Small Start for 'Willows'

News that Ellen Geiger at Curtis Brown just sold Norton senior editor Bob Weil a book called The Annotated 'Wind in the Willows' is not huge, certainly, but unearths a salutary piece of publishing lore. The book, by scholar Annie Gauger, will be published as far in the future as 2008, the centenary of the original publication of the children's classic by Kenneth Grahame. Although The Wind in the Willows has since sold millions of copies around the world and been filmed several times, it nearly didn't get published at all. Grahame's manuscript was originally sold to Methuen in London by Curtis Brown himself, but the publishers thought so little of it they gave no advance, just an escalating royalty (which they must have come to regret). Likewise here in the States; it was turned down by many publishers, and Charles Scribner only took it after he received an enthusiastic endorsement from President Teddy Roosevelt himself.