THE BUMBLE BEE
PARADOX:
An
Introduction to WRITER, Volume 4
by Richard A.
Lupoff
You may already
know this story, but just in case you don’t, please bear with me.
Seems
there was a professor who was fascinated by the behavior of bumble bees.
Apparently he’d had an encounter with one of the critters when he was a boy,
and developed a fascination—I’d almost say an obsession—with them. In fact he
spent a lifetime studying them. He became a professional entomologist and devoted
his career to studying bugs.
He
was particularly intrigued by the ability of bees to fly. He studied them for
many years, wrote learned papers on their biology and mechanics, and eventually
produced a book that became the standard reference work on bumble bees in
particular.
He
studied their dimensions, their physical structure, their nutritional systems,
their social organization, and their means of communication. Was it their
“dancing” or the sounds that they made that carried their messages from one to
another? Anything that anyone knew about
bumble bees, the professor knew. But as he would have been the first to admit,
he didn’t know everything about bumble bees. The great puzzle for him was the
secret of their flight.
As
anyone who has ever looked closely at a bumble bee is aware, they are rotund
creatures. Their body is suggestive of a barrel. Their weight is proportionate
to their size and shape. Their wings are thin, almost transparent. The
professor compared the weight, mass, and physical volume of the typical bumble
bee with the weight and volume of air that the bee’s volume occupied. He
measured the surface area, the muscular “hinges” with which the wings were
attached to the bee’s body, and the number of times per second that a bee’s
wings were moved while in flight.
The
professor’s calculations were applauded as a great contribution to the field of
entomology. In fact he received the annual Lifetime Achievement Award of the
International Association of Bumble Bee Enthusiasts. The award was represented
by a gold-plated bumble bee, enlarged to make every feature visible, which the
professor received at the annual conference of the IABBE, and thereafter
proudly displayed in a place of honor in his office.
There
was only one problem left in the professor’s life: How did the bumble bee fly?
The professor’s prize-winning measurements and calculations had proved beyond
all doubt that it was impossible for the bumble bee to fly. It was simply too
heavy and too voluminous for its gossamer wings to support.
Yes,
the professor had proved beyond challenge that it was impossible for the bumble
bee to fly.
One
day, as the professor had just reached the dramatic point of his carefully
prepared lecture, a student of the professor’s—a notorious jokester—sitting in
the front row of the professor’s classroom, removed a glass jar from his
backpack and unscrewed its lid. Happily freed from its imprisonment, the
largest bumble bee that the professor or any of his students had ever seen, emerged from the jar. It flew unerringly toward the
professor, stung him on the tip of his nose, and flew away, out an open window,
never to be seen again.
The
professor, nursing a bright red swelling on his nose, virtually collapsed
behind his desk, shaking his head sadly.
The
malefactor who had released the gigantic insect from its jar raised his hand.
Receiving a grudging nod from the professor, the student asked, “Golly,
professor, I guess that bee never read your learned paper on the subject of the
inability of bees to fly.”
The
professor thereupon invited the student to withdraw from his class.
*
* * * *
And
now we come to a bright morning several years ago. The scene is the home of my
longtime friend Michael Kurland in Petaluma, California. I had dropped in to
visit Michael, whom I found merrily perusing his morning’s mail. He had just
opened a circular which announced the creation of a new publishing firm.
The
firm was to be called Ramble House. It was the creation of two book-lovers,
Fender Tucker and Jim Weiler. Messrs. Tucker and Weiler had invented a new way
to publishing books. Or so they claimed. With little or no capital and even
less experience in the process of book production, of editing, typography,
proofreading, book design and binding, marketing, distribution, and finance—these
two partners—virtual babes in the woods when it came to running a publishing
operation—planned to create books with the assistance of a desktop computer,
word-processing software, and a portable printer. Once they had produced the
pages for a book, they would then bind them on an ironing board.
An ironing board?
Yes!
The
first project planned for Ramble House would be a uniform set of the complete
works of the late Harry Stephen Keeler. Not only would Ramble House print a new
edition of each of Keeler’s books ever published in the United States. It
happened that, late in Keeler’s career, he had been dropped by his publishers
in the US but his Spanish publisher had continued to issue his new works. In Spanish, of course. And eventually, Tucker and Weiler
discovered that there still remained Keeler books that had never been published
anywhere in the world. They managed to obtain publication rights to these
books, and added them to their list of forthcoming titles.
Impossible?
Yes!
But
like the giant bumble bee that had never read the professor’s works proving
that it could never fly—Tucker and Weiler remained unaware that their planned
publishing program was impossible.
Michael
Kurland and I had a good laugh at the planned program of Ramble House. Then we
went out for lunch and forgot the whole matter. Or I did, anyway. Michael will
have to speak for himself.
We
now fast-forward a few months to a bright spring morning. The scene is a
parking lot outside a convention center in Southern California. An annual book
show and sale catering chiefly to paperback collectors had ended the night
before. As I walked across the parking lot I ran into my friend Greg Ketter, a knowledgeable, honest and friendly book dealer
from Minnesota. I stopped to chat while Greg packed up his excess stock. As he
worked and I watched (an arrangement that I thoroughly endorse) I noticed an
odd little paperback book sticking out of one carton. It wasn’t much bigger
than a deck of playing cards.
I
asked Greg what the book was and he showed it to me. It was a novel by Harry
Stephen Keeler. It had been published by Ramble House.
Ramble
House!
Tucker and Weiler and a Harry Stephen
Keeler novel?
Obviously,
like the professor’s bumble bee, Tucker and Weiler had never learned that what
they were attempting was impossible. They had actually created Ramble House.
They were publishing books with a desktop computer, a portable printer, and an
ironing board!
As
best I can remember, that incident occurred in the blessed year 1999.
Ramble
House has been publishing books for a couple of decades now. I don’t know how
many titles are in their ever-growing catalog. Must be well over 500, and they
keep on coming. You can look at the back of the book you’re holding now and
you’ll see the list.
After
I’d read the book I bought from Greg Ketter—as I
recall, it was Keller’s novel The Man Who
Changed His Skin—I sent a congratulatory letter to Fender Tucker. He sent a
gracious reply. Turned out that he’d actually heard of me, and no less even had
copies of a couple of my books. We wound up corresponding, and eventually I
found myself doing a little freelance editing for Ramble House. That
arrangement worked out so well that Fender asked if I would create a private
label under the Ramble house umbrella. I talked the idea over with my wife and
she encouraged me to proceed.
All
we needed was a name for our enterprise. I didn’t have the ego to call it
Lupoff Books. And somebody else—I think a guy named Nixon—had already laid
claim to “Dick and Pat.” So we put the decision on hold, climbed into our Volvo
station wagon, and took our youngest offspring for an outing to the Steinhart
Aquarium in San Francisco.
While
there Pat and I admired a friendly dugong happily munching on a head of cabbage,
and a splendid, gigantic orange octopus (which our youngster insisted on
calling, “Pretty, Pretty”). But then we stood before a display case in which a
creature unlike anything we had previously encountered basked drowsily beneath
a warming spotlight. We couldn’t decide which of its two outstanding qualities
was more noteworthy: its laziness or its ugliness. I still can’t make up my
mind.
A
placard announced that it was a Surinam turtle.
I
turned to Pat and Pat turned to me and we nodded in unspoken agreement. This
was the totem of our publishing enterprise. Thus was christened the Surinam
Turtle Press.
It’s
been a long while now. Ramble House has outgrown its desktop-and-ironing-board
roots, but thanks to modern print-on-demand publishing technology it’s still
pretty much its original miniature enterprise. It has spread its tentacles
around the world. Fender Tucker is more of a business manager now, working from
his home in Mississippi. Most of the design and production work is in the
talented hands of Gavin O’Keefe in Australia. Veteran bookman John Pelan is one
of our editors, and I’m still involved with Surinam Turtle Press, although I’m
afraid I’ve slowed down more than a little in recent years.
I’ve
been proud of the selection of titles that we’ve issued via Surinam Turtle
Press. The present volume is something of a retrospective compilation of
introductory essays that I’ve contributed to STP books over the years. I hope
you’ll enjoy reading them. This small-scale publishing business has grown dramatically
in recent years, and the bonuses that we offer on many of our
titles—biographical and critical essays, new cover designs—add to their
appeal. At least, I hope so.
In
the meanwhile, Ramble House continues to grow. John Pelan is one of the world’s
leading authorities on so-called dark fantasies of both the pulp and pre-pulp
eras. He also has a background as a publisher. He has been responsible for
bringing dozens of scarce and expensive works back into print—to the delight of
fans, readers, and collectors. You’ll find titles from his private imprint,
Dancing Tuatara Press, intermixed with Ramble House’s own releases.
You’ll
also find an array of first-rate mysteries by Francis M. Nevins in the Ramble
House library. When Mr. Nevins doffs his hat as a talented author you may find
him wearing his attorney’s garb as Ramble House’s legal advisor, for he’s a law
school professor emeritus and one of the nation’s leading authorities on the
tangled web of copyright law.
And
if I may offer a tip of the Lupoff chapeau to Chris Mikul, Gavin O’Keefe’s
fellow Australian and a Ramble House author. Later in the present volume you’ll
find an essay devoted to the late Tiffany Thayer, in which I lament my
inability to turn up a copy of Thayer’s novel Dr. Arnoldi. Ah, but books are where you
find them, and Mr. Mikul turned up a copy of the Thayer opus where I’d been
stymied. You’ll find it now in the Ramble House catalog, along with a superb
introduction by Chris.
If
any of the books that you’ll read about in the present volume—plus its three
predecessors—whet your appetite, I’m sure that they’re available from Ramble
House. Just look at the last pages of this book and see what catches your
attention.
Running
Surinam Turtle Press has been a lot of fun. My thanks to
Fender and Jim, to Gavin and John, and to our brilliant legal advisor Mike
Nevins, for taking me on a great ride. Pick up a handful of our books.
I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of them!
Richard
Lupoff
Oakland,
California
2020
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