Beau, given the development of of this book over the years, what was the rational of including MOON OF THE TREES BROKEN BY SNOW to begin with? I remember being initially disappointed when it was removed in the 1989 revised edition, but realized very quickly how out of place it was after reading the then-newly added selections.
#1. "RE: YONDERING question for Beau..." In response to Reply # 0
Paperback short story collections have tended to be simply a dumping ground for material that has been published elsewhere. Or they reflect a particular editor's taste and that editor puts them together recognizing that they will only organize the one book on that particular author and so there isn't an "entire career" sort of perspective.
Neither of those issues relate to the creation of Yondering BUT it's important to realize that Dad put it together in an environment that accepted such lackadaisical standards. He liked "Moon of the Trees" and wanted to publish it somewhere other than an airline magazine. So he stuck it into Yondering. To his credit it wasn't a Western, he knew he was creating a different sort of collection, he just wasn't disciplined about what was different about that story.
He also didn't go to the trouble (and it would have been a LOT of trouble given the messy state of his office) to find every single one of the Yondering stories. He got a bunch together, that was good enough, and he moved on.
The same thing happened with the Ponga Jim Mayo adventure stories. Bantam dumped a bunch of them into the West From Singapore collection but they missed two. Did Dad remember which stories were Mayo s and which weren't? I don't know. Did Bantam care that thy got them all into one book? I don't know, they would have needed to bother to ask my Dad if they had them all. Basically, no one cared ... and that's just the way paperback collections were done in those days. I can remember as a kid reading Robert Heinlein or Larry Niven short story collections and finding the same story in multiple collections by the same publisher. It really fried me.
The bottom line is that paperback were looked at by EVERYONE in the business as if they were magazines ... to be discarded and forgotten. They were EXPECTED to go out of print and vanish from history. They were EXPECTED to fall apart and be thrown in the trash. The entire mentality of the business was based on the magazine business. The life span of a book was seen as a few months. That's why guys like my Dad wrote so much and so fast.
The idea that 30, 40, 50, years later we'd be remembering and talking about a single title would be shocking to them. We are applying the standards of "literary" hardbacks to what people, even the publishers and authors, considered to be mass market pulp. People have inflated ideas of what publishers do and how good they are at doing it. They also have the idea that an editor has got more than a few hours a year to deal with any one author. It's extraordinary and wonderful that this old material is still around and you really can't blame any one involved for the slap dash approach. They really didn't know any better!
You also have to realize the message being sent is also different. In creating the Yondering collection, Dad was saying, "see I also wrote some stuff like this." When I REcollected Yondering I was saying, "Here is what the first version of 'Louis L'Amour the author' looked like. This is how he envisioned himself. This is a reflection of his world."
