What is your best or maybe most important memory to you through the entire process of working the books?
Well, I’ll never forget when my husband handed to me the first section of The Eye of the World —it was about a third of the book—and it knocked me off my perch. And I’ll tell you, I called Tom Doherty, and said, “Tom, you’ll have to read this one,” and he said, “Why?” [laughter] When he founded Tor, he said he wanted a company where he could always read everything that he published, and Jim said, “It’s not going to be long before he said, ‘I want to read all the “read” books that I publish.’ “ And he had been—at that point, Robert Jordan had been writing Conan the Barbarian, which were not significant record-breaking novels. They were very good, but they were what we call midlist. [?] I said because either after—I’ve forgotten what it was; seven years of marriage?—”Either after seven years of marriage, I have fallen into the ‘wife trap’ and can’t tell whether it’s good or not, just cause I’ve married Jordan—and either that, or this thing is wonderful . That’s why.”
And so, he did read it, and I started—he was my working [?] publish it, but he did support the book. And as it went on, he was giving it to me in [?], and at one point I said to him, “Now, when we get to Tar Valon….” He said, “We don’t get there in this book.” [laughter] I said, “Okay.” And then, when they go to Rhuidean— that surpassed the beginning….[?]….just absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous writing. So that was high. And in one of the books—and I’ve honestly forgotten which one it was—I said, “Honey, this is a boring section. You’ve got talking heads, talking heads, talking heads. Can’t something happen?” So somebody gets killed. [laughter]
Harriet has told this story before here .
And you know, Tom once told me—this is the guy who founded Tor, Tom Doherty, and it was his company all through the 80s—he once told me he sold the company in order to get the capital after reading The Eye of the World , that he thought, “I need money to promote this book, to make it a best seller.” And that was one of the main things, he said, that convinced him to sell the company.
I never knew that. That’s a hell of a story. Anyway, he did do a splendid job in publishing it. There used to be something called the American Booksellers’ Association, and there was a huge convention in the spring. He had gone to Dallas to hand out previews to booksellers, which was common in those days, but what was not common in those days is that he had done a double, full-color cover on the book. Nobody did that—they had those gray covers, with plain type—and that startled all of them. It just really did; he just did what he does better than anybody else, and he did it with The Eye of the World . He was just a wonderful publisher all through the series.
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