I love books. I can thank my mother for
this. She introduced me to stories and the books wherein many of them reside. I
say this because one of my favorite stories she told my brother and me during
our childhood is nowhere to be found in print, so it must have made its home
with her. One of the best stories I know, but not what I want to write about.
So I’ll begin with the first literary oddity.
Do you know what a lipogram is? If you
don’t already know, then you will be surprised to learn that a lipogram is a
written work composed in such a manner as to avoid the use of one or more
alphabetic characters. Thank you dictionary.com.
Ernest Vincent Wright would you please
take the stage please. Mr. Wright was an American author who lived from 1872 to
October 7, 1939. Between 1896 and 1918, he published three books. Several years
before 1936, Wright accepted a self-imposed
challenge to write a novel completely lacking the letter “e." Why
would he do such a thing you ask? The answer is simple. Someone told him it
couldn’t be done. It took him years to complete the manuscript but once
completed it contained 50,110 words. Nary a one contains an “e." Where
would such a book find a publisher? It didn’t. So in 1939, Wright
self-published the book himself. Shortly after the printing, the warehouse
holding many of the copies burned destroying nearly all copies of the book.
Some did reach circulation, and they are quite valuable. If you happen to have
a first printing of Gadsby cherish it.
If you’d like to read it for fun, it is available as an e-book or POD.
When I was first told of this feat, the
story indicated the letter “e” on his typewriter was broken, and he decided to
write a book anyway. As it turns out, he intended to avoid the letter and took
great pains to guarantee none snuck into the finished work by tying down the “e”
key.
The next oddity happened in my lifetime.
I even remember when the announcement was made on TV. I can’t recall the show,
but there was a great production made about the book and the introduction of
the author. The book published in the summer of 1969 had quickly sold 20,000
copies, and by the end of the year it had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times
best-seller list.
So sitting in front of the TV that night,
the nation expected to see Penelope Ashe a housewife from Long Island and the reported
author of, Naked Came the Stranger. When
the curtain opened, the first of twenty five Newsday journalists stepped out
onto the stage. The entire book was written as a literary hoax. The brainchild
of Mike McGrady, a prize-winning reporter for Newsday, he solicited twenty-four
of his fellow writers to be co-conspirators in his truly unique work of
fiction.
In recruiting his cohorts, two hard-and-fast
rules presided. The book should contain as much sex as possible, and it should
be written as awful as possible. Why would this noted journalist do such a
thing? It was an experiment to see if good writing didn’t really matter. They
found out it didn’t. The adage of sex sells was upheld. That’s still true
today. Books considered soft porn are the top-selling books year after year, and their authors are
becoming rich spewing out sex scene after sex scene between the covers. But if
you want to read a collaboration of hot steamy sex check out Naked Came the Stranger. It was
rereleased in 2004 and has sold over 400,000 copies.
Until next we meet, keep reading.
