Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library [NAL] Revisited: (17)

 Two other New American Library [NAL] employees I vaguely remember, after so many years, were an elderly couple, seeming to be in their late 50s or early 60s, who--almost in their own outer office world across the aisle from me, worked in another one of the offices with (like the NAL publicity director's office) a skyscraper window , out of which one could see the street below.  The white elderly husband and his white elderly wife had apparently previously made some kind of a deal, with either NAL or with the Times-Mirror media conglomerate, to sell their previously independent Daw paperback-publishing firm to either NAL or Times-Mirror.

So now, their Daw paperback firm, that published science fiction and fantasy paperback books--which apparently had never been able to sell as many copies as the books that Stephen King wrote in the decades after 1970 did--was now just a subsidiary of a mass media conglomerate, in an office surrounded by NAL executives who seemed to rarely interact with them.

I can't recall having exchanged any words with the culturally straight, elderly couple. But during my time as a NAL wage slave, my impressions is that the beardless husband, who wore glasses and always came to work dressed in a suit and tie, and the conventionally-looking wife, who always came to work wearing a dress, were used to working together alone and ignoring everybody else at the office. So they barely noticed or cared that no one at NAL seemed interested in socializing or conversing with them; despite Daw being now distributed and marketed by NAL. 

I had been into reading science fiction paperbacks and watching TV shows like Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But by the time I was publicity clerkin' at NAL in the mid-1970s my reading interests had changed so much that, when I did read fiction, I mainly read fiction that reflected a socialist realism, feminist, African-American, Beat Generation or working-class aesthetic. So I don't recall which science fiction novels were published by NAL with the Daw imprint or whether its science fiction paperbacks were generally considered to be of higher literary quality than what other science fiction paperback publishers were publishing in the 1970s.

What I do recall, though, is that--after I opened for the NAL publicity director some envelopes (which each contained a photocopied clipping of the latest print media reviews of NAL-published/marketed books) and noticed that one of the mailed-in print media reviews included a mean-spirited and personal attack on her husband's qualification to hold his position as NAL's Daw imprint editor/publisher, which I first showed to the Daw woman co-editor/publisher (before letting the NAL publicity director see it), she read it and then quickly tore up the hostile photocopied clipping.

The only other New American Library Library [NAL] worker I still have some memory of so many years later, mainly because I did have a conversation with him alone inside the office in which he worked, was a usually casually-dressed white visual artist in his late 20s, whose job was to create and draw the different illustrated covers that were printed on each of the NAL paperback books.

The NAL visual artist didn't have to work 9-to-5 while dressed in a suit and tie when he came to his skyscraper office "studio"/ private office each day.  And he could pretty much spend the day creating and drawing the illustrations used on the book covers, without having to interact personally with any of the business-oriented NAL executives and higher-up corporate-types.

But my impression, after chatting with him alone in his private office at some length, where I had been told to go to in order to pick up some rush book cover illustrations he had been assigned to complete, was that this NAL paperback book cover illustrator would have preferred to be at home during the day or in a studio, working on his own paintings, rather than being in the skyscraper each day doing what he likely considered to be "hack work." 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: Conclusion

In 1970 the "titles of current interest" of books whose paperback editions the New American Library [NAL] firm was then interested...