It’s kind of neat sitting here in this office, looking across Madison Square at the building where we first worked together at Tempo, back in the olden days, 1970. We started together there. I was Publisher, Harriet was Editor-in-Chief, and we had a lot of fun. We began doing fantasy and science fiction in that line, and Harriet was of course the one doing it. We did so well that Grosset bought [SFF imprint] Ace for us to play with. Harriet became the editorial director of Ace, and we experienced tremendous growth there.
Tremendous growth. I remember when you went to your first science fiction convention, all happy you had a nice company, planning to do wonders for science fiction—as in fact you have. When you said hello to the first people you saw in the lobby, they stood up and said: “Hi, we’re the Science Fiction Writers of America grievance committee, and we’re going to audit your books.”
Oh, I remember that so well.
I think you came up clean.
Actually, we did come up clean. We’d just bought Ace that week. We were behind because Ace was behind. Our editor in charge of science fiction back then, Pat LoBrutto, understated the situation. He said to me: “You know, we’ve got a little bit of an image problem. It would really help if you would come out to the World Science Fiction Convention.” It was in Kansas City, so I said, “Sure, Pat, if it’ll help, obviously, I’ll come.”
As soon as we came in, these two guys recognized Pat. They didn’t recognize me yet. One of them said: “I’m Andy Offutt, I’m president of the Science Fiction Writers of America.” The other one said, in a very loud voice: “And I’m Jerry Pournelle. I’m chair of the grievance committee, and we want to audit your books.”
Well, Jerry had been in the field artillery. His hearing was bad, and he talked loud enough to hear himself. That meant everybody in the whole lobby could hear. Everyone kind of turned en masse to look at us. One person in the group of fans pointed at me and said: “That must be Ace. They’re the people who screwed Andre Norton.”
Now, we loved Andre Norton. Harriet had already bought her books at Tempo. We had published her there. But Ace had been in financial trouble, and they were behind on their royalties. What a way to be introduced to the World Science Fiction Convention.
I was so glad I wasn’t there.
I came home and went to Grosset immediately. I said “Boy, the first thing we do is pay all these royalties,” and we did. That kind of annoyed Jerry Pournelle, because by the time he got there and did his audit, we didn’t owe him anything, so he couldn’t charge us for the cost of the audit. It’s a long time ago, and Jerry may remember it a little differently, but I remember it pretty clearly, and that’s how I remember it.
It was an interesting time.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.