An NBCC Tie-In
by Edward Fruchtman -- Publishers Weekly, 4/14/1997
Among Jonathan Raban's sources for his bestselling, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Bad Land: An American Romance was a 25-year-old manuscript of memoirs by Montana native Percy L. Wollaston. Raban learned about the Wollaston's family's struggle from 1900 to 1925 to maintain their Montana farm when Wollaston's son, Mike, gave the author a copy of the memoir (they met when Raban rented a space for his sailboat in a marina run by the son), and he cited it in his book as an "unpublished source."Pretty soon, however, that will no longer be the case. In October, Wollaston's Homesteading: A Montana Family Album will be published in hardcover by Lyons &Burford, complete with eight pages of family photos -- all thanks to a far-sighted acquisition by Ben Jacobs, Lyons &Burford's publicity and rights director.
Jacobs says he was attracted to Wollaston's extracts when he read Bad Land last Thanksgiving. "Hearing about one family experience puts such a personal face on the historical movement of Americans to the West," said Jacobs, adding that he approached Mike (the elder Wollaston died in 1983) about publishing the entire manuscript -- which the author had never envisioned as being popularly appealing. "He typed up these journals as a family memento for his children and grandchildren," said Jacobs. "He never thought of it as something to be published."
Lyons &Burford's publishing plans for Homesteading include a 15,000-copy first printing and deliberate cross-promotion with Bad Land, which has sold more than 35,000 hardcover copies to date. Raban, in fact, has agreed to write the foreword to Homesteading and the Vintage trade paperback of Bad Land comes out with a near-60,000 first printing the same month. And as a final legacy to Percy Wollaston, a portion of the book's profits will be donated to the Eureka [Montana] Public Library, of which he was once a trustee.
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