Amanda Cockrell

I am moving this blog to Substack which has lots of nice features including the ability to post multiple photos. I am hoping that will inspire me to keep up with it, at least once a month.  I will leave the archives up here, but this is a link to subscribe to the Substack. It's free, don't let them talk you into paying. I never intend to charge for it.

What We Keep

My mother's chapter book fairy tale, Shadow Castle, was first published in 1945. My first edition copy is fragile, since it was produced, as the front matter states, "in full compliance with the government's regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials" during World War II. While she was writing it, her husband, my father, was in the Pacific somewhere (Iwo Jima as she later learned) and a stay in Fairyland must have been a welcome retreat from the daily news.

In the late 1960s the publisher licensed it to Scholastic for sale at school book fairs and it had a renewed life in a small paperback edition priced at 60 cents. At that time, a copyright ran for 28 years and could be renewed for another 28, which the publisher should have done in 1973. They didn't, a fact that my mother was unaware of until an outfit aptly named Buccaneer Books began to offer an edition on Amazon in the late 1990s. She found out when she got a fan letter saying how glad the reader was to have found this childhood favorite again.

My mother was ordinarily an even-tempered woman but the things she had to say about Buccaneer Books as well as the original publisher whose fault this all was, would curl your hair.

There was nothing we could do about it legally — in 1976 copyright law had changed to an automatic provision of 70 years plus the life of the author, but it was not retroactive for books whose copyright had been allowed to expire. The book was irrevocably in the public domain.

There was however a secret stash of eight unpublished chapters that the editor at the original publisher had cut for length, choosing those because she thought they contained the two scariest storylines. (They would not, I might add, make a modern child turn a hair.) And the Authors Guild had just launched its Back-in-Print program, through which its members could republish their own out of print books. We couldn't stop Buccaneer Books, but we could re-release our own edition with those additional chapters and copyright it as the Author's Expanded Edition.

So we did, putting on some speed since my mother was ninety at that time and I wanted her to see it in print. She died at the end of the year but had the satisfaction of seeing Buccaneer Books' version fade from the listings.

Self-publishing was not yet a simple matter in 1999 and the AG program was a godsend. You had a limited choice of cover formats and colors but their work was excellent and they walked me through positioning the original illustrations, correcting the OCR text, and the added complication of blending in the extra chapters, including finding a way to reuse the lovely illustrated initial capitals for the new chapters. Each chapter had to start with a letter we already had, but fortunately there was T for "The" and a W for "When" and an M for "Mika" the main character.

After she died I didn't have the heart or the time to do much more with it, satisfied just to see our version in print, but it ticked along, making small but regular sales to people looking for their childhood favorite for a child or grandchild or just their own collection. As self-publishing became easier, the AG program faded out a bit, another company took over the distribution, and made changes I didn't like to the cover and the type size. I kept saying I should take it back and publish it myself. I also kept not doing that because I had a fairly good idea of how much time I have the capacity to devote to business type matters before I go mad. Then the new company changed their accounting from Reasonably Transparent to Opaque Like a Brick Wall. I lost my temper over it at the same time that a friend launched a small press.

So now there is a beautiful new edition from Chapin Keith Publishing, which will manage the business end of it and let me keep my fingers in all the literary and artistic bits. We have increased the type size, and recreated the beautiful cover that adorned the 1945 hardback, using the original painting which the illustrator gave to my mother all those years ago.

I love it all over again. I can see my mother so clearly in it, particularly her love of all the wild things, and her curiosity — she would absolutely have followed a small dog into a tunnel through a mountain. I see too her clear-eyed view of matters other people might not care to look at. At one point Mika gives Gloria a magical bracelet to protect her. She puts it on and sees goblins all around her. They don't seem to be able to get at her but they are clearly there. She takes it off again in a hurry. Then she puts it back on because now that she knows they're there, she would much rather see them than not.

I think there are echoes of the war in the goblins that haven't bothered Fairyland for decades and now are suddenly here again with their poisoned claws and their sense that they can have anything they want, and I can't help thinking that might be timely again eighty years later.

I hope you'll want to have this lovely new edition for your child's library or your school's or just your own.