The Associated Press (”Dispute over long-buried Stegner book,” by Lisa Leff) has another story about editing and disputed versions, this time involving Pulitzer Prize-winner Wallace Stegner:

SAN FRANCISCO - A small publishing house did not have to dig far to unearth a long-buried book Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Wallace Stegner wrote a half-century ago about oil exploration in the Middle East. 

The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history. Stegner, who is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.

For reasons that now are a subject of dispute between Barger and the late author’s son, however, an edited version of Stegner’s manuscript was not published in the Arabian American Oil Co.’s in-house magazine until 1967. It was not available to the public until Vista, Calif.-based Selwa put out a trade edition of “Discovery!” in September without permission from Stegner’s estate.

“His particular version of the manuscript was one that was cut up by one of their PR people. It was never put up for sale,” said Carl Brandt, Stegner’s longtime literary agent. “If Wally had wanted to publish that edition, he would have been on the phone with me saying, ‘Let’s go, and get Viking to do it.’”

(Apropos of nothing, what happened to the days when the AP summarized the story in the first paragraph?)

Many writers have paid some bills with a corporate history or two, and there’s no shame in that. But one wonders whether the work in question is an important enough part of Stegner’s legacy to even be worth fighting over. These things are, in some regards, extended advertisements–I’d be surprised if most of them weren’t owned in perpetuity by the company that commissioned them. But Stegner was certainly writer enough to turn even an advertisement into art, so maybe that’s what he did.

I got a press release today from Paperspine, a new Netflix-modeled book-rental service that “enables members to read more books without the high cost of purchase or the inconvenience of numerous trips to the library.”

“We believe we can revolutionize the book industry by offering the convenience of the Internet with the borrowing system long used by local libraries,” said Paperspine co-founder Dustin Hubbard. “As a Netflix customer and avid reader, I thought the same model could work for books.”

Hmm…where have I heard this before?

In the Guardian (”What a carve-up“), James Campbell uses the flap over Tess Gallagher’s plans to publish a retitled, reedited version of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981) as a jumping-off point to examine the larger phenomenon of “restored” texts. There’s some thought-provoking stuff about Carver (who “now belongs in the peculiar community of writers who have published more after death than before”)…

But then, if Gallagher and Stull get their way, and the formerly stultified L. D. is permitted to shout and repeat himself, where stands the reputation of Carver, one of the most influential writers of American prose of the past quarter-century? In later books, such as Cathedral, Carver appeared to be progressing to a more ample style - a development not welcomed by all his readers. According to Stull, “the ostensible transformation of Raymond Carver from minimalist to humanist was not a change of head or heart. It was a change of hands.” For better or worse, it seems, the firm must be restored to its original proprietorship: not Carver & Lish Ltd; just Raymond Carver Enterprises.

…followed by a brief discussion of two other examples, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Richard Wright’s Native Son. (The war over War and Peace, while not attacked, is also a worthy target.)

Not to spoil the ending, but Campbell’s conclusion kind of reminds me of some of the reactions to J. K. Rowling’s recent revelations about her characters’ secret lives.

We can only wait to see if they succeed in reaching an accommodation with Knopf (my guess is that they will). But however altruistic they may be, there is no escaping the fact that their mission to rescue L. D. from his abduction by Gordon Lish will bring about his demise in the place where he really lives: the imagination of readers.