Alan Swallow, publisher
2679 South York St., Denver 10, Colo.

Feb. 14, 1949

Dear Herbert van Thal,

Thanks very much for yours of the 7th. I believe that another
of mine has crossed yours meantime. I should like, as I last
mentioned, to have a fairly close idea of the volumes
scheduled immediately ahead, and approximately the time for
each. I take it now that they are Mrs. Gaskell, Edgeworth,
Trollope, Lawrence, perhaps in that order, and running
through the rest of this year. With Scott to be shipped
by you before long and Mrs. Gaskell printed when you do, I
should be able to handle these fine. The reviews have kept
coming and more recently have averaged out much better. The
first big one was the NY Herald-Tribune, with its damaging
comments; the others have, in the main, been favorable, with
two of the largest very favorable indeed. I have to stock
largely with a big wholesaler in the East now, and will get
reports of sales and returns from sales only thrice a year;
but they have had to come after more stock, so that I feel
more confident now than at any other time since I started
publishing. I think this series is going to help, when it is
all in.

Yes, I have worked on Defoe. I expected, by now, to have a
substantial part to show you in something like a final draft,
but I won't make that much until early summer now, I'm afraid.
I take it that you are not in a hurry to schedule it, that is, to
see it in order to schedule it soon; if you are, I'll put it
ahead of other things. Meantime, I work at it as I can.

I am very sorry that the Contemporary Authors idea doesn't
strike you well. Would it work if the books were somewhat
longer, about the same as the English Novelists Series? Or
would it work, for you there, if we put say three associated
authors together in one book, publisher each separately here?
If there is a chance there, I'd like to have you in on this;
if there isn't, don't make a special point of it for me. I am
interested in your ideas on the matter, for I imagine they
apply to some extent here, too. The Idea, so far as I know,
has not been tried out here.

As for the American Novelists Series, I suspect it would be
at least a year before production could be thought of. I am
just now making contacts with prospective authors. Therefore,
maybe we need not worry about it for a time. Perhaps the
regulation will change. At any rate, I certainly hope you can
go in with me on it, and thus all of us keep these two series
together. If the regulations still remain, there would be
three alternatives, I should think: production actually there;
sending you clear press proofs for off-set there; making
plates here, running an printing, and then shipping them to
you for a printing, sending them back and forth as needed. I am
sure we can lick the matter in some fashion on something so
important.

I am very sorry that the Board of Trade will not let you take
in any sheets, even if practically given to you. Do you know
if Sylvan Press, or any of the others of your acquaintance,
could take up that offer? Could you enquire to see if one
of them could and would be interested?

In the Amer. Nov. Series, by the way, I doubt if we will do
Jewett first. We'd want at least a couple of the very first
titles to be much better known people, even here in America.

2679 South York, Denver 10,Colo.

September 19, 1949

Dear Herbert van Thal,

I have delayed writing you in part through a busy summer and a trip to the Pacific Coast to deliver a couple papers at convention of the Modern Language Association; but chiefly, I must confess, in an effort to dodge certain issues until I could make up my mind what direction I could take. I have been encouraged about the English Novelists Series by the reviews we have got from the 7 books we have issued here so far; but completely discouraged over sales. My hope was that there would be initial sale enough to take care of basic costs of sheets, transportation and duty, binding, jacketing; we work here completely without overhead, so that I didn't worry about costs there. I had enough money to finance the first four titles all the way through. But I didn't have enough to finance more without minimum cost returns on the first four, which I expected right off. It hasn't worked that way. The books sell very slowly. What is pleasing is that they sell steadily, and when the ~~XXXX~~ second three (LYTTON, KIPLING, BENNETT) were out, the first four sold right along with them; indeed, the second three has been very poor by themselves. Those three have been bound and out since late May, but altogether the seven haven't sold enough to clear completely my bill with you and the complete binding bill. Thus, being behind, and with ~~XXIX~~ sheets with two more titles (SCOTT and GASKELL) having trouble getting through and facing costs on those with money I didn't have, I was really very discouraged. A couple weeks ago I seriously contemplated writing that I must stop the series entirely and ask you to try to get another American publisher, which whom I would cooperate insofar as listing the entire series as being available. I delayed until the end of August, when I got my five months' report from the large wholesaler in New York, and that was extremely sad.

The SCOTT and GASKELL got through in August and are now in Chicago. The trouble with them was, in part, that now the Customs is charging me at the retail price of the completed book, more than twice the customs charge on the previous seven sheets! That makes another problem. And I haven't the money, and I don't want, to get those two bound until I have sold enough of the first seven to complete my payment to you to date on those seven and until I get even with the bindery. That looks, at present, like about three months' sales before I reach that stage. Meantime, you are probably ready with one or two more to be shipped.

Your last letter indicates that you are in the same boat, short on cash to continue as before. Thus all that seems possible to me now is to continue on credit for the items to date, and then ask a delay or ask that you go ahead to place other titles elsewhere. Your own needs dictate a slowing up of the issue of new titles. So I am writing the Chicago bindery to ask them to send on all the sheets they have (SCOTT and GASKELL). Through a local bindery we can get a very minimum number of each bound to take care of review copies, initial orders, and a stock to handle two months or so of sales. Our investment in the binding will be at a minimum, and the further copies needed later can be taken care of a couple hundred or even less at a time. This will get these two out and on the market and increase the titles to nine from which we will get income during the next months. That way, I am sure, the end of the year, or even before, will see me caught up on past bills.

I shall further use this plan on any titles you have ready. In this case, and from now on until I can do something else, please have any sheets (any you may have ready and therefore

2679 So. York, Denver 10, Colorado, USA

September 30, 1948

Dear Herbert van Thal,

I went to my office today at the University and was most pleased to find your very friendly and personal letter there. Thanks very much! I hope that my activities are beginning to get a bit straight for you finally. Perhaps my last letter helped a bit. As you have probably guessed by now, and as I thought I had told you long ago, I am a teacher; I make my living teaching and not as a publisher (I've never made any money as a publisher!). I am not a person of means. My father made a little money in his day, and he has been tolerant toward my wish to publish and supplied me with the loans necessary up to now. As a matter of fact, he lent me $100 when I first started, when I was in graduate school in 1939; with that sum I bought a second-hand hand press, some type and paper, and began. My special interest, since I also wrote poetry, was in the problems a poet meets in getting his poetry published. So for years I worked primarily with poetry, doing almost all the printing myself, frequently from handset type and printing on the little hand press. All stopped for a little over two years I spent in the Army; when I returned, I wished to be able to do much more for the authors and the work I liked, and thus I branched out a bit onto the larger commercial market. This development explains the various imprints. The oldest imprint is that of my name, now Alan Swallow, Denver; it is continued but is branching out rapidly from the former rather exclusive interest in small editions of poetry, as witness recent fiction, the English Novelists Series, and all that. The Swallow Press, the joint imprint with Morrow, was designed to give certain of my books the ready-made facilities (I had neither the capital nor the interest in trying to create those facilities at the time) of a fairly large and successful commercial publisher. Sage Books was a happenstance; when I came to Denver after my Army experience to teach, I found here a man by the name of Critchlow who had worked with me before the war in Albuquerque, and we had actually published a few titles under the imprint Swallow and Critchlow. He was interested in continuing; thus we started that firm to specialize more in books out of the Western region of the U.S. The University of Denver Press was mostly happenstance, also. Certain people at the University were interested in seeing a university press here; as I was the only one around who pretended to be a publisher, I was pushed into the job of directing the Press. It is fun but unremunerative; work until (and if) it gets well on its feet. Our visual aids are interesting and I'll see that some are sent to you. It might be possible, if you like them, to work out some distribution for them over there. Behind all this lies an effort to make something coordinated out of my life. I did a little poetry (my third brief collection appears this fall, and I'll happily send you a copy), quite a bit of criticism (uncollected), and have done editorial work on several magazines, a couple of which I published myself. Then I teach creative writing, but I do not like to teach it in a vacuum. So I have tried to blend writing, teaching of writing, and working on publishing in an original, and perhaps rather unique, plan. The trouble is that my own writing has suffered tremendously the last couple years. My present time off this fall from teaching, on a Rockefeller fellowship, makes me hope to get a little done, particularly on the Defoe project -- perhaps a bit else, besides. My Ph. D. degree was taken in 1941 from Louisiana State University. I was there in the days of the famous Southern Review and my major professors were Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks; Mrs. Swallow served as secretary to the magazine for a year and a half while we were in Houston.

I have always expected financial failure as a publisher, and I think it will come. But I'm putting up a good battle, and there is a chance I'll win through, despite my interest primarily in belles lettres. I shouldn't be too sorry, I am told, because it will probably put me in an early grave, as with my father (who died at 52); but I will be sorry if it happens, for it is fun and is some good, I think. As with you, the spectre of another war -- insane, as I consider it to be, if it happens -- hangs daily a black pall over everything.

over

Our getting together would be the occasion for much good talk and some good mutual planning in publishing. I wish it could be! But I am tied by lack of money, too, and by teaching; I've been to New York once for 36 hours to arrange things with Morrow in 1936 and hardly get anywhere away from the Rockies (to California this summer to teach and make more money in the summer session there). But, like you, I think we must earnestly keep it in mind; I should make the trip at the first opportunity. If fortune shines well on me during the next period with the publishing, I shall have income to reduce teaching and get away more.

The idea of the International Novelists, with a larger book for each, sound most interesting. I think I could arrange to have this done, if it shapes up well, through Swallow Press-Morrow, and thus reduce my own responsibility of labor, since then Morrow would handle the whole distribution side and all that. Please count me in, at least until it shapes up otherwise. I believe in these series. Further, at the

VIA AIR MAIL

PAR AVION

SECOND FOLD

AIR LETTER

Mr. Herbert van Thal
Home and van Thal, Ltd.
36 Great Russell Street
London, W.C.1
England

IF ANYTHING IS ENCLOSED, THIS LETTER
WILL BE SENT BY ORDINARY MAIL

FIRST FOLD

first opportunity, I want to see the American Novelists, too. However, another firm has started a series of books on American writers (both poets and novelists), so that I think there is no hurry about it as yet.

As soon as I get through the press a complete list of Swallow Press-Morrow books, I want to send you copies of the lists of both imprints for your interest and reference. Let me know more about your plans. I think you do wonderfully to think up these plans and series! I just go along from manuscript to manuscript. I'm not a very creative publisher, as you are!

Surely we are at a point at which we ought to be calling each other by given names. I'm called simply "Alan." Do your friends call you "Herbert"?

## Novels

Four novels which represent some of the truly distinguished work in recent fiction.

* Burke, Jackson, *The Arroyo*: $2.75

Possibly the first American existentialist novel, an intense investigation of the frustrations and the answers of our culture.

* Fowlie, Wallace, *Sun Suicide*: $2.25

One of America's best-known critics has written an especially pleasing first novel filled with critical and important overtones.

Hawkins, Willard E., *Castaways of Plenty*: $.50

The ninth printing, fifteenth thousand, of this classic "parable for our times" in a low-cost edition...

Williams, John, *Nothing but the Night*: $2.25

In the person of Arthur Maxley, Mr. Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of the man who has suffered early traumatic experience. With fortunate economy and clarity, the story moves with ever increasing pace to the violent end. Hailed by the critics as one of the soundest psychological novels.

## Short Stories

Next to poetry, short stories are perhaps the most difficult writing to publish in a trade book. Here are three collections, by versatile and important writers, which make good reading anywhere.

Brookhouser, Frank, *Request for Sherwood Anderson and Other Stories*: $2.50

With true insight and real ability to tell stories, Frank Brookhouser writes of the shaping incidents in the lives of the "little man" and "little woman." "An important development of the literary short story," says Warren Beck.

Gonzales, N.V.M., *Seven Hills Away*: $2.00

*Twelve stories of the Philippines, among the world's tales of folk and land, warm and human tales of a people who have folk traditions, who clear land and till it, who live with love and laughter and sorrow.*

May, James Boyer, *For a New Era of Hate*: $2.00

Exciting, incisive stories which trace the intellectual history of the pre-war, war, and post-war periods.

*Published fall 1948.*