lisa_goldstein | Entries tagged with david hartwell

The ebook of my novel Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon is priced at $1.99 today at Open Road Media. I tried to think of something new to say about this book, and came up with this:

Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon takes place in the Elizabethan era, and at one point my editor, David Hartwell, told me that he thought he had a famous ancestor who’d lived then, a man named Abraham Hartwell. I had an idea I could surprise David by putting old Abraham in the book, so one day while I was a UC Berkeley library I looked him up in the Dictionary of National Biography. (In those days I practically lived at the Berkeley libraries.) It turned out that he had translated a book from Italian called A Report of the Kingdome of Congo, a Region of Africa And of the Countries that border rounde about the same. Not only that, the library catalog said they had a copy of the book in their Rare Books collection, and that I could actually go look at it.

Sp I went to the Rare Books room. I had to put everything that had a sharp edge (pens, spiral-bound notebooks) into a locker, and show them the inside of my purse, so they could check for…well, I’m not sure what they were checking for, scissors or blow torches or something. Then they gave me several sheets of paper and a pencil, the only things I could take with me. I felt a bit like an imposter; I wasn’t a student or professor, or really anyone who was going to do anything useful with this information. I must not have looked suspicious, though, because they passed me through to the reading room.

A while later someone brought the book out. It’s still the oldest book I’ve ever held, dating from the early 1600s. It read more like a fantasy novel than a travel book, describing people who were eight feet tall, and others who had metal instead of teeth, maybe the first in a long list of misleading and exoticizing travel books in English.

The Dictionary of National Biography also said that Abraham Hartwell was an assistant to the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. The amazing thing was that I’d already written a character who was an assistant to Whitgift, though I hadn’t given him a name. So instead of having to come up with a place to put Hartwell in the novel it turned out that he was already there — I just had to take out the word “assistant” and put in his name.

This book was a lot of fun to write.

——

I’d forgotten some of this and had to look up Abraham Hartwell on Wikipedia. Strange to think that if Wikipedia had existed back then I never would have seen the Rare Book room, or held an ancient book about Africa.