MEN URGENT

I hate to interrupt the Rome trip but this is very important -- heh

I finally received Marc-Édouard Nabe's L'homme qui arrêta d'écrire, one of the books I mentioned in previous posts, and that I've been waiting for since 17 March, when I bought it on his website, the only way to get it. My order got um "lost" (but not the payment) Still...

The MEN experience started even before I began to devour his words.

It is a "different" book - no barcode! No editor/publisher on the cover, nothing on the back cover apart from the number 28 -- in pink!I love it.

This man is the first author in the world to own almost all the copyrights to his books- apparently he has managed to buy back 23 out of the (now) 28. By publishing this book himself, without an editor/publisher, he will need to sell fewer copies in order to get the same amount of money he would have done through "traditional" paths, selling far more. He (and all authors in France) get 10% of the price of the book, whereas bookshops get 30%. He financed it by selling his paintings (I don't know those very well...) and keeping it a total secret he was writing, given the book's title (The Man Who Quit Writing). He did write tracts and spread them all over Paris and Marseilles, stuck them to the walls, rogue style! Some of the tracts have since been translated and can be found on the website set up by his readers.

I love what he said in an interview when asked about editors and publishers in general.

He said the current "literary" system has only been in place for a hundred years or so; he went on to ask the interviewer: "can you imagine Hugo asking an editor if he thought it appropriate to cut the Waterloo scene, or whether Valjean should in fact do this or that..." No! I can't imagine it. But I had not thought of it this way before.

And it doesn't bother me that he put himself in the same category with Hugo. He's got the goods. Also...if everyone saw his predecessors as an impediment because of their greatness, what would get done? The Romans wouldn't have built much, after seeing the Pyramids.