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Vol. 1 No. 1 |
January 2002 |
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One is the loneliest
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By George W. Price
SHORTLY AFTER I finished my military service and returned home to Chicago in the fall of 1953, I joined the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club. There I met Earl Kemp. He was the guiding genius of the club although he was not a student at the U. of C. (neither was I). We became friends and, when I got married in 1960, he was my best man.
In 1955, Earl and several other U of C SF Club members started Advent-Publishers with the novel idea of bringing out critical works about science fiction. Mainstream publishing housed had only started doing science fiction books a few years earlier, and were completely ignoring science fiction criticism. Damon Knight had written a goodly number of critical essays for science fiction magazines by then, and it was Earl's idea to assemble them into a book. And so it was done: In Search of Wonder came out in 1956, and Advent was on its way.
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J.L. Patterson (Mrs. P. Howard Lyons) designed the original graphics set-up package for Advent in 1956 including colophon and script logo above, as well as the letterhead, envelopes, mailing labels, invoices, inc. In addition, she did a series of illustrations for Advent's premiere volume, Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder. |
From the start Advent was amateur in the sense that all of the partners made their livings in other ways. Some were students; Earl worked in a job printing shop (where he had learned typesetting and book composition techniques for offset printing); I was a chemist. However, we always strove to maintain professional standards of book production. And because we did not depend on Advent for our livings, we did not have to make the compromises on subject matter and quality that commercial publishers necessarily make. We could and did publish exactly what we liked.
One by one all the other partners except me moved away from Chicago to pursue their varying professions, and as they did so, I took over more and more of the company's functions. Earl was the last to withdraw from active participation when he moved to California, in 1965, and I found myself doing everything. The others maintained their financial interest in the partnership, but I did all the work of editing and preparing books for the printers, as well as filling the orders. Later on, Ed and Jo Ann Wood took care of filling orders, from 1973 until 1995, shortly before Ed's death.
Advent not only filled some personal needs (I had always wanted to have children, but never did; no doubt the books that I was producing satisfied part of that), but also seriously affected my professional life. I was working in chemistry and chemical engineering at the Institute of Gas Technology. My boss knew of my amateur publishing activities, so when a job as technical writer and editor opened up, he thought of me. This was at a time when I had realized that, as a scientist or engineer, I would never be any more than mediocre. The proposed job was much more in line with my real talents so I jumped at it. And that's what I did for the next three decades until my retirement a few years ago. Without Advent, I might have stuck in unfulfilling lab work for who knows how long.
My professional and Advent activities were also intertwined in another way. Earl had taught me how to prepare books for publication y using an IBM Executive office typewriter with proportional spacing to compose justified type that looked (more or less) like regular hot-metal printing. That's how we did the first few books. In 1966 IBM introduced the Selectric Composer, a $4,400 machine that used interchangeable "golf ball" type fonts to set justified type in three sizes and many different faces. I bought one of the first ones sold in Chicago, and used it to set all Advent books produced between 1968 and 1976, starting with Heinlein in Dimension. A little later my employer also got a Composer for in-house publication, and since I was already expert on it, I became the person consulted for advice on using it.
In a few more years, the Institute decided to go to more versatile and more expensive phototypesetting equipment. Because of my experience, I was selected to scout out what was available and make further checking. This was not only a source of pride to me, but also in turn affected Advent. With my boss's knowledge, I often stayed late and used the Institute's phototypesetting equipment to compose Advent's books. I retired the IBM Composer (it is still in my attic) and, from then until my own retirement, did all Advent's typesetting on my employer's equipment.
Eventually phototypesetting was made obsolete by the computer-driven laser printers and I switched to them. Since I retired, I have done Advent's work on my own PC and printer. The first book prepared on a PC was the greatly expanded third edition of In Search of Wonder, in 1996. A comparison with the earlier editions will show how greatly the typography improved.
In nearly half a century, many things have changed at Advent besides the typesetting equipment and the resulting typography, but we have always stuck to doing books of science fictional interest. We were the first to publish science fiction criticism, but the mainstream publishers and academic presses eventually followed, particularly after science fiction studies started booming in the 1970s. We never ha any interest in doing textbooks, but our books have been used as supplementary reading in a umber of college courses.
While Earl Kemp started Advent because he perceived a lack of critical books about science fiction, we never limited ourselves to criticism. So in addition to the masterful criticism of Damon Knight, James Blish, and Alexi Panshin, our works include a small art book of Kelly Freas drawings; two histories of science fiction magazines (A Requiem for Astounding and Galaxy Magazine: The Light and Dark Years); a history ad listing of The Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards; a compilation of university lectures (The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism); Don Tuck's massive bibliographic Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy to 1968; a fan of history (Harry Warner's All Our Yesterday); Robert Bloch's The Eight Stage of Fandom; a collection of short pieces by L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp Footpirnts on Sand); two re-issues of out-of-print classics about science fiction (Eshbach's of Of Worlds Beyond and Bretnor's Modern Science Fiction; and the unclassifiable PITFCS: Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies.
The very first Advent book that I set type was the Ellik ad Evans concordance The Universes of E. E. Smith. By coincidence, the newest Advent book is Have Trenchcoat-Will Travel, a collection of all of the late, great Doc smith's stories that are not science fiction. Wat all these books have in common is that we did not expect them to be commercially viable, but we thought they deserved to see print anyway.
In 1968 Advent changed from a partnership to a corporation, with the former partners as the sole stockholders. We did this because Robert Heinlein had intimated that he might sue us if we published Heinlein in Dimension by Alexi Panshin (whom Heinlein detested - see http://www.panshin.com for details). Incorporation meant that even if we lost a suit, we would be liable for only the company's assets (which were negligible apart from the inventory), and would not be at risk for our personal assets. Advent:Publishers, Inc. published the book, and Heinlein did not sue.
One thing has not changed: Advent never made any money. In fact, if you count the value of the partners' time and labor, we have lost money ahnd over fist. But then, we never did it for money. It ws a labor of love, and still is.
When Earl Kemp invited me into Advent:Publishers almost fifty years ago, neither he nor I ever anticipated how enormously it would affect my life. But it did, and I wouldn't change it for anything.
Earl, I thank you.
-- George W. Price, Manager, Advent:Publishers, Inc. April 2001
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