THE WAY IT WASN'T - James Laughlin - New Directions

Generous bookseller friends gave me this astonishing book for my birthday.

James Laughlin sometimes referred to as "the playboy publisher" was a poet, ladies' man, bon vivant, heir to a steel fortune, but above all he should be remembered as the founder in 1935 of New Directions, the publishing house that went out on a limb and championed the works of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Vladimir Nabokov and many others. Many of these writers, now regarded as part of the mainstream, were, back then, seen as alternative types who were largely unpublishable. Because of his private fortune he was not only able to take risks in publishing them but he kept many of them in print for years after their sales no longer justified it.

Now New Directions has published this new work, a huge, eccentric, massively illustrated book that comprises diary entries, odd snippets, photos and drawings , pieces of verse, illustrations of book jackets, excerpts from Laughlin's notes and papers, all presented in alphabetical order.

Laughlin died in 1997 at the age of 83. At the time he was working on his "auto-bug-offery" and it is from these files that the editors/compilers - Barbara Epler (Editor-in-Chief at New Directions) and Daniel Javitch (Laughlin's son-in-law & Professor of Literature at NYU) - have drawn the material.

The Way it Wasn't is gossipy, funny, fabulous - a delight for book lovers everywhere.

Thank you Philip & Sarah. It's a gem that I shall treasure.