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Despite all these pressures, not every editor is too harried, and not every author is resistant to suggestions and demands. Here are two stories of good editors whose efforts resulted in good books:
Jonathan Coleman, 28, is the youngest senior editor at Simon & Schuster. The newly published Changing of the Guard is his project. He arrived at the firm three years ago, after working at Knopf as a $220-a-week publicist. During that time, he had met David Broder, the Washington Post journalist.
Coleman's interest began after he read a newspaper series that Broder had written about Congressmen who had been elected for the first time after Watergate.
The editor got the columnist to talk about how these new faces in Washington differed in background and interests from their older colleagues. The more Broder talked, the more Coleman was convinced he had the makings of a book.
Simon & Schuster's editorial board thought so too. They gave Broder a $40,000 advance on the basis of an eight-page outline covered by a rousing memo from Coleman. The editor's immediate problems: the book had to be ready for the 1980 presidential elections, and Broder had to meet the deadline while holding his time-consuming job as a journalist. Coleman kept the pressure on with phone calls every week. Chapters and suggestions circulated through the mails, and an entire draft was completed just after Labor Day, 1979. Coleman read it and a few weeks later checked into Washington's Jefferson Hotel, where for a week of 18-hour days he and Broder went over the manuscript line by line. "His fingerprints are on every damn sentence," says the columnist with appreciation. "This book is as much Jonathan Coleman's as it is mine."
The less visible prints on the 884-page manuscript belong to Lynn Chalmers, one of twelve staff copy editors at Simon & Schuster. It normally takes about a month to copyread a book, but Chalmers completed the job in two weeks. She corrected punctuation, broke long segments into paragraphs, and checked facts. Inconsistencies were flagged on strips of pink paper and attached to the offending pages.
Michael di Capua, 42, is among the most respected literary editors in the business. For the past 14 years he has been with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the last major independent houses in New York, where things do not appear to be as rushed as at other firms. Its authors include Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag. Di Capua has edited such acclaimed writers as Larry Woiwode and Michael Arlen. A major project now is the result of one man's highly unusual childhood. Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany is a forthcoming memoir by Joel Agee, son of the late film critic and novelist James Agee. In 1941, Agee and his wife Alma divorced. She took Joel, then a year old, to live in
Mexico, where she met and married Bodo Uhse, a Communist novelist and fugitive from Nazism. After the war the family went to East Germany, where Joel lived for twelve years.