books devoured

The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, introduction and notes by Leonard S. Marcus (Knopf, 2011)

People have published useless annotated editions before, but The Phantom Tollbooth? What could you annotate? Explain silly puns like the Whether Man?

Well, it doesn't explain the Whether Man. But it does explain a lot of other jokes, usually in the guise of giving historical notes on who first wrote "short shrift" (Shakespeare, natch) and the like. This is better than the flat vocabulary lessons; in reference to "the land of Null" it tells you what null means. Oh boy.

Lots of annotations of what Juster had in mind in the text. Lots of annotations of, not what Feiffer had in mind in the illustrations, but what the annotator is reminded of by looking at them, usually irrelevantly. Oh boy.

I found out about this book by seeing it in a remainder catalog. I decided not to buy it, but to get it from a library instead. At least the introduction, on how the book came to be, is interesting.

Avid Reader: A Life, by Robert Gottlieb (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2016)

The famous book editor (Simon & Schuster, Knopf) and sometime New Yorker magazine editor tells his story. Once you get past the opening chapters describing his vacuum cleaner-like childhood reading, which is actually the most interesting part, it settles down into anecdotes about the books he's edited, framed by descriptions of how he fell into, rather than acquired, his various jobs, salted with bits about his personal and social life, the latter conducted with people he usually describes as his "great friend." Appendix chapters deal with other bits of his life, such as his part-time career programming the New York City Ballet (say what?).

The accounts of editing books come in detachable nuggets, so it was easy to skim the ones about books I haven't read and concentrate on the ones about books I have, which turned out to be a bloody lot of them. I did not learn from this book that Catch-22 was originally Catch-18; I already knew that. But I did learn:

1) While Gottlieb did not edit William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he says he did persuade S&S to dump Shirer's unfortunate title, Hitler's Nightmare Empire. (Shirer's memoirs say nothing about his ever intending to call the book anything except what it was published as.)

2) Having established that Michael Crichton had neither interest in nor ability to write characters, Gottlieb convinced him to turn The Andromeda Strain from a novel into what's described here as "a fictionalized documentary."

3) Gottlieb was a big fan of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, took her on, and suggested the House of Niccolo series, but his first book of hers was King Hereafter, the only Dunnett I've read and the reason I've never read any more.

4) Gottlieb persuaded Bill Clinton to call his memoir My Life instead of The President's Life by having both dust jackets printed up, slipping them on dummy volumes, and showing them to Clinton while saying, "Which of these books would you want to read?"