Source: “Web Site and Author Rescue a Forgotten Book,” by Lynn Andriani, Publishers Weekly, 2/2/2009 (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6633740.html)
In anticipation of Harper Perennial’s forthcoming reissue of Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine, Publishers Weekly recently included a story about how the book can to be republished. It turns out that the Neglected Books Page had something to do with it:
The Moonflower revival began when a small press contacted Carleton’s grandniece, Susan Beasley, telling her it wanted to reissue Moonflower, which is set on a farm in western Missouri during the first half of the 20th century. Beasley got in touch with agent Denise Shannon, who didn’t know the book but Googled it and wound up on NeglectedBooks.com, a site launched in 2006 that features thousands of books that have been, according to the site, “neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.â€
The Moonflower Vine is due out from Harper Perennial on 24 March 2009.
What a wonderful discovery I’ve just made!
As a university instructor of literature, I remain suspicious of annual awards (i.e., Pulitzer, Booker, and others) and continued to be disappointed by “book lists” (i.e., The Modern Library’s 100 of the 20th Century), but find your blog to be a refreshingly different eye-opener. I shall visit often (and encourage any visitors to my blog (http://selectedbooks.blogspot.com/) to do likewise), and I already know the consequences: I shall be rumaging through second-hand bookstores and libraries for seductive titles you have mentioned. All the best (and please keep up the wonderful work) . . . R. T. Davis (Baldwin County, Alabama, USA).