Perennial Seller Clifton Fadiman had 1,000 True Fans. I’m one.
I was driving through Santa Barbara California on some publishing odd-job or another and somebody called Clifton Fadiman — “Book Of The Month Club” fame — and told him I was passing through. He told them to send me to his house. We’d never met before.
At the time, Clifton was working on Encyclopædia Brittanica’s Great Books Of The Western World (2nd edition) and his own Lifetime Reading Plan. His dear wife, Annalee, brought us iced tea on the veranda facing the mountains. She took one look at us, laughed, and said “See you boys later.” Clifton was 50 years older than me.
Around sunset we moved into his library and Annalee brought us tea and snacks. “Boys, you must eat.”
For the record, Clifton led off with Shakespeare and I swung back with Aristotle. He countered with Marcus Aurelius so I swung back with Seneca’s comments on Epicurus. He scolded me because “Western World” came after Gutenberg’s press and Martin Luther, so I pitched Martin Luther’s Treatise on Good Works. He said, Come on, try something that a living person would actually read today. It was 1984 so I pitched Orwell’s 1984. That stumped him for a second. He loaded his pipe to buy time.
Eventually, Annalee called a halt to this game and we retired.
Somewhere in the madness I remembered to ask Clifton how he got paid. I was all about authors getting paid at the time, because I only got paid if they got paid, so I assumed that was why somebody sent me there. He said — and I can still remember the color of the furniture and his gaze out the window to the Santa Barbara Pacific Ocean —
“I have a few fans. They make sure I get paid somehow.”
If you’re an author and Clifton’s 1,000 True Fans story interests you, join Publica’s Authors Club at https://publica.com/ — I’ll be happy to meet you too!
Wanna know how dumb I was? I was writing the science & maths chapter of the biography of William James Sidis at the time, and I didn’t realize that Clifton was Sidis’ first cousin. I guess I was supposed to ask about that. Clifton didn’t mention it, although he probably knew. 1,000 True Fans, and I’m one.
Read about perennial seller Clifton Fadiman on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_Fadiman
Dumb mistake #2 — I called Annalee Annabel by mistake because my favorite poem is Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee. Cut a kid some slack — Annalee, Annabel Lee, could happen to anybody. Read the poem and you’ll see why she didn’t mind one little bit, and Clifton didn’t correct me. We were, after all, in their “Kingdom by the sea” at the time. They lived in their kingdom by the sea another 15 years until Clifton’s death by the sea, 1999, with his Annalee.
Fun fact — Orwell’s 1984 came back to bite me 25 years later. 2009, Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 ebook from Kindles because of an argument with publisher Hachette. For some reason, they decided the readers’ rights were disposable. As an avid reader, who thought that BUY NOW meant just that, this event pissed me right the *(&$ off. Read more about how I feel about that here: https://medium.com/publicaio/books-digital-locks-versus-blockchain-tokens-206505dd9014
