<
https://slate.com/culture/2023/10/lester-del-rey-invention-fantasy-book-publishing.html>
"Lester del Rey wore 1950s-style horn-rimmed glasses, an unruly billy-goat
beard, and his silver hair brushed back above a big forehead. He liberally
dispensed cards that said:
Lester del Rey, Expert. He sometimes said his full
name was Ramón Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace
Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes. He was in fact born Leonard Knapp,
son of Wright Knapp, in 1915 in rural southeastern Minnesota, subject to the
Minnesotan fever—Jay Gatz, Prince Rogers Nelson, Robert Zimmerman—for
reinventing oneself. In 1977, del Rey, then in his 60s, turned his proclivity
for fabulism to profit: He invented fantasy fiction as we know it.
I always thought fantasy had existed forever. Elves and wizards were old.
Stories about them must have been, too, drawn from deep history, passed from
generation to generation, just as my dad read J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the
Rings to me when I was 6. Part of the magic of these tales is the sense that
they have always been this way; it’s thanks to that continuity with the past
that we’re able to touch the enchanted premodern world, a place that hasn’t yet
been rationalized by capitalism and science. With C.S. Lewis’s Lucy, I, too,
walked through the wardrobe to Narnia. By middle school in the mid-1990s, I was
ripping through the books of Piers Anthony’s
Xanth series, with its basilisks
and ogres, which were by then regularly landing on the New York Times
bestseller list.
But it turns out that fantasy, as an enduring publishing genre, is hardly older
than I am. All sorts of things had to go right—and wrong—to make it happen.
Book publishing and retailing were revolutionized in the 1970s. Lester del Rey
took advantage of that revolution, realizing that readers were hungry for
derivates of Tolkien. Piers Anthony, a prolific sci-fi writer, volunteered to
write one to order. In 1994, I thought I was reading Anthony’s
Xanth novels
to access an ancient tradition of enchantment. To the publishing industry, I
was reading them because I was precisely the modern consumer they expected and
needed me to be: an upper-middle-class suburban kid in a shopping-mall Barnes &
Noble. This is the story of how del Rey did it."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
