages of the book's having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.
So, while I gave up the notions of publishing at that time, I never stopped editing and refining that book. A few years later, in 1987, I thought I had it ready to go out again.
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
The very quick and high sales of the book caught us off guard, but fortunately we got the second edition from the printers at the end of last week and the shops should now be stocked again.