This hypothesis of a final maturing and ecstasy of Mankind is in harmony with the growing importance of the phenomenon of mysticism.
—Teilhard de Chardin
Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection.
—Richard Bach
Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance. We can be free. We can learn to fly!
—Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Don't you forget that the reason you fly is to eat.
—J.L. Seagull's father
I think I can—I think I can* The Little Engine That Could
Bah! Humbug!
—Ebenezer Scrooge
A BISHOP has denounced it for the sin of pride. The new director of the FBI is urging it on his top aides, explaining that he wants "their spirits to soar." A group of alcoholics in Ypsilanti, Mich., uses it to inspire members to recovery. The Christian Science Monitor has refused to carry ads for it. A manufacturer has declared that it encourages "ambition, attainment, leadership, exploration, excellence, growth, goals, imagination, courage, determination, loyalty, sharing, teaching, involvement and concern"—not to mention more aggressive salesmanship. Critics have variously classified it as Hinduism and Scientology. Recently, a columnist, dismissing the whole thing as "half-baked fantasy," offered its success as proof that America's brains are addled.
As it happens, all of these good people are more or less right. But what are they talking about? The Harry Emerson Fosdick-Norman Vincent Peale Reader"! A new rendering of the Kama Sutra with footnotes by Mick Jagger? The Bhagavad-Gita as interpreted by the Rev. Billy Graham? Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Hereafter But Were Afraid to Ask? Not so. They are talking about an illustrated parable concerning a seagull who learns aerobatics. They are talking about a volume so small that Winnie the Pooh could carry it in his hip pocket, and so unfleshly that a vestal virgin might choose to read it at a church picnic. In short, about Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the year's—and perhaps even the decade's—pop publishing miracle.
Two Feet Deep. Jonathan's history is already notorious as an almost cinematic cliché: how the infant Jonathan came to Aviation Writer Richard Bach in a kind of dream vision; how Jonathan was foolishly rejected by a flock of famous publishers (including Harper & Row, Random House and Morrow); how the book was finally, faintheartedly launched by Macmillan with no advertising budget and almost no reviews (Publishers' Weekly, hardly the most demanding medium in the world, called it "ickypoo"). How Jonathan rose slowly on its own merits or demerits, over 18 months, finding an audience—at first mainly youthful denizens of the ever hip West Coast. And then POW!—how in 1972 Jonathan sold over a million copies, breaking all hardback book records since Gone With the Wind.
This fall Jonathan is being offered in a new celestial blue and silver slipcase for $7.50, as well as in the original $4.95 model. All three of Author Richard Bach's other flying books are being reissued. Bach himself is busy with the film