Showing posts with label Taplinger Publishing Co.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taplinger Publishing Co.. Show all posts
Friday, October 18, 2019
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Monday, August 15, 2016
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Friday, July 22, 2016
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Monday, June 13, 2016
Thursday, May 26, 2016
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Thursday, May 16, 2013
Louis Strick, RIP
We loved hearing his stories about Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Ashbery, and other writers he knew. As his colleague from Meridian Books, the legendary editor Aaron Asher, once said, "Louis Strick was a guy who loved books and publishing and fiction" (Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America 296).
Our mom was a calligrapher, as were some of our friends, and Louis Strick more than almost anyone was responsible for the flowering of calligraphy in mid-century America. (See this 1974 New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece called "Everyman's Art.") He had an incredible career and a rich life.
Here is the obituary from Westport Now:
Louis Strick, a 32-year Westport resident, died May 12 at the Jewish Home for the Elderly in Fairfield following a brief illness. He was 87.We will miss him a great deal and offer our deep sympathies to his family, especially to our friends Wesley, who was the editor of our first book, and to Ivy, who designed the book's beautiful cover.
Strick was raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Rosalind and Charles Strick. Growing up near Ebbets Field, he was an ardent fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1940, he became a member of the first class of Midwood High School.
Strick went on to attend Cornell University. His college education was interrupted by World War II, and at age 19 he served as a staff sergeant in occupied Italy. After the war, Strick completed his undergraduate studies and went on to Columbia Universirty to pursue a Master’s in economics.
He then wrote a weekly column on the stock market for the Journal of Commerce. Next he worked as a financial analyst for the investor Fred Stafford. In the late 1950s, he purchased H.M. Storms, a manufacturer of ink ribbons; their primary customer would become the National Cash Register Co.
During this period, Strick bought a radio station in St. Louis. WAMV was the first American station to play the hit song “Volare.” In the early 1960s, Strick co-founded a pioneering quality paperback line, Meridian, publishing Philip Roth among others. After selling H.M. Storms, he acquired Artone Ink, whose distinctive bottle featured the letter “a” in the form of an ink drip, an idea of Strick’s that was designed by Push Pin Studios and gave rise to a popular typeface.
In the late 1960’s Strick began importing calligraphic art supplies, distributed through his Pentalic Company. By making special nibs, pens and instruction books widely available, Strick spearheaded a revival of the calligraphic movement in America;. He also established the Calligraphy Workshop, a school on lower Fifth Avenue.
In the late 1970’s, Strick purchased the Taplinger Publishing Company, bringing out works of literary fiction as well as volumes on modern art, reflecting two of his passions.
Strick himself was an artist who focused on collage; several of his pieces were exhibited in juried shows in Westport where he lived with Elizabeth for 32 years.
He is survived by his wife of 41 years, Elizabeth, his three children, Ivy, Wesley and Charlotte, a stepson, Simon, seven grandchildren, and two younger brothers, Walter and Stanley.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Cover of New E-book of Richard Grayson's 1979 Short Story Collection WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK
This is the cover for the forthcoming e-book of our first hardcover short story collection, WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, originally published by Taplinger in 1979.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Kirkus Discoveries reviews Richard Grayson's AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN
Today, August 26, 2009, Kirkus Discoveries reviewed Richard Grayson's Autumn in Brooklyn: September-November 1978:
AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN
Author: Grayson, Richard
Review Date: AUGUST 26, 2009
Publisher: Superstition Mountain
(261 pp.)
Price (paperback): $15.00
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-578-03208-5
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: NONFICTION
Three months’ worth of diary entries from a pivotal period in the author’s life and career.
Grayson (The Silicon Valley Diet and Other Stories, 2000, etc.), began keeping a daily dairy in 1969. It’s not entirely clear why he’s decided to publish the entries from this specific time period now, but his first semester teaching at Kingsborough Community College provides something of a narrative arc, and a number of dramatic events occur within these three months—his father’s surgery to remove a facial tumor, the editing of his first collection of short stories and the Jonestown massacre and assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk in San Francisco. Being dropped into the middle of someone’s life is a disorienting experience, and there’s not enough context for many of the names Grayson drops, but a handful take shape as real people: Ronna, the aspiring journalist who wants to keep sleeping with Grayson in spite of his preference for guys; Grandma Ethel, made miserable by the diet designed to keep her cancer in remission; and Rosa, the troubled student who frightens Grayson by lying to his face and then declaring her love for him. But the book is perhaps most intriguing as a portrait of a young man trying to make it as an artist in the 1970s. Almost every day brings acceptances or rejections from magazines with fabulous titles like Nit & Wit, The Smudge and Dirty Linen. Meanwhile, the author name-checks fringe luminaries such as Jonathan Baumbach, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer and Michael Lally. Elsewhere, Grayson worries his friends will think he’s a sellout for signing with the now-hard-to-remember Taplinger Publishing Company. As a writer, the author is known for his stylistic playfulness and irreverent humor, but these diary entries are straightforward and bracingly honest—the young man depicted here is kind, jealous, prickly, ambitious and frightened. Aspiring writers may feel a little less alone after reading this daily catalog of soaring ambitions and crushing doubts.
Those familiar with Grayson’s life and work will appreciate the inside look into these formative months.
Autumn in Brooklyn is available for free reading at Google Books and Scribd.
Sunday, April 4, 1982
Miami Herald publishes feature story on Richard Grayson
Today's Miami Herald has an article about Richard Grayson, "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog's Author," on the front page of its Living Today section:
The Miami Herald
Sunday, April 4, 1982
Living Today
Section G, Page 1
Lincoln's Doctor's Dog's Author
'Giving It All Up for Computers, and Other Stories'
By MIKE WINERIP
Herald Staff Writer
Thirty-year-old Richard Grayson was sitting in his furnished Davie apartment, six months into his eight-month lease, rereading the New York Times Book Review from March 14:
"Richard Grayson's first book carried the title, With Hitler in New York. Some reviewers liked the book, at least one detested it, and readers ignored it in droves. It sold only about 500 copies, according to the author, who teaches English at Broward Community College in Davie, Fla.
"When it came time to compile a new book…he decided to appeal to a broader constituency. Having heard that books about Abraham Lincoln, doctors and dogs usually sell well, Mr. Grayson is calling his new hardcover book…Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, and Other Stories."
Except for an extra sentence or two and a couple of adjectives, that was the whole thing in a nutshell.
A friend who is into Eastern culture called Grayson and congratulated him. A lady from Queens with a handicapped kid wrote asking for Grayson's autograph if he wasn't too busy.
He wasn't, though he is considering taking up computer programming this summer at the community college.
*
Richard Grayson, who has published 150 short stories in dozens of obscure literary magazines, recently was teaching a Compare and Contrast lesson to his beginning English class at Broward Community College. Something about the American Revolution versus the Russian Revolution. Only one student knew what a Bolshevik was.
Grayson was making the point that a good Compare and Contrast didn't have to be one paragraph about Russia followed by one on America (although that was one way to do it). You could have both revolutions in the same paragraph. It wasn't clear if anyone was getting this concept.
There is no other way to put it: Broward Community College does not feel like the kind of place anyone one would be doing serious writing. It feels like a place where future pharmacists, computer programmers and dental technicians will learn to write sentences without comma splices if they pay close attention. It feels very clean and scrubbed, very healthy and wholesome. Lots of tanned young people wearing very little clothing hurry up and down geometrically pleasing stairwells. You could cast Brave New World here. Almost no one looks fat or excessive or impolitic. It's the kind of place that might make one of Richard Grayson's elderly characters say: "So many sensational young people and nice teeth, too."
Graffiti from radio
The graffiti covering desks in Grayson's classroom are not literary. They're mostly from the radio. A sample desk in Grayson's class says: "Styx…Trash…For Sure…Lou Reed…Rock and Roll Forever."
More than once Grayson has thought that were Melville or Hardy around today he might go electronic.
"I know most of you, when you get the urge to read, lie down until it passes," he says, though not in a mean way. The tone is of a man being left behind.
Still, Grayson remains faithful to the course curriculum. He talks about comma splices.
"I once had a student who said, 'Don't you put a comma every fourth word?' We're going to have a very animated discussion on commas Monday…We'll have a real good discussion on the dash. The dash is wonderful. When all else fails – use the dash."
*
Richard Grayson, whose favorite food is the hamburger, likes life in Davie. He is making the most money ever in his life, $14,000 from the community college, plus a $3,000 grant from the Florida Fine Arts Council. And there are perks: Teaching at the college entitles him to take computer programming at a reduced tuition rate.
This is his ninth college teaching job. To make ends meet he has worked at places like New York City Technical College, where, his resume says, he was a substitute adjunct lecturer.
He does not consider any of this noble.
His fiction has never paid much. Taplinger Co. gave him a $500 advance for the first short story collection, With Hitler in New York. The book didn't sell enough copies to cover the advance. Nor does he expect to make anything on Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, scheduled for release in May. There was no advance for that one.
Most literary magazines that publish his stories count circulation in the hundreds, not thousands: Apalachee Quarterly, City, Writ, Shenandoah, Texas Quarterly. The big ones pay $50. The small pay nothing. Welter, the University of Baltimore's literary review, just accepted one of his stories. His compensation will be two free copies.
The story is about a painter who becomes a computer programmer.
*
Richard Grayson started writing regularly at 18. He had just spent a year in his room, scared to come out. Grayson didn't know it then, but he was suffering from agoraphobia, a fear of mixing with crowds. It was a nervous breakdown of some sort. When he reappeared in the spring of 1969, everything seemed fresh. It was a classic case of being rehatched.
"I wasn't the best in my creative-writing class. I was maybe in the middle of eight. But I kept at it. I'd keep sending my stuff out when it was rejected. I sent out the same story over and over. Others gave up."
*
The absurd is on Richard Grayson's mind.
He takes major historical figures and drops them into mundane American settings like his native Brooklyn. There's absolutely nothing funny about Hitler, right? Grayson's Hitler flies into Kennedy on a Laker flight, smokes a joint on the Belt Parkway, eats Szechuan in Brooklyn Heights.
Constipation is sad and private, right? Richard Grayson wrote this about one of his characters:
"When he was very young, he was constipated. Sometimes he did not go to the bathroom for weeks. His grandmother would cry that the boy's appendix might be on fire…In the summer, people would come into his grandmother's bungalow to watch him straining at the stool. The bathroom door would be open wide and sometimes people would bring their guests for a weekend barbecue….
"When there was a bowel movement his grandmother would make a party. It was more for the adults than him."
*
His stuff is autobiographical. At times he doesn't bother to disguise it. In the middle of a short story about a lawyer he interrupts the narrative: "The 'I' of this story is really me, Richard Grayson, and not some literary device….Please, you can see I'm a sick person. What would it take, a few pages in your lousy literary magazine, to make me happy?....If I can't have your respect I'll settle for your pity."
"Pitiful," wrote Kirkus Reviews.
"I used to get rejections saying, 'Grow up.' Truly cruel ones. The kind that level with you: 'You have no talent. Give up.' They discourage you for a couple of days."
The Los Angeles Times thought he was funny; Newsday said he had a wild sense of humor, yet some telephone company official stringing reviews for the Minneapolis Tribune almost had a nervous breakdown:
"This is the worst book I ever read in my life," he wrote, "a cornucopia of crap."
The telephone review man said he planned to give Grayson's book to someone he despised.
*
In his spare time Grayson cooks up minor media events. It amuses him and brings a little of the recognition you don't get when you're trying to do something enduring in Davie. He started a campaign to run Burt Reynolds for U.S. Senate.
Burt refused.
Grayson ran for Davie Town Council as a lark last month, saying horses should be given the vote and the council should be abolished because it didn't do much. This offended local newspaper editorial writers, who have a genuine concern about the quality of leadership on the Davie Town Council.
Grayson lost.
When his grandmother, Sylvia Ginsberg, was lonely and depressed last year, he sent out press notices saying she was a superstar and that he was starting the Sylvia Ginsberg Magazine and fan club.
She died.
*
Grayson expects ts to be famous.
"I have a feeling I'll be discovered in my 70s. I can't really say why. I just feel that's the way it is. It's fate.
"I've done things a lot of people tried to do and couldn't. I've had books published by a commercial publisher. I'm young, too. Maybe I'll go on for 10 years without having a successful book, and all of a sudden I'll have one.
Wilder slept there
Two years ago Grayson was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. A small group of promising writers, composers, painters and sculptors spends the summer at a wooded retreat. You work in your cabin all day and gather for discussions in the evenings.
"You're treated so well," Grayson remembers. "Like you're important. I wasn't used to being treated well."
He lived in the same cabin where Thornton Wilder once worked. At the desk where Grayson sat, Wilder wrote Our Town.
Each year, when the summer's over, the fellows write their names on the wall of the cabin where they stayed.
As he added his to the long list, Richard Grayson scanned the other names. A few were familiar.
*
"Of course sometimes it hurts me that I have friends who make $70,000 doing what I might call trivial things.
"My best friend Linda I've known since first grade. She's the editor of a magazine. She owns two houses in Washington, D.C., as investments. She's written a book. But I have things she doesn't have. Her book's about roller skating. She's doing a story about travel in Costa Rica. The magazine she runs is for weight watchers. I don't think she has the same feeling toward her material that I do. I have the freedom to write what I want."
A couple of years ago Richard Grayson was depressed about not being known. Then a Mount Holyoke professor sent him an English 234 paper. It was a detailed analysis of "Summoning Alice Keppel." A short story. By Richard Grayson. That kept him going a couple of extra days.
And there is more:
"Linda has a friend who taught high school in Wisconsin. He was going around the class, asking everyone their favorite writer.
"And one kid said, 'You've probably never heard of him, but Richard Grayson.'"
Thursday, November 1, 1979
New review of Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK
A zine (no publisher known, no date) has published a new review of Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York:
WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK by richard grayson. $7.95 from taplinger, 200 park ave south, ny 10003.
i first read grayson in writ (8), a story about joe colletti i believe. well, joe colletti has become one of my folk heroes, so i guess you're gonna know i'm gonna recommend this book for some good time reading. my only complaint is that i feel it coulda been more cohesive. its a collection of short stories - sure, but there's so many characters we meet. uncles, aunts, sisters, joe colletti. woulda made a hilarious novel. its okay for me as it is, but collections of short stories are hard to sell. unless you write science fiction.
good science fiction. so just pretend this is a good science fiction collection & i'm sure you'll never forget joe colletti. that's the sign of a good character, one you can't forget, & its addictive. i sat down during one of my lax periods & wrote a joe colletti story. every writer should have at least one joe colletti story to share with his friends. & they should also have a copy of the original which can be found in this great book by richard grayson. three cheers & a beer, only $7.95.
Monday, September 17, 1979
Publishers Weekly covers Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK's innovative review copies policy
In its September 17, 1979 issue, Publishers Weekly featured a news item covering the innovative review copies policy for Richard Grayson's book With Hitler in New York:
NOTICE SENT TO PW'S STRAIGHT-FACED EDITOR:
The Taplinger Publishing Company has announced that it will pursue an innovative policy in regard to review copies of "With Hitler in New York," the book of short stories by Richard Grayson ("Grayson pokes fun at American life . . ." PW, April 23). Review copies will bypass critics and be sent directly to the Strand Book Store in New York City.
"This efficient system," observed the author, who originated the plan, "will save postage and bothersome packaging for literary critics."
Reviewers may now contact Taplinger and request that copies of "With Hitler in New York" be sent directly to the Strand rather than to their homes or offices. The book will be credited to each reviewer's account by the bookstore.
Friday, April 6, 1979
Taplinger Publishing Company's Spring 1979 Catalog features Richard Grayson's "With Hitler in New York"
Thirty astonishing stories by an exciting new writer –
Hitler and Mike get stoned and go for eggcreams in Brighton Beach. Buddy’s grandfather secretly knows that Farrah Fawcett-Majors has a foreign accent. A famous weight-lifter realizes that he’s got to live inside the body he’s built for himself. A teenage fan magazine tells ‘How to Make Chief Justice Burger Love You.’ A woman dutifully lies under the bed while her son has sex with Sarah Lawrence of Arabia. Cambodian insurgents auction off centaurs, gorgons, satyrs and griffins. A short story on a low-cholesterol diet gets arrested for solicitation. . . Welcome to the world of Richard Grayson, a gifted young writer whose short fiction, published in dozens of literary magazines, has been startling lucky readers for years. With Hitler in New York is a collection of Grayson’s finest, freshest, funniest work – thirty original visions of the way we live now.
160 pp. 5¼x8 $7.95 8406-X May Fiction
- Taplinger Publishing Company Spring 1979 Catalogue, page 14
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