CoL49 group reading ch3 purpose of intermingling

[Michael Bailey]

 But is the source for that Reddit post, which I linked to lower down

https://thomaspynchon.com/thomas-pynchon-1973-letter-to-bruce-allen-and-the-marketing-of-gravitys-rainbow/

also wrong?

 Someone named Gerald Howard seemed to be speaking rather authoritatively
(quite a ways down in that link)

“Gerald Howard writes about
<http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html> the marketing
of *Gravity’s
Rainbow* in a Pynchon-themed edition of Bookforum (Summer 2005):

Now the real problem presented itself: How to publish a
seven-hundred-plus-page book at a price that would not be grossly
prohibitive for Pynchon’s natural college and postcollegiate audience. *V.*
 and *The Crying of Lot 49* had each sold more than three million copies in
their Bantam mass-market editions. (Let us pause here to contemplate what
these numbers say about the extent of literacy in the America of the ’60s.
Then I suggest we all commit suicide.) According to a letter from Cork
Smith to Bruce Allen (who reviewed *Gravity’s Rainbow* for *Library
Journal* but
wrote to Viking complaining about the novel’s price), Viking would have had
to sell thirty thousand copies at the then unheard of price of $10 just to
break even. By comparison, *V.* and *The Crying of Lot 49* had sold about
ten thousand copies apiece in hardcover. So how to reach even a fraction of
the cash-strapped Pynchon-loving millions? “




Do you have more insider knowledge about this, Mark?






On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 3:45 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

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