The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (31 page)

What I wanted was to get first look at most of the uncommitted new material by the pros. In the long run I wanted more than that. I wanted first look at most of the amateur stuff, too, and I also wanted to loosen some of the pros' commitments to
Analog
, F&SF, and all, but I had other, slower-acting strategies in mind for those efforts.

The money was only Step One in the campaign. Speed of reporting was almost as important, and so I made my first order of business every week to read and respond to the incoming manuscripts, not only the professional submissions but the slush pile as well. It was easy to beat out the competition in that arena. John Campbell ordinarily took a month or more to report. Horace had sometimes been far slower than that. Most of the other magazines had a two-tier system, preliminary reader and then editor; I did all my own reading, and I did it fast, and for at least ninety-five percent of the manuscripts either a buy or a bounce was on its way within forty-eight hours of the time I first saw the script. Of course, most were bounces. I trained my secretaries and assistants, when I had any, to open all incoming manuscripts, put a rejection slip on each one, and put it in an envelope stamped and addressed to go back to the writer. In the event I bought the story, that effort was wasted. But that only happened to one manuscript in twenty or fewer; and for all the others I could read them in the train on my way home to Red Bank and drop them off in the mailbox at the station when I arrived.

Of course, there was more to it than that, but just that much gave me a crack at more than half the stories I wanted. Nothing works perfectly. Some good stories slipped through my net. When they were good enough to make me covetous, I tried to let the author, or his agent, know how I felt, hoping that the next one would come my way.

Once or twice I lost out on a story I really had every right to expect, and that was painful. Cordwainer Smith was one of my favorite writers. He was also a recluse, who didn't want too much contact with the science-fiction world, but we had become friends and he had voluntarily promised to give me first look at everything he wrote. Unfortunately, he had taken on an agent. The agent was willing to live by Paul's
*
commitments, but he also had certain standard rules of procedure. One was that he never under any circumstances submitted two stories by the same writer to an editor at one time. When Paul happened to finish two scripts on the same day and sent them off to the agent in the same envelope, the agent sent me the one he liked best and mailed the other off to
Fantasy and Science Fiction
. By the time I found out about it, they had already accepted it, which is why I didn't get to publish "On Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard"; but I then persuaded that agent to change that rule.

It was
Galaxy
that I was trying to make the leader in the field again.
If
was only a stepsister, but I had a good use for it. Most writers are in-and-outers, something good and then a few that are not so good. The best ones I wanted for
Galaxy
. The others I didn't. It's hard to deal with that sort of writer when you have only one magazine. You can't publish everything without sacrificing overall quality. But you know perfectly well (assuming the author is as good as you think he is) that someone else will publish the ones you turn down. There is always the risk that the suitor who soothes his feelings by buying the one you bounced will win him away with the next good one, too. If, with its lower rate, gave me a perfect dumping ground for the stories I didn't want to print in
Galaxy
but didn't want anyone else to have, either.
If
was also a good place to try out new talent.

There were, at least in my head, significant policy differences between the two magazines. Good gray
Galaxy
was the class leader. It paid a lot more for what it published, and took a lot more planning and care.
Galaxy
was edited for the mature, sophisticated science-fiction reader. If you could read only one magazine in the field but wanted to be
au courant parfaitement
,
Galaxy
was the magazine to read.

If
was for the younger reader, and the newer, and the less involved. Editing
If
was almost recreational. If I had a whim not solid enough to call an inspiration, I tried it in
If
. In terms of literary quality and significance, I have no doubt that
Galaxy
was a better magazine than
If
, but
If
was a lot easier to turn around. It was cheaper to produce. Its budget was lower. It had less of a distinguished history for the readers to compare the current product against. I was able to make
If
show a profit long before
Galaxy
did.

And it was
If
that caught the fancy of the readers. What was fun for me seemed to be fun for them. Or maybe it was for another reason.

Early on I was sitting with another editor at a world convention banquet when Hugo time came around. He picked up the best-editor trophy. I was as generously congratulatory as my mean little envious spirit would allow. He mumbled something, glowered at his coffee cup for a while, and then leaned over and whispered in my ear: "You know, considering how little I've done on the magazine the past couple of years, it begins to look like the less I do the better the readers like it." It was almost the same with me. I never won a Hugo for
Galaxy
, but I won three in a row for its little stepsister,
If
.

By the time my stores of cheap stories were running low, the magazines were showing signs of returning financial health. I hit Bob up for a budget increase. He smiled and tousled my hair and told me six dirty jokes. I came back to it the next week, and the week after, and when he had used up all the dirty jokes he knew, he gave in. Sweet Old Bob! I always called him that. Or sometimes just the initials.

The next step was to make the magazines monthly, and that was a whole nother story. Alarmed by the fact that he had lost the battle of the budget, Bob summoned up reinforcements.

The thing about Bob Guinn was that he knew he wasn't a publisher, and so he decided to hire a publisher to do the job for him. Now, this will seem strange to many writers and editors.
What
job? they will ask. What is it that a publisher d
oes
do?

I can understand this confusion, because I have worked for and with a lot of publishers in my day, and I am still not sure exactly what it is that some of them were doing. One used to lock himself in his 16' X 28' office every morning and read comics. Another spent his first year of incumbency in taking every single employee off the job he was doing and putting him on some other job, so that no one in the office but he would know exactly what was going on. Another spent his time padding down the office corridors and peering in at each desk to make sure the person was sitting there. Another was hired, I think, mostly to yell. There are some great creative publishers in the world—Oscar Dystel and Ian Ballantine are the two I see the most of—but there are also hell's own herd of turkeys.

Nevertheless, there are certain publishing functions which have to be done. They aren't fun or glamour things, but they make an immense difference to the success of a publication. In large corporations they are divided among a multitude of departments, and the publisher's main function is as a sort of KP-pusher, making sure that everybody does his job and knocking heads together when needed. Galaxy Publishing Corporation was nothing like that. The editorial, promotion, publicity, and advertising departments were combined into one person, me. That left out a lot of nitty-gritty, mostly production and distribution. Production is a matter of seeing that type is set and paper is on hand and copies are printed and bound. That was Bob's area of special expertise as a printing broker, anyway, so there was no problem in leaving that to him. Distribution is concerned with keeping the national distributor on his toes, checking his draw-and-return figures to see that copies of the publication are going more or less where they might be bought instead of to six all-night delicatessens in LaPorte, Indiana. Bob was less good at that, but even so, better than I was.

Dealing with distributors is not the most fun there is. The standards of the trade are higher now than they used to be, but there was a time when your average local wholesaler had got most of his training in the newspaper circulation business, in the days when the standard ploy for bettering your sales was to tip over the other fellow's delivery trucks. One national distributor of a few years ago was run by a troika. Two of them had served time in prison, and the other had got his start peddling pirated song sheets, I took a couple of local wholesalers to a science-fiction convention once and showed them the costume ball. One femme fan had a lovely butterfly costume, weeks of painful sewing and a lot of creative thought; the two wholesalers showed their first signs of interest when she came by. One said, "Hey, I like that," and the other said, "Me, too. Will she fuck?"

Bob was not too rarefied a soul to be exposed to such crudities, but even he came back from some excursions into distribution with horror on his face. There was a large newsstand near his summer home; it sold six or eight hundred copies of
The New York Times
every Sunday . . . and two copies of
Galaxy
every month. Bob suggested to the dealer that he ask for more. The dealer said he had, dozens of times. The two copies he did get he kept under the counter for regular customers, and he was sure he could sell plenty more. But the distributors would not be bothered. So Bob took fifty copies out of the warehouse and put them in the back of the car, and the dealer put them on his shelves. And forty-six of them sold. And so Bob went triumphantly to the wholesaler and said, "See? Why don't you ship them fifty copies every issue now?" And the distributor said (paraphrasing out some of the more colorful parts), "Why, no, Mr. Guinn, I wouldn't care to do that, and because of that dealer's presumption we won't ship him any copies of
Galaxy
at all any more."

Well. That was a while ago, and the elder statesmen of the distribution business have now largely retired to their villas outside Palermo. The new generation is a lot easier to get along with. But still it is no job for an amateur.

So when Bob proposed to employ a professional publisher, I was all for it. In due course into the office came Sol Cohen, former VP at Avon Books, recently retired with enough capital-gains on his stock participation to be in little need of employment, but not ready to quit working entirely.

I spent a lot of time with Sol over the next couple of years. He has strengths and weaknesses. In the right place he would be a valuable natural resource for a publishing company. I don't think Galaxy was the right place. The size of the numbers involved was an order of magnitude smaller than he was used to. His experience was with paperback books, rather than with magazines. And he had much too much interest in the editorial aspects of the business to suit me. We had that out early. After a few tentative engagements he never interfered with my editorial decisions on the magazines but took out his ambitions on side ventures: a series of anthologies for a small paperback house; a book-magazine hybrid of our own called "Magabook," which struggled through a couple of issues but never really got off the ground. What he did do was spend a lot of time with the distributor, which I welcomed a lot. What I welcomed less was that on any major changes of policy I now had two people to convince instead of one.

My big remaining ambition was to make both
Galaxy
and
If
monthly. I had totally failed to persuade one person. Confronting two was disheartening. But I wanted it too much to accept defeat. While both magazines were in the red I could see that it wasn't a good idea to lose twice as much by bringing one of them out twice as often. But then, when
If
struggled its way into the black, I announced that it was now time to switch it over to a monthly schedule. really?" said Bob, and "That's a big step, Fred," said Sol; and the two of them went off and conferred. They came back with the decision that it wasn't a good idea to mess with a profitable proposition by making a change in frequency, either. Oh, shit, I said, look! If you don't want to go monthly when it's losing
because
it's losing, and don't want to go monthly when it's making
because
it's making, then when, pray, is the time when one
does
go monthly? They admitted that was a good question. They talked it over for another eternity or two and then, reluctantly, agreed to roll the dice for an experimental period. We'll make
If
monthly for six months, they said. No promises beyond that! If it's doing all right at the end of the six months, we'll keep it up. If not, back to bimonthly and no more arguments. Fine, said I, my heart singing.

That meeting took place in the afternoon of the last Thursday in August of 1962. I know the date well, because the next day I was to leave for the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. In fact, that was why I had pressed the issue at that time. What I was trying to do was to generate and maintain momentum. I had bumped the rates, improved relations with a lot of writers, got some talk going, acquired some significant stories. The next thing I wanted was to be able to tell that convention that
If
was going to be monthly again. Happy as I knew how to be, I went home and packed, collected Carol, caught a plane, and arrived in Chicago to find a telegram waiting at the hotel:

ON NO ACCOUNT MENTION POSSIBLE MONTHLY SCHEDULE FOR IF PENDING FINAL DECISION.

SOL