Publisher's Synopsis
Lawrence Block remembers:
I stopped writing for Nightstand Books when I stopped being a Scott Meredith client in early 1964. Bill Hamling's publishing operation was a closed market, exclusive to the Meredith agency, so it was time for me to give up being Andrew Shaw. I had a wife, I had a mortgaged house in a Buffalo suburb, I had two young daughters-and I had no visible means of support. Well, one finds a way. I established two new writing selves, Jill Emerson and John Warren Wells. And I wrote a final Andrew Shaw type novel, though not as Andrew Shaw, as I recount in my memoir of my beginnings, A Writer Prepares: "A new publisher in Buffalo got in touch with me and wanted me to write a Nightstand-type book for him. If I ever knew who steered him in my direction, I've long since forgotten-nor do I remember the name of the fellow I dealt with, or if I ever knew it in the first place. We settled on a price of $500. I wrote one, turning it out as rapidly as I could type it, and I put a title on it, which I don't begin to recall, and a pen name, which I do. See, I looked down at the box of typing paper I'd used, and I chose the name Howard Bond. "Because neither of us had any reason to trust the other, we met downtown and I gave him the manuscript and he gave me the money. "I went home. A few days later I got a phone call from him. He thought the book I gave him was too short. Was I sure it was long enough? "I suspect it was in fact shorter than what I'd been in the habit of delivering to Hamling, but I certainly wasn't inclined to do anything about it. Just as Abraham Lincoln's legs were long enough to reach from his body to the ground, so was my manuscript long enough to reach from the first page to the last. "So I assured him it was the right length, and he may or may not have been convinced, but that was the last I ever heard from him. I never gave the book another thought, and when I recalled the incident years later I assumed his venture had come to nothing and the book had never been published. "When Terry Zobeck was working away at my bibliography, A Trawl Among the Shelves, I kept recalling books and stories and articles of mine that had slipped my mind, and reporting what I could recall; Terry, apparently indefatigable, would scour the internet until he came up with a copy of the new discovery, add it to his collection, and write it up for the bibliography. "Until finally Howard Bond's effort came to mind, and I wrote about it in the afterword I'd agreed to supply for ATATS. I rather doubted it had ever seen print, and even if it had, how could he possibly turn it up? I couldn't say what I'd called it, or what imprint the publisher might have devised for his venture. All I remembered was my pen name. "And that was evidently enough. Item A66 in A Trawl Among the Shelves reads like so: [Sex Takes a Holiday, 1964. Connoisseur Publications (FN 112); Cleveland, OH; ($0.75); 159 pp.; no statement of printing. As Howard Bond. (PBO; novel)] "Terry has a copy, and so do I. I've flipped through it, and while nothing I've read rings any kind of a bell, I can recognize it as my work. Will ego and avarice render me shameless enough to reissue the thing in my Collection of Classic Erotica?" Evidently...
