Is there any campaign underway to get Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights back in print? It would be wonderful to see that strange cover photo gracing bookstore shelves again…. and (of course) to see those incredible essays preserved. If not for that book I would never have known that there was ever such a place as bughouse square, that there were in fact people like “Navin Diebold”. Such things have only been told to me before in snatches of mazily nostalgic anecdote, terminally innaccurate and unbelievable. Your essays ring of truth. I believe that others of my generation (whatever they decide to call us) suffer under the same misapprehensions that I did, and therefore it is our solemn duty to get that book back on the shelves and preserve a chapter of cultural development that could otherwise be lost in the cold new world of modernized… I don’t have to go on. You see my point. Bring hope to the lives of the terminally television-dependant! Bring that book, dippy Ellison quote and all, back to the eyeballs of the English-speaking world!
Publishing is where you go when you are just not good enough to do anything else. The level of employee is way below convenience stores. and for the past few years they have been terrified of losing their awful jobs--and thus make few decisions, and usually bad ones when they do decide anything. Getting books reprinted is incredibly hard.
