In a 994-word piece misleadingly labeled “Small Corrections,” (which would seem to mistakenly imply brevity) to a recent Neal Pollack piece in the New York Times Book Review, Dave Eggers complained that Pollack mischaracterized his relationship with Andrew Wylie:
Andrew Wylie does one thing for us, which he does very well and which helps us exist: he sells foreign rights to certain McSweeney’s books, because among our business staff of three, only one person has been farther than Maine.
But according to this week’s Book Review, there is one other thing Wylie could do for McSweeneys/Eggers:
A writer’s papers would be “considerably” more valuable if they included e-mail, Wylie said. The question for an acquiring agency or library is how to prevent “extrapolated diminishment of value,” he added. “I could certainly see Dave Eggers’s collected e-mail correspondence appearing in 10 volumes in the course of the next 40 years, and I think it would be absolutely riveting,” Wylie said of another client. (He said there were no immediate plans to sell Rushdie’s or Eggers’s e-mail correspondence.)
Which is fantastic of course, because the only way this would be better is if were printed, bound between two pieces of cardboard and sold for $24.95. Thank you, Andrew Wylie.
UPDATE: I didn’t realize it, but Alex Balk beat me to the punch here.
[Ed.—By the way, until tomorrow, I’m guest-blogging Galleycat. The good book bloggers will return shortly.- Elizabeth Spiers]