A few minutes ago, I wrote to my personal Magical Godmother News email list as follows:
Back in the olden days, I had an agent trying to market a book called Beyond Nudity: The Magic of Human Adornment. This was the VERY olden days–1977. I had seven boxes of slips of 5×5 paper, mostly hand copied from sources ordered through InterLibraryLoan (only that involved a trip to the University library and filling out a form with a ballpoint pen. I copied most of them from the books myself in very small calligraphy with a gold fountain pen. A small number were typed from the books by a paid assistant. A tiny number were pasted from Xerox copies of materials short enough to cut and paste (with scotch tape, not flour and water library paste mixed with arsenic to repel literal bookworms).
The agent eventually gave up after telling me that I should by no means write more than two sample chapters of the book until I had a book advance large enough to guarantee a big promotion campaign. I was–as has always been my pattern–about ten years ahead of the curve. In 1977 no one published books about magic. Go to Amazon.com these days. My how things have changed. In 1987, I would have been catching the beginning of a rising curve both for magic and for the internet.
After my agent failed to sell the book and suggested I try to market one on Women in Nineteenth Century America as a spin off from Founding Mothers, I lost my enthusiasm. In retrospect, as Founding Mothers is still earning royalties, this was a bad decision from an economic viewpoint.
Anyway, if I was 37 years old today and beginning my research, this is the kind of story I would have snapped up.http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/09/23/emergency-remove-bra/
I actually did have a story I collected in the ‘seventies about a metal bra sold in Japan to repel groping in the subway.
