NYT Premium Content? 33-Year-Old Anecdotes

As we discovered from a reader’s tip, along with all the other bonus features available to New York Times TimesSelect subscribers, you get to read Dick Cavett‘s blog, where Wednesday night he posted a story about being told by bookstore owners that his publisher wasn’t supplying them with copies of his book…in 1974.

How old is this story? Cavett’s publisher was Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, one of the bookstores he visits is a Kroch-Brentano outlet, and his response to the book shortage is to get on the phone and demand to speak with William Jovanovich himself. When that doesn’t pan out, he threatens the president of HBJ that if the books don’t show up soon, “I’ll cancel the Dinah Shore Show, the Carson Show, the Today Show and all the rest of this so-called selling tour and come home.” All of which is not to say that TimesSelect readers weren’t lapping this stuff up: In fact, Sandra Holtzman even went so far as to take the opportunity to pitch her services. “I would love to write my next book with Mr. Cavett about how publishers need to market their books,” says the author of Lies Startups Tell Themselves to Avoid Marketing. “By the way I’m a professional marketer which makes the experience of working with publishers even more painful since I understand what ‘should’ be done as I watch it not happening.”

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