White Cedar Press

By Eric Timar

A young editor, thrilled to have secured his dream job with a prestigious small publisher in New York, watches in horror as the firm abandons its standards and begins printing all the lurid novels it can find. The publisher’s new books offer Huckleberry Finn re-imagined as a slave trader, Hester Prynne as an ax-wielding vigilante, and Robert Frost as a motorcycle gangster; plus the usual contemporary catalog of fur and fangs. As the publisher embarks on a campaign to conquer New Zealand — and pushes the editor’s closest colleague into mental health rehabilitation — he has to decide whether to rebel, quit the job, or surrender.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eric Timar
• Release date: Oct 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301794096

Eric Timar

Eric Timar lives in Virginia with his family and rabbits. He can count to ten in Miskitu.

Book preview

Chapter One

You can be confident that your publishing house is dead when you receive a query like the one I read that Thursday:

January 5, 2011

Tim Craire

Acquisitions Editor

White Cedar Press

New York

Dear Mr. Craire,

I ask you to reimagine the raft trip of Huckleberry Finn, with Jim. They are drifting south along the Mississippi, toward Cairo. They revel in their freedom as they escape from Jim’s owner.

Now imagine Tom Sawyer waving to them from the bank of the river, and then imagine them picking him up to journey with them. Imagine Tom whispering furtively to Huckleberry over the course of one day and two long nights; and then imagine the two of them sneaking up on Jim before dawn and chaining him again in order to return him into slavery.

Literature today is all about reimagining our present, and our past; it is about zombies where we least expect them, and vampires in the White House. My new novel, Re-mancipation, reimagines the greatest work of American literature, and I would like to offer it to White Cedar Press.

It was the novel Outback WereCats, by Beverly Quan Gianelli, which inspired me to begin my own writing career; and as Ms. Quan Gianelli’s publisher, I believe White Cedar Press is the natural host for Re-mancipation. My novel—featuring Huckleberry Finn as a slave trader—can be yours.

I read this much and asked myself when it had begun to go wrong.

To give you an idea of what a healthy, living publishing house looks like:

Four years earlier I had joined White Cedar Press to edit a biographical novel of Friedrich List, a Nineteenth Century German economist who today continues to influence our lives—

Let me start over: Friedrich List is a man who still takes money out of your wallet. To this day. I think my first version was too dry, just now, so here you are: List killed himself in 1846 but his ideas still take your money away from you. You can look at your most recent pay statement, or at a restaurant receipt. If you see any money which you earned at your job, or which you did not spend on food at the restaurant, moving away from you, that’s List at work. Today, right here and now. Because List, as much as anyone in the past three hundred years, argued that governments should spend big. And governments listened.

Before we put out our book, almost nothing had been written about List in English. James Fallows had mentioned him in his book about Japan, Looking At The Sun, but apart from that, List was forgotten in English, as far as I knew. Until we at White Cedar Press took on a novel about his life.

And this novel about Friedrich List was a noble literary work which no one read and which made no money, right? Wrong. List was an engaging guy who lived in Pennsylvania for years as well as in Leipzig. Plus there was the term of ten months of hard labor in prison in Germany. In the end he shot himself after he went bankrupt.

How about List’s luck with women? Anything interesting there to include in our novel? Well, we had to take educated guesses, but we assumed that a fiery, urbane European dreamer transplanted to Reading, Pennsylvania, attracted a respectable amount of attention from women who compared him with the available competition. Let’s see, now: Earnest, hardworking local Pennsylvanians who had never been more than twenty miles from their farms, or this ambitious European dreamer just one Atlantic crossing from the toughest intellectual circles of London. Do you reckon any bored women in Reading might have made inappropriate eye contact with choice number two?

What do you think: Could a competent novelist get three hundred saleable pages out of that life? Yes, he did. At White Cedar Press—five years ago.

Listen to me hold forth. I have to apologize. I was not previously so pedantic and bitter. I have become this way due to the fall of White Cedar Press. Perhaps it’s just as well that all this has happened, in terms of what kind of person I have become; I am better at expressing my opinion. Expressing it, that is, to buffoons who don’t know what they are doing.

Buffoon: Related to the word puff; a reference to the way a clown might puff out his cheeks. Now and then people will trace it to the Latin bufo, a toad. I can live with either of those explanations.

To resume: I am more confident expressing myself now that I have watched this publisher get run into the ground. That is the development of my character. (God help me—I am giving away the resolution of this story already. I am not supposed to let you know that until the last chapter.)

I began as a fresh-faced and humble young editor who was a team player, who listened more than he spoke, and who never lectured anyone. Today, on the other hand, my job is a disgrace, but at least I am able to inform people when I see an obvious short in the wiring. Also, I am no longer afraid to have a drink with lunch, so that’s an improvement.

You may ask: If I was reluctant to speak out, as a young editor, how was I able to last as long as I did? Holding forth with opinions is the job of an editor, correct? Well, yes, certainly; but I lasted so long because I worked with like-minded colleagues. It’s as simple as that. When I began at White Cedar, and up until about two years ago, I did not need to dissuade anyone on our staff from, say, adding on a final chapter to a novel so that the young female protagonist—a collegiate athlete rebounding from major surgery—could get sold into sexual slavery in Qatar. Because no one on the staff of White Cedar would have suggested that sort of plot twist in the first place. Back then.

Let me tell you about one of these like-minded colleagues. Our typesetter for the List novel—typesetter was the title he wanted us to use for him—handled the interior, and it was gorgeous. Paulo d’Avignon is the name of this typesetter. The List novel, for him, was his personal revenge against Augusto Pinochet and also the Brezhnev regime of the USSR. That sounds like quite a lot to ask from a historical novel cranked out by three guys at a small publisher, doesn’t it? Ah, but Paulo identified with old Friedrich. As we worked on this book Paulo squinted, and set his teeth, and for four straight weeks looked at it as a fight with the two of them on one side and Pinochet, Brezhnev, and the economics department of the University of Chicago on the other.

You know, my parents fled to that country; they fled to Chile, Paulo had told me. "And that coup was how Chile repaid them. They brought money there, they brought skills. Their departure from Brazil left that nation a worse place, and their arrival to Chile made it a better place. And this was how those jodido bastards repaid them." He shook his head and leaned his shoulder into his press.

He did not actually lean into his press; that is only how I remember him. When I think of Paulo d’Avignon Bruschet, I think of him in an ink-blotched white T-shirt, sleeves rolled up, leaning into the turn of a giant screw on a Gutenberg press. I picture him unshaven, with unkempt hair; the kind of unkempt hair which, on a foreigner―a fiery foreigner, just like Friedrich List was fiery―looked hot to women.

(You worry about your own hair; about losing it, or, if you’re lucky, about how to get it cut; and then some preoccupied South American intellectual like Paulo comes along with hair looking like ten inches of steel wool in a hurricane, and women think he’s irresistible.)

Anyway he did have the unkempt hair, and was never clean-shaven, and wore mostly white T-shirts―that much is true―but he did not work at a Gutenberg screw press. I always picture him at one, though, when I think of him.

His parents (who were both of French extraction, obviously) had fled Brazil in the 1960s when a military dictatorship there had taken over, I learned. They headed west to Chile; not a good choice, it turned out, of course.

My parents were prepared to spend their lives in Chile, he said, flipping his hair out of his eyes. "They even spoke to us, my brother and I, in Spanish, as well as Portuguese. Starting all over again with their lives, and never a word of complaint about it. And these hijos de puta, Pinochet and his advisers, his henchmen, with their caps pulled down and their sunglasses on, with their Chicago cronies, they foul the country. And they kick my parents out.

"And why? You may ask this, Timoteo. Let me tell you why. Because of the jefe hijo de puta Adam Smith. Adam Smith and the Chicago leeches who followed him. And killed List. The people who put a bullet in List’s head; the ones who erased him from history."

(It was hard to argue with Paulo when he insisted that unrelated people who lived before a man, and decades after that same man―a man who had in fact committed suicide―had killed him.)

"And no one knows about List. Your countrymen, they do not know. Now, would they care about it, you ask? Would they care about what was done to Friedrich List? Well, we have no idea if they would care, for the time being. Because they cannot care if they do not know.

Now they will know, he said, nodding. He leaned forward to crank the fat oak handles that pushed down the broadsheet onto the bank of type beneath. Now they will know.

I met Paulo early on in my time at White Cedar, although he did not work in the New York office with me. I then communicated frequently with him by phone and email for some years. Eventually I was lucky enough to spend time at his branch and work with him personally.

In addition to his printing skills, Paulo was a certified diving instructor. Also, from 1998 through 2001 he had been the equipment manager for the Miami Fusion of Major League Soccer, a position he had obtained in large part because he spoke Portuguese and the franchise had a head coach and a few players from Brazil.

Paulo was a good example of the sorts of people I had worked with at White Cedar Press, in the beginning.

Now, by way of contrast, let me show you another letter we received, fairly recently:

Tim Craire

Acquisitions Editor

White Cedar Press

New York

Dear Mr. Craire,

At the time of 200 C.E. in Mesoamerica, a Mayan named Zucul lives a fairly solitary existence. He is somewhat of an intellectual and tends to be too skeptical of his people's religious practices to fit in. Living on the outskirts of his city does give him one advantage: He has two space alien friends, Naquin and Kelago, that secretly visit him upon occasion. This novella outlines what happens during one particular visit.

I am sure White Cedar Press will be intrigued by this novella because I have been so inspired for years by the work of your author Beverly Quan Gianelli; her book Infant Larceny taught me the possibilities of speculative horror writing.

[And so on, sincerely, etc.]

Chapter Two: Tio Will

The preceding has been the first chapter. Tio Will deserves his own chapter, so here it is. This was all supposed to be one introduction. My intended structure for this tale has gotten away from me already.

Will Keller gave me the opportunity to work at White Cedar. He was the founder and sole owner of the publishing house.

What sort of person do you picture as the owner of a publishing house in New York? I had an image in mind before I met him. Some thin guy dressed in black, right? With late-model glasses and manicured gray hair?

Will was thin, sure enough, and had gray hair, but I hadn’t anticipated someone who wore jeans cut-offs and hiking boots whenever it was over sixty degrees. He also usually wore a baseball cap, and, when it rained, a battered raincoat that looked like it had kept him dry through multiple tropical storms.

Everyone called him Tio Will—Uncle Will—because he had lived some years in Mexico and spoke Spanish well.

My Spanish is horrible, he told me once. "I break