Stuart J. Wright | ཐུབ་བསྟན།

Two thousand and four was quite a year. I remember arriving home in London – from Luxembourg – at about 2am at the end of March 2004. A parcel from the University of Wisconsin Press that had recently been delivered to my flat in Archway was waiting for me: The proofs for my book, An Emotional Gauntlet: From Life in Peacetime America to the War in European Skies. A band that I was on tour with at the time, as a session player, had an XFM radio session in the morning, then a soundcheck for a gig in Islington. We were back on the road the next morning, and there wasn't time to open the parcel. After a gig in Nottingham, I skipped the bar, went to my hotel room and began reading the proofs. Following years of research and writing, seeing the pages of text and photographs professionally typeset was gratifying. The cover was not included, but I already knew what it was going to look like. I read two or three chapters, annotated a note or two in the margins, highlighted a couple of typos, and then left the proofs in my luggage for another week until returning to London.

It was eighteen years since I had first met Bill Eagleson, the veteran Eighth Air Force bombardier whose aircrew the book focusses on. Since subjective perceptions seem to contort time as we get older and time seems to speed up, with some decades becoming more compressed than others – requiring some kind of ongoing psychological/perspective re-adjustment – those eighteen years seemed like double the length of the subsequent twenty. And it was almost ten years since I decided to make some kind of book from eight years of correspondence with Bill. (If only my second book had come together so ‘quickly’.)

I had first contacted the University of Wisconsin Press in 1999. I was lucky that my manuscript caught the attention of Sheila McMahon, the acquisitions assistant (who went on to become the managing editor). Sheila expressed interest in the project on behalf of the University of Wisconsin Press, but it was clear that the manuscript was not ready. Nonetheless, as I recall, Sheila patiently responded to numerous emails, as I attempted to maintain some dialogue. The situation seemed promising considering that the Wisconsin Press had not actually rejected the project, as far as I could tell.

Around the same time, I received a rejection accompanied by a damning anonymous review from the University of Massachusetts Press. The reviewer made some fair points about a couple of run-on sentences in my text, and did not like the attention to the minutiae of daily life in England, including the chronological accounts of mission details – describing the dramatic and often terrifying ‘maximum effort’ missions as well as the relatively easy ‘milk runs’ perhaps in equal measure. It seems the reviewer wanted the thrilling war story, whereas I also wanted some balance, to recount the monotonous repetition of experiences in the air and on the ground. Or so I told myself, when it might actually have been an obsession with details, of not wanting to discard anything that might tell the story, especially as I always felt like the research itself was compromised in some ways. Moreover, there was a lack of time to become more objective, and I lacked experience and skills to be a great writer, or even above average. However, more seriously, the reviewer ‘corrected’ me on some historical details with, ironically, some historically inaccurate statements. I sent back a detailed response to the corrections, defending the draft andreferring to the reviewer’s own errors, but the editor was unresponsive.

After leaving the manuscript for the whole of 2000 and resuming in late 2001, I managed to undertake some additional research, edit, and rewrite, and then submitted a new draft to the University of Wisconsin Press. Raphael Kadushin (humanities editor at that time?) and Sheila McMahon responded with apparent enthusiasm. In spring 2002, the manuscript received very positive reviews from Martin Bowman (Eighth Air Force historian and author of numerous books) and Jerome Klinkowitz (professor of English and author of Yanks over Europe: American Flyers in World War II).

At the beginning of September 2002, I received an offer letter from the University of Wisconsin Press, followed by a contract. That September,  Betty Allen – sister of the original navigator from Bill’s crew, Donald Lawry, killed in action on 22nd February 1944 – was visiting London with her husband, Don Allen. I had met them in Wisconsin in 1998, and in Arizona earlier in 2002. But it was a particularly memorable moment to greet them in London with the letter from the University of Wisconsin Press, a few days before taking them on a trip to Norfolk, to the control tower museum at Thorpe Abbotts and then to Old Buckenham, the airbase of the crew featured in An Emotional Gauntlet.

Officially, the book was to be published via Terrace Books, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press. Somewhere down the line, I took some bad advice from someone or another, that it might be worthwhile finding a UK publisher as well, in order to market the book as effectively as possible in the UK. I recall Martin Bowman suggested Pen & Sword. The University of Wisconsin Press agreed, allowing Pen & Sword to publish the book in the UK under license. I had very little contact with Pen & Sword. Compared to the rewarding experience of working with the University of Wisconsin Press, my experiences of Pen & Sword were always underwhelming.

In the end, I submitted about 20,000 words above the agreed limit (of 80,000, if I recall correctly), but the Wisconsin Press accepted the manuscript without question. The editor, Susanne Breckenridge, made suggestions for very light changes, and allowed me to accept or reject all suggestions. We discussed various points along the way, and I learned a lot through that process. 

I managed to persuade the Wisconsin Press to let me include double the number of photographs than they had originally proposed – ultimately one hundred. I recall that Sheila Leary, outreach director, sought funds to make the inclusion of so many photographs possible (I understand that technology has changed, but back then, more photographs resulted in higher production costs). After years of searching for photographs via letters and emails – and then borrowing, copying, scanning, and returning them to their owners – all photograph files had been prepared for print (meticulous spot, scratch, and dust removal, curves adjustments, resizing, etc.) by my brother, Grant Wright, graphic designer with book publications experience. Grant also contributed maps and aircraft formation diagrams.

The Wisconsin Press wanted one of their tried-and-tested cover designers to take responsibility for the cover artwork. I expressed enthusiasm for the front cover design that Grant had already created, files were shared, and their in-house designer faithfully reproduced Grant’s cover. There had been some minor tweaks, a few millimetres this way or that, but it was essentially Grant’s design – all the elements, and all the colours, were the same. The proofs looked great.

Grant and I discussed that a page layout similar to that in Martin Bowman’s book Four Miles High might be interesting, as it seemed more ‘dynamic’ than straight columns of text aligned with the photographs. The Wisconsin Press were happy to consider our suggestions, and the in-house designer/typesetter, Kirt Murray, brought this to life. An intern at the Wisconsin Press, Nina Roy, was seeking indexing experience, and kindly did an excellent job of indexing for me. Additionally, Andrea Christofferson, Kara Zavada, Benson Gardner, and Carla Aspelmeier, all contributed to different stages of the project.

Receiving a copy of the book and seeing it for the first time in early September 2004 was incredible. It felt like perfection. There was only one thing that disappointed me – one detail that had slipped through the net: I had not seen proofs for the back cover. It said, “Cover design: Kristyn Kalnes”. Always helpful and accommodating, the University of Wisconsin Press agreed to modify the credit for the 2008 paperback edition after I suggested a compromise – “Cover concept: Grant Wright. Cover design: Kristyn Kalnes”.

Meanwhile, in spring 2004, Pen & Sword sent me their new catalogue, including An Emotional Gauntlet with a rather amateur-looking, ‘illustrated’ cover thumbnail – and the wrong subtitle. I immediately emailed Pen & Sword to express me alarm, and was told that it was just a temporary image for the sake of the catalogue (the wrong subtitle made its way onto one of the book’s several Amazon listings).

I spent September–October 2004 and September–December 2005 in the United States, partly doing new research, and sometimes promoting An Emotional Gauntlet. Some of the promotional events were later described in the ‘afterword’ of the 2008 edition. It’s true, the US version of the book essentially gained a short chapter containing about fifteen-hundred words and four additional photographs.

The Pen & Sword edition published in the UK in 2004 was a disappointment. In December 2004, a few days after being interviewed by BBC Radio Norfolk (no, not Alan Partridge – that’s the fictional Radio Norwich!). I arrived at the Second Air Division Memorial Room in Norwich library for a book signing. The location was, therefore, approximately – except for a devastating fire and subsequent reconstruction – the same place where I had first met Bill Eagleson, in March 1986. 

Boxes of books were waiting. Anticipating the book with which I had become familiar, but with a different publisher’s name and logo, I opened one of the boxes of books and got a first glimpse… of a smaller book! Pen & Sword had ‘downsized’ it. It was as if someone had gone to press ‘print’ without realising the settings were on ‘90%’. The pages felt a bit like plastic rather than pure paper, the type was smaller and therefore harder to read for some, and the Four Miles High page layout idea seemed to take a nosedive into the gutter. (Actually, the smaller version does not look so bad in the adjacent photographs, but the combination of the font size and the gutter margin of the Pen & Sword edition just feel like a compromise when holding the book to read.) There was a line of people reaching from outside the Second Air Division Memorial Room, wanting signed books for Christmas presents, but I felt a bit like I was promoting a bootleg version.

In hindsight, the licensing agreement was not good (lack of communication and transparency over sales and royalties being just one aspect of concern), and I wish that I had never persuaded the University of Wisconsin Press to consider the idea. Although the agreement meant that Pen & Sword could not sell copies in North America and the University of Wisconsin Press could not sell copies in Europe, there is a grey area as far as electronic versions are concerned, as a consequence of digital books being a new consideration back in 2004. Somehow, Pen & Sword are selling the first edition on Kindle – stripped of all page design and delivered in the blandest way possible, as Kindle does – not only via amazon.co.uk, but also via amazon.com and amazon.ca (contrary to the contractually agreed market territories regarding the print versions). Thus, the Kindle version does not have several corrections that improved the second edition, nor the 2008 ‘afterword’ with additional photographs. (I know nothing about the Apple Books version, but assume it is the same as the Kindle version.)

I cannot say enough about my experiences of working with the University of Wisconsin Press. Academic friends with experience publishing with some other university presses do not seem to have had comparable experiences. The University of Wisconsin Press provided me with some desk space and a computer during my visit to Madison to attend the Wisconsin Book Festival in October 2004, as well as overnight accommodation in the university; and I also stayed at the home of Sheila McMahon and her husband, before Sheila drove me to Freeport, Illinois, and then up to Evansville, Wisconsin, to have some meetings and deliver some books, and Andrea Christofferson kindly drove me an hour up to Wisconsin Dells where I caught an Amtrak train to Minneapolis, to continue my research on the Tibetan diaspora.

That was all twenty years ago.

Stuart J. Wright

Oxford, 31-03-2024