From the Archives "As one who has been around FSG for a very long time, I often find treasures of our past. Among the memorabilia are brass stamping dies which I use as paperweights and an old loose leaf notebook marked 'office memos' covering about 10 years from the mid '50s through the mid '60s. I hadn't gone to that notebook in quite some time but had occasion to recently. As I was leafing through -- noting the memo that granted staffers 1/2 day for Christmas shopping -- a crumpled set of papers fell out from between some pages. I flattened this now-accordion-shaped document to find these editorial meeting notes from 1974. Reading them, I was reminded of that time long before email and technology when there was typing, copying, and interoffice mail delivery bringing the house’s news to the staff."
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by Dan Piepenbring Three years ago, I was browsing a used bookstore in West Saugerties, NY when I came across an anomaly from FSG’s past. It was published in 1974. It was titled, simply, The Best. And it comprised . . . a list of things that are the best. You know, like the Best Electronic Pocket Calculator. The Best Pepperidge Farm Cookie. The Best Illustration of the “Convergence Theory” That Communist and Capitalist Societies Will Come Increasingly to Resemble One Another. If you’re confused, so was I. Actually, perusing the pages of The Best never fails to leave me a little flummoxed. Compiled with affection and not inconsiderable wit by Mssrs. Peter Passell and Leonard Ross, The Best is a strange and wonderful slumgullion of the helpful, the frivolous, and the unabashedly topical. The Library of Congress files it under “Consumer education” and “Curiosities,” neither of which quite works. It’s a book that seems almost stridently out of place in 2012, and for this reason, among others, it has a cherished space on my shelf.
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FSG has published Isaac Bashevis Singer's works for over fifty years, including The Magician of Lublin, Gimpel the Fool, and his Collected Stories. As you can imagine, there's a wealth of interesting material from his archives. Here's just a brief selection. You'll notice our print advertising is nothing if not consistent: the notice for In My Father's Court isn't terribly different from its modern-day counterparts.
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Though Train Dreams has only recently been issued in hardcover, many readers first read it in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review. And what an issue: Johnson's novella shared space with new work by Aleksandar Hemon and Rick Moody. To mark the occasion, The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center has generously shared some of Johnson’s notes and drafts from his archive, which is currently being processed. Many know the Ransom Center from their acquisition of David Foster Wallace's papers. (Or rather, that's how I first heard of it.) I visited this past March while in town for SXSW, and only upon entering their gleaming new facility did I realize they've amassed a world-class collection of writers' papers, including Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and, most recently, J.M. Coetzee. You can lose days in their collections. Here you'll find fragments of various Train Dreams drafts and notes, as well as revisions of Johnson's essay "Why I Write."