September 8 Wednesday – In Elmira Sam wrote to J.M.G. Wood (on the letter addressed to Jack G. Wood, Aurite City, La. Sam’s letter is obviously a response to one received (not extant), an invitation to read:
I wish I could but I can’t. I never venture to read when I am writing anything, lest I get my attention diverted from my work, & have a long, hard pull of it getting back into the swing again.
Sam answered the writer’s questions about the value of publishing first in a magazine then in book form, and said this about the “slush pile” of submissions to editors, something which may no longer be a truism:
It [an article submission] will get honest attention; for there is one thing that does not happen in this world, the popular superstition to the contrary notwithstanding: it does not happen that an unknown author’s MS is cast aside uncarefully examined by the editors of a great magazine. It would not be “business.” As Mr. Gilder said to me once, “If the Brazilian miner scorned to ransack the ruck-heap, he wouldn’t ever find any diamonds” [MTP].
Note: This was likely not John George Wood (1827-1889), famous British naturalist and writer, who lectured in Boston and spent some time in the U.S. Benussi offers that a J.M.G. Wood published two volumes A Case of Jealousy: A Comedy in Two Acts, and A 10,000 wager, Farce in Two Acts — and later also others; sometimes he is identified at I.M.G.
Bacheller & Co., the first American newspaper syndicate, wrote to Sam asking if he would,
…write a short article suitable for publication Christmas Day for our syndicate of newspapers….Anything you might feel disposed to write on any conceivable subject even if it were very short we would be glad to get” [MTNJ 3: 264n127]. (See Sam’s answer Sept. 15).
Addison Irving Bacheller (1859-1950) was a New York journalist and writer who founded the first modern newspaper syndicate in the U.S., bringing English writers such as Conrad, Doyle, and Kipling to American readers. Webster & Co. Would publish his The Master of Silence: A Romance (1892).