.....
Hardy: I don't know whether you need that commitment. I haven't just re-read your letter this moment - my secretary rang you rather faster than I thought, I was going to re-read your letter - but I don't know if you feel that you need that kind of commitment in order to have the psychological motivation to turn to it again?
Malcolm: Well I feel I need some commitment, yes. It's partly from experience of having... I mean I originally went through putting the whole thing into the form of a dialogue on the advice of a publisher that they would be interested when it was done.
Hardy: How frightful! You mean you first of all wrote it as a straight text?
Malcolm: It was originally ninety percent straightforward philosophical essays, and there were some dialogue parts that they caught up on and really liked, and they said redo it, and I spent five years redoing it, and I mean in the process a lot of other things have added to it, but I went back to the original publisher and of course the bloke I was dealing with wasn't there, da-de-da-de-da, and they just... The first mention that it was a dialogue, the woman philosophy editor said "Oh no, no, we couldn't handle it, dialogue is completely out of fashion", so I mean... line 40
Hardy: Who was the publisher?
Malcolm: That was Penguins.
Hardy: And who was the editor who left?
Malcolm: It was a bloke by the name of Mike Dover
Hardy: Do you know where he went to?
Malcolm: Yes, he's now in children's books or something.
Hardy: He hasn't gone to a similar slot with another publisher?
Malcolm: No. It was the same in fact... This was years ago, I had two really quite firm, as I thought, bits of interest from two different publishers. There was Allen & Unwin as well, and the bloke had moved from there too, and I was right back at square one again.
Hardy: Yes. Do you... The translation into dialogue, was that something you undertook reluctantly or something you ended up believing in?
Malcolm: Well, I certainly believe in it now. I was reluctant in a way...
Hardy: Yup.
Malcolm: ...but having got into it I think it's much stronger now from every point of view.
Hardy: You don't feel you were led up the garden path? line 60
Malcolm: Oh, I wouldn't have been led that far up, no, but I, obviously...
Hardy: Well...
Malcolm: That is why I am looking for some sort of commitment.
Hardy: Understandably, very understandably.
Malcolm: I mean apart from anything else you see, I wouldn't just hack it around, chop bits out and bung it back to you, it would be at least six months I think before I got it to what I wanted it to be. You know, quite apart from cutting it down, I would want to have another go at it.
Hardy: Yes quite, and that will involve, include at least, putting it onto a machine?
Malcolm: Well I don't know actually. I've been experimenting with these word processors and I'm not quite sure about that.
.....
Hardy: Maybe you think it's important that it should be long rather than that it should be cheap?
Malcolm: Well I do in a way, and on that subject, increasing the length is not simply proportional to the price by any means is it? I mean presumably...
Hardy: No, double the length doesn't mean double the price if that's what you mean, no. A book like this... I mean I haven't really thought very hard about how one would publish it, although I think you have said that you thought it should be paperback straight away?
Malcolm: I haven't said that, no.
Hardy: You haven't said that, I'm sorry.
Malcolm: No, I don't know enough about the economics of it or the...
Hardy: It's normal when we publish a book of this kind, and indeed I'm sure this is the way in which, for example, Godel, Escher, Bach was done and The Mind's Eye, is to publish it in hardback first. line 120
Malcolm: Yup.
Hardy: I mean one thing I could do is to have the book roughly cast off and see how long it would be. How many pages is it in your typescript, do you know?
Malcolm: Erm, it's about 450 is it, something like that.
Hardy: 450?
Malcolm: Something like that I think [in fact 435].
Hardy: Only that?
Malcolm: I think so. The thing is the pages vary a great deal.
Hardy: The pages are quite closely typed so I suggest that it's going to be more pages in print than it is in typescript, although not very many more pages, I mean it might be between five and ten per cent more, not vast.
Malcolm: Really? I'd worked out, we'd sort of estimated that it would be more like 400 pages in a largish format paperback. [It ended up 425 pages.]
Hardy: Really?
Malcolm: Yes.
Hardy: Well if you have calculated that, that may be... I mean normally typescript takes up a little bit more space than print because normally typescript is presented in full double spacing and yours, if I remember, is 1.5 spaced.
Malcolm: It varies a lot. line 140
Hardy: In varies a lot.
Malcolm: Yes.
Hardy: Well I mean one thing I suggest we will do is have that (the cast-off) completed so that we know what we are talking about.
Malcolm: Yes.
Hardy: If it's a 500 page book and published in hardback and given that I think we both agreed it's a somewhat speculative venture, even if we did it we probably wouldn't print a very large number to start with, so it's going to be, ermm, be between £15 and £20 pounds I guess at today's prices at that sort of level.
Malcolm: Good God!
Hardy: And then it could be much cheaper than that if it took off and went into paperback, but it couldn't be much cheaper than that without artificially taking a much lower profit margin, which I know is something that we wouldn't be interested to do.
Malcolm: Yup. I can immediately think of things that could be cut without spoiling it too much. I mean I think it would be more like 400 than 500 (pages).
Hardy: Right. Well I mean I think the first thing to say is that cutting is going to improve its chances, so long of course as you don't feel that the cutting is damaging its essential characteristics. line 160
Malcolm: Right.
Hardy: So that much is said in advance and I think we've already mentioned various passages which the reader found too long...
Malcolm: Yes.
Hardy:...and I can see what he means.
Malcolm: Yes. Incidentally, was your reader a... what was his background, was he a scientific type?
Hardy: A philosopher.
Malcolm: A philosopher rather than a scientist?
Hardy: Yup.
Malcolm: Uhuh.
Hardy: Yes, but I mean, er, he's ermm... Well I don't see why I shouldn't tell you who he is, he's Alan Ryan, who is a delegate, which is a key point as well. Do you know about the delegates?
Malcolm: No I don't.
Hardy: Well, OUP, being a university press, has a board of dons called delegates who have to approve everything that is published.
Malcolm: Oh really?
Hardy: In fact I work here for a department called the General Books Department which is far freer from delegatorial control than any other part of the Press. line 180
Malcolm: The Thought Police.
Hardy: Yes, well, it isn't quite like that, erm, it may sound like that, erm... The press is a Department of the University and we are supposed to be primarily engaged in publishing scholarly works et cetera et cetera but we have a General Books Department and we do a lot of general publishing as well. Anyway, academic editors have to submit proposals for approval by the delegates before they sign them up. We report our decisions to the delegates on the whole, [Hardy's emphasis] but, erm, when we think that a book may be controversial in some way or another, maybe it's a... I mean we do get into the thought police bit when we publish very political books sometimes; we published a book a couple of years ago, you may have even seen it called London After the Bomb which was a...
Malcolm: Oh yes, yup.
Hardy: That was my book, that was a swingeing attack on the Home Office presentation of what to do after nuclear attack.
Malcolm: Mm.
Hardy: In cases like that, one takes care to clear the delegates beforehand because, you know, if they have something reported to them which they think is dubious, they will want to ask questions.
Malcolm: Yes, I see.
Hardy: That's why, as I say, it's important that Alan Ryan is a delegate because he has read it and he likes it very much, basically, which is good.
Malcolm: Really? And he's a delegate?
Hardy: That, as it were gets it basically over that hurdle...
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