GIFTS

'Tis Much Better to Receive than to Give

Some businesses discourage employees from accepting gifts, because the practice suggests undue and even corrupt influence. In the publishing business, however, exchanging gifts is a more relaxed custom and seldom suggests anything other than good will or gratitude.

The commonest forms of gifts are, of course, books. Books are not just what editors do, books are what editors are. They represent their good taste and pride and their investment of time, care and love. Seldom will editors invite an agent to lunch or drinks without bestowing a just-published or soon-to-be published book or an early look at a highly touted volume, the underlying message being “Do you have anything as good as this?”

Over the course of my career, however, I have received some gifts that were far off the beaten path. The late and great western saga novelist Terry C. Johnston presented me with a vicious-looking Indian jawbone war club, I forget which tribe. (See the photo above, complete with the ass’s teeth and a baseball-sized rock tied to the bottom.) My audio narrator client Mil Nicholson gave me a shillelagh (also pictured above.) I keep both near the door of my office to defend myself from berserk authors. Luckily, I have not provoked any to that level of outrage.

I have received many gifts from writers soliciting representation ranging from balloons to baked goods. The most elaborate of the latter was a manuscript accompanied by a chocolate cake shaped like an open book, with title and author on the right side and “represented by Richard Curtis” on the left. Regrettably, the writer’s literary skills were inferior to her culinary ones.

One day a messenger delivered a large box to my agency in which an eighteen inch high chocolate elephant (with white-chocolate tusks) was lovingly packed. The accompanying note from HarperCollins editor Larry Ashmead thanked me for selling him a marvelous book called Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived. My staff crowded around my desk to behold this wonder. “When do we get to eat it?” someone asked. “Not until it’s damaged,” I said, embracing it protectively. Whereupon my irrepressible associate Laura Tucker left the room, returned with a hammer, and shattered the beast with a stroke, spraying my staff with chocolate shrapnel. “It’s damaged,” she said insouciantly, popping an elephantine haunch into her mouth as everyone else pounced upon the poor beast’s carcass.

The outcome of another present was much happier. It happens that a publisher had expressed interest in a manuscript by a young author named Sonja Massie. In one of my books I had written that the fastest way for authors to gain access to agents is to tell them there is an offer on the table. Sonja prefaced her approach to me with a luscious box of homemade bonbons filled with exotic flavored liqueurs. They were irresistible, and the offer she had was a legitimate one from a legitimate publisher. I made the deal on her behalf, the first of 73 over a long and successful career.

A gift I gave in earnest to an author turned inadvertently into a joke, and then into a misfortune that almost cost me his representation.

He had just moved into a snug studio apartment in a brownstone. He’d been searching for months for a place with a wood-burning fireplace to fulfill his fantasies of attracting girls to cuddle up before a crackling fire, and at last he had found the ideal flat. The fireplace inspired the perfect gift: a cord of firewood. However, being a city boy I didn’t know how much wood a cord was. I called a supplier (yes, you can buy firewood in Manhattan), but when I told him the dimensions of the apartment he told me a cord was way too much. I reduced the order to a quarter of a cord.

I called the author and told him to be home at 1 PM to receive his “housewarming” gift (I congratulated myself for the perfect pun). A few minutes after one he called me, gushing with appreciation: they had just brought in a bundle of wood. I accepted his thanks and hung up. But five minutes later he called back, not so gushy this time. “Uh, they’ve just brought in five more bundles. That’s three years of fires on my two year lease.”

Ten minutes late he called me again, half hysterical. He was up to eight bundles! “Tell them to stop! There’s no more room in my apartment! My landlady is yelling at me! She won’t let me stack it in the hallway.” But more was to come, a total of one dozen. I called the firewood company and learned to my dismay that a quarter of a cord measured eight feet by four - 32 cubic feet, enough to warm female companions for at least a decade! By the time they delivered the last bundle he was almost in tears.

It seemed like a good gift at the time!

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Richard Curtis’s latest book, Digital Inc., Inside the Transformation of Publishing from Print to E-Books, now on sale.