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continue until 2 a.m. the next night. After the first few days in New York, what is necessary is a strict regime of energy conservation.
    Is my book [
The Baron in the Trees
] displayed in the bookshops, either in the window or on the shelves?
    No. Never. Not in one single bookshop.
    Random House
    The real pain is that the managing editor, Hiram Haydn, after sponsoring
The Baron
has left Random House to found Atheneum, and Mr [Donald] Klopfer, the owner and founder, has no faith in the commercial possibilities of my book, talking to me in the same way as Cerati 18 does to Ottiero Ottieri. 19 Every bookshop received four or five copies of my book and whether they sold them or not, they don’t restock: what can the publisher do in these circumstances? The Americans don’t appreciate fantasy, it’s all very well getting good reviews (there was a wonderful one in Saturday’s
Saturday Review
), even the bookshop owner reads them and ought to know what to do. I manage to wring a promise from him to send Cerati to talk to the bookshop owners, but I don’t believe it will happen. However, I am having lunch with him on Thursday. I have learnt from the girls (I am always very impressed by them: in terms of its editorial department, Random House is one of the most serious publishers) that there have been mix-ups in distribution because of the IBM machines that Random House has just installed in its sales department: two machines had faults and so tiny bookstores in villages in Nebraska have received dozens of copies of
The Baron
, while major bookshops in Fifth Avenue have not received a single one. But the basic point is that the publicity budget for my book was only 500 dollars, which is nothing: to launch a book you have to spend half a million dollars, otherwise you will not achieve anything. The fact is that the big commercial publishers are fine when the book is a natural best-seller, but they are not interested in promoting the kind of book which first has to do well in terms of the literary élite: all they want is the prestige of having published it. At present they have three best-sellers: the new Faulkner, the new Penn Warren, and
Hawaii
by a commercial writer called [James Michener], and those are the ones they sell.
    Orion Publishers
    consists of two tiny rooms. This [Howard] Greenfeld is a bright, rich boy, but it’s difficult to understand what they want to achieve. However, since they only do very few books, they look after the commercial side, also as a kind of public relations exercise, and the
Italian Folktales
are everywhere, also because they come under children’s books even though Orion has done nothing to push the book in the children’s literature direction. On Sunday there was a review of it in the
New York Times Book Review
, very flattering as far as the Italian original was concerned but rightly critical of the translation.
    Horch
    She seems a woman who is on the ball, a fearsome old bird, but very warm and kind. She does not want to give
The Cloven Viscount
to Random House, who now want it, and I agree with her in keeping it for the smallest but most prestigious publishing house. So she will give it to Atheneum which will start publishing soon and it will certainly be a publishing event of tremendous importance since these are three highly prestigious editors who have got together: one is Haydn who used to be manager of Random House, another is Michael Bessie from Harper’s and the third is Knopf ’s son [Pat]. I have already made a bit of a mess of things because I made a promise to Grove who are sticking close to me, and indeed Grove books you find everywhere: they are the most fashionable books in avant-garde circles. Actually they did have an oral promise from Horch, but she wants to give the book to Haydn, and I also believe that Atheneum will be important.
    10 November
    Rosset
    The cocktail party at Barney Rosset’s of Grove was the most interesting party to have brightened up my days here