2. When the Library of America was launched in 1982, the critic Hugh Kenner wrote an interesting critique in Harper’s arguing that the emerging list (Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Beecher Stowe) was a very constricted, very conservative New England canon.
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13. Hugh Kenner, far-seeing and prophetic, is linked to the Lord of the Rings piracy saga. In the early 1960s, he noted that there was no paperback edition of the trilogy & thought there was a market for it. It was Ace (operating on its own) that took advantage of the gap.
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14. As tawdry and criminal as they sometimes were, Ace Books was, to judge by the Library of America, one of the most important American publishers of the 1960s, the publisher that launched Dick, Delany, Le Guin, Russ, Lafferty, Zelazny, and many others who are now canonical.
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15. My essay on Delany explores how he himself was emblematic of the blurring line between literary fiction and genre back in the 1960s. That's one reason he and Le Guin are so important. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1592-samuel-r-delany-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-super-emnovaem …
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16. The next step, of course, will be to get the LOA to make this dream project -- a Samuel R. Delany set -- real.pic.twitter.com/afoX6sOQKm
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Of course, another view might be "Ace exploited the negligence of Houghton Mifflin to publish a legal (though unauthorized) edition". The Kirkus Reviews summary of the affair (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/unauthorized-lord-rings/#continue_reading_post …) is a little fuzzy on the legal details...
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The raison d'être of the Berne Convention (https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/ …) is to limit these sorts of shenanigans. Of course, we didn't formally implement it until much later than many others...
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hence the JRR Tolkien admonition on (i think) Bantam paperback edition that he appreciates readers who respect the authorized editions
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