I have always been interested in the remainder market, for it often gives insight into what works and what doesn't, is exciting (and nowadays, bestsellers apart, sometimes seem to be the only active part of the book trade). Way back when in Arms & Armour Press days, we were able to join the print runs of some books that were being reprinted in the United States for the promotional book market (which is a euphemism for especially manufactured remainders), and bought substantial quantities for sale in Britain and around the world. The leader of the market in those days was Larry Alexander of A. & W. Visual Books, and he licensed Small Arms of the World by W. H. B. Smith from Stackpole Books and we purchased from him, I recall, some 10,000 copies. Those were the days. A larger than life character was Arnie Hausner of Book Sales (who died in 1995). He was a fast talking, white-suited individual with a reputation for high living. For example, he and the Book Sales team used to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair on Concorde, and in the hotel bar he would buy champagne, sometimes thousands of dollars of worth, for anyone there. I bought several books from him (such as The Book of Rifles also by W. H. B. Smith) and used to meet with him to discuss the books that I was taking, but he always wanted military books from me. I never licensed books for American reprinting through him, preferring to sell them at full price through my distributor. The remainder field is immensely competitive, and often remainders are readily available through several firms at the same time. There is no such thing as exclusivity. But in one of our conversations an idea occurred to me. "Arnie", I said, "Why not originate books, and therefore you have them exclusively." He was interested of course, but had no editorial department or knowledge. I said I could do that side of things, and, "Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain in the United States, with the wonderful evocative illustrations. Why not publish it?". Thus, in the mid-70s, began my career as an editor, using a pseudonym. To get the original Sherlock Holmes stories I had to buy a run of The Strand, the London monthly magazine. It was excruciating, but I had to tear the pages out to provide camera-ready copy. Therefore I managed to buy second, if not third, rate copies where bindings were falling apart but the pages were clean. I provided bibliographic citations, and the book was published by Book Sales. It was an immediate and immense success. The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (with all 356 illustrations by Sidney Paget that are taken as the standard image of Sherlock Holmes) was published in about 1976. And I got royalties on every copy sold. He soon came back to me and said "how about a second volume of Sherlock Holmes stories." Alas, I had to advise that after Sherlock Holmes fell over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland there was a long gap before resurrection, so to speak, and those final stories were at that time still protected by copyright. "We must do more Sherlock Holmes!", he demanded. So I came up with the idea of a volume that could be called The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. At that time the title was used for an anthology that was published in Britain, but it seemed to us to be the best possible title, and it had the name Sherlock Holmes in it, and hopefully the twain would never meet for his editions would stay in the American market. Thus I set to gathering the turn-of-the-century monthly magazines, and in addition to The Strand obtained runs of magazines such as The Windsor, Cassells, Royal, Pearsons, The Idler, and Pall Mall. I reckoned that I must have read something like a million, even more, pages. There was alas an enormous amount of dross, but in fact there was a small amount of excellent fiction that had stood the test of time in my opinion. I wrote introductions, using my pseudonym Alan K. Russell, and provided biographical details of authors (which spun off from essential research into the copyright), and notes on the sources. The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes sold well and a year later the companion book The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes 2 appeared. The two books contained nearly 90 authors, and 1,000 pages. Amongst the authors were Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, Arthur Morrison, Baroness Orczy, Richard Harding Davis, Jacques Futrelle, Brett Harte, E. W. Hornung, William Le Queux and Arnold Bennett, etc. These projects required enormous research, especially because it was necessary to work with authors, or their published work, who were in the Public Domain in the United States. American copyright law was then different from British copyright law (and it still is, again differently) and many of the authors were at that time in copyright in Great Britain but out of copyright in the United States. We had to tread a careful course, and follow American copyright law. Shortly after the books were completed I was in California for the ABA, and coming back through Los Angeles airport I saw someone reading one of ‘my’ books. I could not contain myself and went over to him and, to a somewhat surprised passenger, introduced myself as the editor, commented on the books and then went back to where I was seated. About ten minutes later the gentleman came over to me and asked for my (pseudonymous) autograph! Book Sales wanted an author blurb but as Alan K. Russell was a pseudonym, and I did not feel it appropriate to ‘come out’, I wrote for the back flap of the books the following anodyne piece: “Dear Publisher”, wrote Mr. Russell in response to our request for autobiographical information, “you ask for autobiographical details. May I decline, with thanks. As an editor and presenter of the work of others, I prefer for their work to speak on its own merits. “For The Complete Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, and The Collector's Book of Science Fiction by H. G. Wells, I have had the pleasure of many, many hours of reading and research from my library of Victorian and Edwardian magazine volumes, reliving the pleasure and thrills which their original readers would have enjoyed in years gone by. In helping to introduce today's audience to the original presentations I hope that they will similarly relive such pleasure and thrills . . . Let the selected authors (some of whom I do not think will have had their work read – and being read live again – other than by a handful of people for seven decades) tell their tale and receive the credit. I hope that some may be rescued from undeserved obscurity, and others be seen in a new light in these presentations of their work as it originally appeared.” As referred to above, the next ‘big author’ whose work was anthologised from the original magazines was H. G. Wells and I created The Collector's Book of Science Fiction by H. G. Wells (and if you've seen the book, I can't claim credit for the jacket, which is rather hideous). This had The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, When the Sleeper Wakes and many of Wells’ short stories such as The Country of the Blind, The Man Who could Work Miracles etc. This was followed by the now inevitable companion Science Fiction by the Rivals of H. G. Wells with 30 stories and a complete novel. With that volume I had exhausted the opportunity for further anthologies from the turn of the century magazines which would have in the title either a famous novelist, or be tied in some way to a famous novelist. I had by that time used up the resource. A considerable amount of research had been involved and in fact I had gathered together a collection of bibliographies and reference works, and was indebted to the most famous bibliographer of all, Everett Bleiler, for information. Therefore I ‘came out’ to him, and declared who lay behind the pseudonymous Alan K. Russell. In the books I had gradually expanded the anodyne back flap autobiography, and for example threw in a footnote from my days at Herbert Jenkins, quite truthfully, about the jacket design from Sax Rohmer's last novel, Emperor Fu Manchu, which had been reproduced in Otto Penzler’s Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection. I wrote: “Whenever I see this illustration my memory recalls that I had commissioned it when an editor with Herbert Jenkins, the London publishing company. Rohmer had telephoned me while on one of his rare visits to London, and paid me and the artist a great compliment by saying that he thought it the best-ever representation of Fu Manchu – but maybe he was being kind to a very young editor. He died a few weeks later, aged 76, on 1 June 1959." Arnie Hausner wanted still more by big name authors and so I did some lateral thinking and decided we would typeset stories to match the magazines, as though they had originally appeared, and illustrate them from the Victorian editions. We undertook two volumes of the stories of Jules Verne, which were collected together to make Jules Verne: Complete Novels which had five full novels such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Round the Moon, Around the World in Eighty days, etc. We ran into a little problem with the Jules Verne books. Upon reading these 19th century novels I discovered that in some of them he had three adventurers, a hero, his companion, and a bag man. The man who carries his bags was usually, most unfortunately, a ‘snivelling nigger’. He invariably used this bag man as the butt of his humour, and of course that wasn’t acceptable nowadays. But could I edit a classic author? I didn't think for long, for these were not books being prepared for an academic market, which were annotated and explained contemporary references and so forth, but for a wide, mass market today. And Jules Verne was, if nothing else, a popular author writing for the mass market. I was sure that if he had appreciated the offence that he would cause in later years he would have found a different term, such as from America and therefore so did I. As an aside, there was another case when I altered the ‘truth’. It occurred in a book set in World War II, where one of the characters was unfortunately suffering from diarrhoea. So his companions called him, I regret to say, ‘Shitty’. The trouble was that this person was still alive, still in contact with his wartime colleagues, but had gone on to have a distinguished legal career. He wasn’t known as ‘Shitty’ by any other group of people, only those he had served alongside for a short period whilst in action (so to speak) against the Germans. He got on to me before the publication of the book and explained the problem. I didn't hesitate to alter the author's text. We also undertook for Book Sales a number of reformatted, large children’s books, which required research into the work of Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, Randolf Caldicott, etc. On all these books I shared in their success and received royalties, while they were in print. One of the Book Sales team is Frank Oppel, a fine bookman with a good knowledge of sources, and I worked with him and he took over the compilation and choice of books to publish, very successfully, to this day. When I sold my Arms & Amour Press in 1984 to Link House Books, they had a remainder and promotional book section called New Orchard Books, and I undertook for them a number of books such as The Forsyte Saga, two volumes of the historical novels of Arthur Conan Doyle (such as The White Company, Sir Nigel, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard etc.), The Adventures of Charlie Chan, and collections of crime and horror stories called The Book of the Dead and The Book of the Sleuth. But although always interesting and profitable, such editorial advice and preparation did not add to the asset value of my Arms & Armour Press or Greenhill Books, and I let it all slide whilst building my publishing. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 128 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com