Ask me to write the foreword or introduction to your next book!
Reasonable rates and few regrets
Many years ago I wrote an foreword (it was to this book), and at the time I assumed I would just be dashing off prefaces left and right from then on, an assumption that proved false, I have never been asked to write another.
You, dear reader, could change all that. If you have a book, fiction or nonfiction, I will gladly write a foreword or introduction for a low low price, probably something like a $15 gift card to bookshop.org, or even just a friendly smile. Just ask and I’ll give you a foreword.
And this, below, is the foreword I will give you.
An introduction is an opportunity to convey something about a book, but it is also an opportunity to behave like a giant jackass.
I was reminded of this fact as I was taking a book off my shelf, where it had been nestled between my much-praised work of historical mischief, Impossible Histories, and my young readers’ collection of sorcerous lore, Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers. The nestled book in question was The Hugo Winners vol. 3, an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov and with introductions to each story by him as well. To introduce Theodore Sturgeon’s Hugo-winning story “Slow Sculpture,” Asimov begins by reminiscing about the last time he saw Sturgeon, but quickly segues into the time he, Asimov, was at an awards dinner and dashed off an impromptu limerick, which, when he recited it to the crowd, “got the biggest laugh of the evening.” Asimov pauses to mention his two collections of limericks, with bibliographic information for the curious. The impromptu limerick does not appear in these collection, so Asimov reprints it, in this introduction, “for posterity.”
Neither my acclaimed collection of alternate history scenarios (Impossible Histories again), nor my strange, funny, equally acclaimed novel Sudden Glory, nor the sundry acclaimed entries in the Apprentice Academy series have required outside intervention in the form of a foreword or introduction, so I must turn my attention to other people for a moment as I continue this universal history of behaving badly through prefatory remarks.
In 1896, Robert Brown (Ph.D., M.A., F.L.S., says the title page) edited a seventy-year old memoir by John Jewitt, who had been in his youth (again according to the title page) the Only Survivor of the Crew of the Ship Boston, During a Captivity of Nearly Three Years, Among the Indians of Nootka Sound in Vancouver Island. A brief metaintroduction to the 1896 volume mentions that Brown died while finishing up the book, and also that he was a frustrated would-be botanist—one of those random small details that proves of vital importance later in this well-made play. This time it explains why Brown, in his own long, scholarly, and thorough introduction, engages not only in his reminiscences of his more pleasant sojourn to Nootka Sound in Vancouver Island, but also in the eccentricity…oh, I may as well just quote him.
Gay were the thickets of thimbleberry1 and salmonberry2 wherever the soil was rich [when Brown was in Vancouver], and for miles the ground was carpeted with the salal,3 while the huckleberry,4 the crab-apple,5 and the flowering currant6 varied the monotony of the gloomy woods. In places the ginseng, or, as the woodmen call it, the “devil’s walking-stick,”7 with its long prickly stem and palm-like head of great leaves, imparted an almost tropical aspect to scenery which, seen from the deck of our little craft, looked so like that of Southern Norway, that I have never seen the latter without recalling the outer limits of British Columbia. On the few flat spits where the sun reached, the gigantic cedars8 and broad-leaved maples9 lighted up the scene, while the dogwood,10 etc.
Please note that those footnotes are all Brown’s. And, indeed, at the bottom of the page, we find:
And not just that one page! The list just goes on! Gradually you realize that Brown has trotted out the story of his travels, and perhaps even chosen to write an introduction to this old and musty memoir, simply as an excuse to list every plant he could think of, with binomial duly footnoted! What a jerk!
Only Brown’s untimely death prevented him from spending years explaining that he had to include the scientific names, in case his readers were confused by his use of ambiguous terms like “maple” or “dogwood.”
Asimov and Brown are two of the shining lights in introductory jackassery. The Law of Threes, so-called, would seem to demand a third example of a real jerk of an introducer, but I am drawing a blank right now, so I will return to counting the money generated by people licensing this introduction.
Rubus Nutkanus.
Rubus spectabilis.
Gaultheria Shallon.
Vaccinium ovatum.
Pyrus rivularis.
Ribes sanguineum, now a common shrub in our ornamental grounds.
Echinopanax horridum.
Thuja gigantea, a tree which to the Indian is what the bamboo is to the Chinese.
Acer macrophyllum.
Cornus Nuttallii.