B. U. G. S.

Somebody gave me some points on SF and said they would love to read a book of collections of my writings. He asked if such a book was likely. In the Ole Bob tradition of giving long, meticulous and detailed responses, my reply is No.

At fairly predictable intervals, I get enthusiastic proposals from people who tell me how great my writings are and how they would love to collect them for the generations. They are using a very good strategy. The best way to start getting published is to ride in on the name of someone who is already publishable. That is EXACTLY what I did to move up to a major publisher with The New Right Papers.

But once I explain to them that I am now slightly less publishable in America than David Duke is in Israel, their enthusiasm collapses, as it should. It was good gambit, and it failed. Very few people who are not New York Jewish break into publication if they don’t try gambit after gambit and can paper their walls with rejection slips.

So there won’t be any book. This is NOT new in real history. Historians are always busy doing two things:

1) Trying desperately to find out more about the minds who actually predicted and influenced today and were lost in the rush of nonentities who were fashionable at the time and;

2) Getting on Larry King and talking about how the fashionable authors of today will be remembered in the future.

1) and 2) are their JOBS.

So I put my ideas into people like you. If someone wants to do a dissertation on me when my ideas take hold and I have long since topped paying for internet space for my ideas, they’ll have to do another dissertation.

It’s no big deal. Personal publicity means little to me since I retired, except where it helps my ideas spread. By the time they realize what I did, neither personal publicity nor anything else will have any priority for me at all.