“Then we worked on it til January, lots of drafts, lots of phone conversations with half-reasoned sentences: ‘Yeah, I dunno, I just think this part needs to be more awesome…’”

The Rake asks:

On the editing side, what’s it like to work on a book with unusual typography–was there difficulty in keeping the structure of the book together? Were there great concessions made? Deadly struggles? (You get the picture.) I would imagine a book like this needs a careful hand, given that the physical construction mirrors content in many ways….

Also, can you talk about the process of obtaining the manuscript. The SF Chronicle article mentions that you called Sal after running a piece in McSweeney’s, is that right?

Eli responds:

First, thanks to both of you for doing this; it’s really exciting to hear what actual people actually thought about the book. A rare treat — no one ever tells me anything. Here are some attempts at answering your questions:

We first heard of Sal when he submitted a story that we ended up publishing in Issue 12 of our quarterly. When he sent in his bio, we learned that the story was a chapter from a book he had just finished. So I asked to see that. I read it, knew it was something special, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it. So I agonized indecisively for some huge number of months. But what sold me, aside from the book itself, was talking to Sal, hearing how commited he was, how ready to work — there was no defensiveness about the book as it was written, just a dedication to making it as good as it could be.

That was in May, I think. Then we worked on it til January, lots of drafts, lots of phone conversations with half-reasoned sentences: “Yeah, I dunno, I just think this part needs to be more awesome…” It was pretty clear that neither of us really knew what we were doing, so we were able to skip any pretense and just dig in. It was fun.

Then I put it Quark. The typographical kookiness only got really tricky towards the end; the book depends on the words filling each physical page in kind of intricate formations, so Sal had to be conscious of both content and word count. Problem was, he wrote the book based on a 8.5 x 11 sheet of printer paper, in 10pt Times or whatever. This all got shaken up when we put it in the book layout, so there was actually a lot of back and forth between design and content — a couple characters reappear simply because the cacaphony required an additional voice. Practical concerns like this helped shape the book in several places, but that was part of the challenge — the physical limitations of the book are one of the foundations of the story, so it didn’t feel like we were compromising anything.

So we sorted out all the layout, then Rachell Sumpter did a great job with the cover art, then the books were printed and put on a boat. Then they were quarantined by the Bureau of Fish and Wildlife, because it turned out we were sharing a container with someone who was smuggling dead animals. Then Sal and I (and often Paul La Farge) drove around the country doing “readings” (there was as little actual reading as possible).

(I think the Rake’s question of what is at stake is a good one. That’s something I always try to ask, and I can get bored if everything feels too loosey-goosey. But that’s one of the reasons I was so excited about this book: it’s experimental and free-wheeling and fun, but you can’t doubt that the writer cares, that everything matters. As many have noted, the debate between realism and made-up-ism is mostly a false one; as in the Barthelme quote, the imaginary is often its own realism, and “realism” is still hardly anything like normal boring life anyway, even if people drive realistic Toyotas and listen to realistic Radiohead or whatever.

A similar point could be made about the metafictional and typographical features of The People of Paper and other books — they often inspire a knee-jerk reaction (for or against) that isn’t necessarily very responsive to the book itself. But that’s probably a digression. Unless you want a digression?)

(Regarding the Pale Fire discussion: I think Nabokov really resisted those one-to-one matchups: red means anger, the waxwing represents the soul, that type of thing. “Texture, not text,” I think he (or Shade) said, and I think it had something to do with all that. For The People of Paper, I kept getting surprised in both directions; whenever I asked what, say, the mechanical tortoises were, Sal would chide me for reading a novel too literally, but then later we’d be talking about girls and it’d turn out that this person was Ida or whoever. So I’m still sorting out what’s what.)