A couple literary did you knows?

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.