CoL49 group reading ch3 purpose of intermingling

[Mark Kohut]

Those sales figures for V and Lot 49---and then GR on the reddit fabtalk
are WRONG, very wrong.

THAT IS ALL.

On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 12:34 AM Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just kind of splashed up against my mind -
>
> This idea:
>
> You’ve got the sex scenes to draw an audience
>
> They’re there, & probably what one would mention to a friend at the water
> cooler, oh yeah, you’ve got to read Pynchon, “Oedipa does LA” - but does
> one really get massively turned on by them? (Rhetorical question)
>
> So by intertwining them with the historical stuff, and even drawing
> comparisons, the reader who was trying to plunge into prurience starts
> instead to use their brain to figure out what the heck he’s talking about
>
> Not only a way to comply with the letter and spirit of “redeeming social
> value”
>
> But also a good marketing strategy
>
>
> https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/u4zoam/what_are_the_sales_of_pynchons_books_worldwide/
>
> Apparently V [with both elements but slightly more discrete] had sold three
> million copies in the US by 1970,
>
> …
>
> Crying of Lot 49 had also sold three million copies before GR came out, so
> it was over six million before his most popular book
>
>
>
> These figures, it turns out, came from the estimable
>
>
> https://thomaspynchon.com/thomas-pynchon-1973-letter-to-bruce-allen-and-the-marketing-of-gravitys-rainbow/
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>