For my publishing class, I'm reading
Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. She was this legend of an editor for Harper & Row, kind of the Maxwell Perkins of children's lit. She always typed her comments in letters to her authors, and always kept copies of all her letters. She welcomed new talent in for an interview, appointment or not--and worked with such legends as Maurice Sendak, Mary Rogers (
Freaky Friday), Russell Hoban, Garth Williams, E.B. White, Edward Gorey, John Steptoe, Else Holmelund Minarik (
Little Bear, the first book I ever read on my own), and Shel Silverstein. She took chances and knew what she was doing.
So this book is her letters, collected and edited by Leonard Marcus. Every single letter, whomever it's addressed to, begins, "Dear Genius."
On taking charge of the department, Nordstrom made it her policy that no artist or writer wishing to presnet his or her work would be turned away, with or without an appointment. If she sensed that the visitor had talent--her antennae for this remained permanently extended--time and the telephone, and the daunting stacks of manuscripts and mail, ceased to exist for as long as the get-acquainted session lasted. . . . "You've come home!" she told more than one thunderstruck visitor in whom she had detected promise, accepting the author in advance of the work. . . .
Such blanket acceptance afforded the editor wide latitude when criticizing, and sometimes rejecting, and author's subsequent efforts. The marginal note that everyone who worked with her remembers--"N.G.E.F.Y.,"--or, Not Good Enough For You--implied, deftly enough, that if a word or passage or even an entire manuscript did not pass muster, it was not because the author was a failure but because the piece of work in question had, in that particular instance, somehow failed to rise to his or her own high and praiseworthy standard.
Isn't that cool? I want to be like her when I grow up! Of course, the business was different then.
