Overlook Press has signed a contract to republish the Freddy books, starting this fall with Freddy Goes to Florida and Freddy the Detective. These will be high-quality facsimile cloth editions complete with dustjacket and selling for $22.95 each. The primary target audience are those adults who have treasured memories of the Freddy books and want to get copies both for themselves and to pass along to the next generation. Overlook is also considering producing paperback editions as well, but those would come out well after the hardbacks.
The books will be distributed nationally by Viking USA/Penguin and are already being advertised in their catalog. We recommend that you order the books through your local bookstore so that evidence of interest in the republication is spread as widely as possible. (See sidebar for details on ordering.)
Overlook is planning on reprinting the entire series two books at a time, most likely on an annual basis, with the next two books being Freddy and the Ignormus and Freddy and the Flying Saucer Plans.
As stated in the main article, we strongly encourage you to visit your local bookstore to order the new Freddy books and to encourage them to stock these new editions. Most bookstores will order books for you if you supply the title and ISBN number. For the first two reprints, these are:
Freddy Goes to Florida, 208 pp., ISBN 0-87951-808-1, $22.95
Freddy the Detective, 256 pp., ISBN 0-87951-809-X, $22.95
If you have problems with your local bookstore, you may order them directly from the publisher:
The Overlook Press 2568 Rt. 212 Woodstock, NY 12498.
Shipping via mail is $3.50 for the first book and $1.25 for each additional book (New York State residents should add sales tax). Visa and MasterCard are accepted. Those of you on the Internet can check out Overlook's web site.
Please note that, though September is listed in Viking's and Overlook's catalogs as the month of publication, publication deadlines frequently prove to be optimistic.
Also please note that because these are high-quality, limited-run fascimile editions, their prices are high for the library market. As a Friend of Freddy you might consider donating copies to your local school and public libraries as another way of promoting Freddy for future generations of young readers.
My wife Loni and I met Peter Mayer about 25 years ago. We had just started a small printing business in New York's Catskill Mountains, and we dreamed of publishing books someday. A mutual friend brought Peter to our shop. He was looking for a local printer to produce catalogs for The Overlook Press, a publishing company he had recently founded with his father in Woodstock where he maintained a second home. He was certainly in a much better position to start a new press than we were. At that time he was CEO of Penguin USA in New York City, but sensing the way the publishing industry was heading, he, too, dreamed of having his own imprint, a different kind of enterprise--according to him, "We wouldn't pursue bestsellers; what we wanted were goodsellers. And we believed in backlist. We didn't want to be a niche publisher, just a small general publisher."
Despite this, Overlook soon outgrew the type of printing we were able to supply with our small equipment, and we lost touch with Peter but not his press, and we followed his career as he moved to London to head Penguin Books. He is largely credited with leading Penguin to its position as the international publishing behemoth it is today, and of course, he put his life on the line as Salman Rushdie's publisher of The Satanic Verses. We met Peter again a couple of years ago at a birthday party booksigning he gave for a friend of ours who is one of his authors. He told us then of his plans to retire from Penguin at the beginning of 1997 to devote all of his time to Overlook.
Then last summer, I reread Adam Hochschild's excellent article in the May 22, 1994 New York Times Book Review on the economics that had doomed the Freddy series. Demand for the books hadn't changed--but steady, modest sales were not enough for a house like Knopf. My thinking ran: "If a big house can no longer make money on the series, what about a smaller house (but one with national distribution) like Peter Mayer's Overlook Press?" I sat down and carefully composed a two-page letter laying out my case. I included Hochschild's article and offered to introduce Peter to Steve Collins, Walter's stepson, who, along with his sister, inherited the rights to the Freddy books.
It took many months before my letter reached Peter as he circled the globe on behalf of Penguin, but then early one Saturday morning in October, he called. "The Freddy books? Of course I'll publish the Freddy books. I thought I was the only one who still cares for them." (Where have we heard that sentence before?) Could he come to our convention in Cooperstown where Steve Collins also lives? He could squeeze it in. His daughter was coming from England for the weekend, and they would have a few hours. He arrived at the inn with a jet-lagged 13-year-old late Saturday afternoon. She was entrusted to the care of Jaimee Joroff and Loni while Peter and I had a very positive meeting with Steve. Unfortunately, Peter could not stay for the evening, but he loaded up on back issues of The Bean Home Newsletter and bought several teeshirts.
Now, the contract has been signed, and Freddy will be returning in style: not merely back in print but in facsimile editions with dustjackets that we can not merely collect but cherish. What can one say except that it's about time?