The following article was adapted by ScienceWriters from a talk by Dava Sobel at a meeting of the Women's National Book Association in New York City on November 11, 1996. Sobel is a freelance writer in East Hampton, NY.
This book had the most inauspicious beginning imaginable: as a failed proposal for a magazine article. I had heard of this longitude symposium that was being held at Harvard University. It sounded funny to me, but the person setting it up was someone I admired so much that I figured the meeting would have to be terrific.
I tried to get every magazine I wrote for to agree to send me, but everybody had the same negative reaction: That's weird, esoteric stuff. Who would want to read about that? So I finally gave up. I was turned down by the Smithsonian, National Geographic, even Harvard Magazine, where I had been a contributing editor, and where the symposium was being held!
And then, two days before the symposium, the editor called me up and said, we've changed our minds. Do you think you could drop everything and come up after all? Which I did. But I was totally unprepared, I hadn't done my homework like a good science writer should.
So I had the experience of learning all of this material for the first time. And it was fascinating stuff. I couldn't believe how good it was. There were 500 people at this symposium! When I first heard that all the world's experts were coming, I thought, you know, go wild-seven, eight people -- but it was a tremendous thing, and they were an interesting mix-a lot of clock collectors, historians, museum curators, geographers, cartographers, rare book collectors... The audience was as interesting as the speakers.
The magazine made it the cover story. They printed the picture of the most beautiful sea clock of them all on the cover, full bleed. And so my publisher at Walker, who was a Harvard alumnus, saw that article and called me up. He thought it could be a book. I had just spent a year trying to sell it as a magazine article, and now it was a book overnight, without even a proposal.
I thought he was completely crazy, but he was very nice, and the offer, even though it was for next to no money, was absolutely irresistible, because he was as excited about the story as I was. Walker is a small family-owned company, had never had a New York Times bestseller. I was thinking, my mother and a small circle of intimate friends, who else would read it?
Walker went to a lot of extra expense to make the cover beautiful. They hired an outside designer, who had worked at Knopf, and I think it really looks like a Knopf book, classy-and small. It was a short book, because we thought to expect people to read through a long book about longitude would be truly suicidal, but they gave it fat boards, and thick paper, so even though it's small, it has some heft to it. I really think that a lot of its success had to do with the fact that it looked like a novel; it was physically attractive. Of course I like to think it's extremely well-written, but we all know that's not enough to get on a bestseller list, by any means.
George Gibson was an excellent editor. When I turned in the manuscript and waited that week or two weeks, not breathing, he finally called and said, well, it's very good, but it could be great.
At the very end, ... he hired an outside eidtor who was known as the cuteness editor.
Rewriting was a wonderful learning experience. At the very end, when I'd been through everybody at the company, he hired an outside editor who was known as the cuteness editor. There was a feeling that I had gotten a little too cute in places with my humor, and I needed to be rolled back.
Luckily she really liked the book, because she did such a brutal job on me that if I hadn't felt supported by her, it would have been devastating. But she came up with three categories of cuteness, and as she went through the book, she would just write in the margin, level one, level two, level three. It was astounding, but very helpful. There's still a couple of lines that I still miss, but I went along with her, I would say 99 percent.
The first printing was 10,000, which to me seemed enormous, for a book with a title like "Longitude." I still have people come up to me and say, what is it about? With that many copies coming out, I figured I would probably have most of them in my garage, forever.
But it just started to go. One of the first good things that happened was the idea to send the manuscript to Patrick O'Brian for a blurb. We felt that his readers, if they knew about the book, would be interested, because Captain Jack is always taking his sextant and shooting Arcturus, and magically knowing where he is. I still haven't figured out what it is that he does, that lets him know where he is. But O'Brian talks about it a lot. Nobody knew him, and we just sent him the manuscript cold. He read it and liked it, gave us a wonderful puff, and that was a great help.
And then we started to get good reviews. I was in Miami at a ballroom dance competition, and I knew the book was going to get reviewed in the Times because on Monday of that week, "The Island of the Day Before" was reviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. The word "longitude" was mentioned three times in the review and I thought, he's read it. By the third mention I thought, not only has he read it, he liked it. But I had to wait until Thursday to find out.
I came back about 2 a.m. Wednesday night-Thursday morning, and George called me. He had picked up the next day's Times and read it to me over the phone. I just sat there in a daze. When he finished I said, read it again. It was the most unbelievable feeling, because I'd read Christopher Lehmann-Haupt all my life. I'd never met him, even when I worked at the Times, because the science department at that time was up on the fourth floor behind the sports department. We were never in the newsroom. So I really didn't know anybody.
To get that kind of review from him was just phenomenal. It improved my dancing, because the next day, we had to perform alone on this gigantic dance floor, and I remember walking out there saying to myself, this is not my real life. In my real life, I'm a writer, and I've just gotten a rave review in the New York Times, so I was completely calm and we took first place.
This book was really a creature of the independent bookstores. They made it and pushed it. And so many good things were happening, that I finally had to say to George that I didn't really deal all that well with good news, I was better in tragic situations, Then one night, he called and said, I'm really sorry, but there's one more good thing. It's on the New York Times bestseller list.
And every time I saw that L-word on the bestseller list, I thought, this has got to be somebody's idea of a joke. The cover blurb says: "The story of John Harrison, the 18th century Englishman who invented the marine chronometer." That sounds like a bestseller, right?
Then the paperback sale came along. This failed proposal for a magazine article went to auction, and got purchased to my great delight by Viking Penguin, which has been yet another wonderful experience.
Viking publicity arranged a real live book tour, which of course, the hard cover never had. I've been going to museums and libraries, which has been very rewarding and a lot of fun.
I actually got invited to speak at the Explorers' Club, soon after the hard cover came out, but the invitation was immediately rescinded on the grounds that I was not a real explorer. And I could understand that, no hard feelings. Then they called me back again because the members were so interested in the topic, they wanted to find some kind of loophole through which they could squeak me into the lecture series.
They wanted to know, had I gone around doing research? I said, I don't think going to London and hanging around museums is exploration: it's just not the same thing. They said, think of something. I remembered that when I was a child, my parents were sailors, and my father had an unbelievable knack for getting us into a hurricane every summer. My mother would be on the deck saying, throw me overboard, somebody please throw me overboard, and I'd have to be lashed to the deck sometimes. I told him this and they said, that will do. So I got into the Explorers' Club.
It took a long time for this book to sell in England. The book was purchased by another very small company, and it came on the London Times bestseller list at number one and stayed there for eight weeks.
Then it got a sort of negative review, but you know, I wasn't at all offended by it because it started off saying that the book had all but outsold the Bible, so how offended can you be after an opening like that?
It was such a phenomenon that a BBC radio talk show did an entire segment on the fact that Longitude had gotten a negative review. They called me on the phone to defend myself. And I thought, you know, if I had paid this guy to write a negative review, I don't think I could have gotten better publicity.
I'm fully aware that I'm living the dream of 200 lifetimes. I just watch it all with surprise and delight.