CoL49 group reading ch3 purpose of intermingling

[Mark Kohut]

NO, Howar is a famous-enough insider..a major editor....his figures are
surely right......He would NEVER talk
of millions, since that was not even close then.....

The Crying of Lot 49, not V, took off in ales when it was published as that
groovy Bantam paperback....
because it is SHORT...and groovy...and mysterious and endlessly
talk-aboutable...as we are proving....

On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 3:52 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

>  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.
>>
>