Galley Slaves

[Dave Monroe]

GALLEY SLAVES:  Book critics who hung on to their
advance reader’s editions of “Cold Mountain” made a
wise decision. These rare copies are selling for as
much as $750 on some Web sites. The Penguin Press, the
publisher of Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel
“Against the Day,” is trying to keep tabs on where
Pynchon’s coveted advance editions end up. They’re
writing the critic’s name in each copy of “Against the
Day” they send out. I suspect, in a few cases, this
could make the editions even more valuable. On the
used book site abe.com, for example, you can buy — for
a mere $4,750 — John Updike’s copy of Tom Wolfe’s “Man
in Full,” the same copy Updike read and marked up
before writing his memorably negative review in The
New Yorker. (“ ‘A Man in Full’ amounts to
entertainment, not literature, even literature in a
modest aspirant form.”) According to the ad on
abe.com, Updike’s marginalia includes “ha,” “vulgar
writing” and “whole book a lecture by stories.” But
back to Pynchon: his novel is due to be released on
Nov. 21. His last one, “Mason & Dixon,” spent eight
weeks on the list in 1997.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/22tbr.html

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