President’s Day 1993: an agent’s first day

When I think President’s Day, my mind skips over slashed prices at the mall or even the day off… I always think of my first day working at the agency. It was probably snowing.  There were probably train delays, especially taking the N or R trains (the “Never” and the “Rarely” as they truly were decades ago). It was a national holiday, a Monday, a great day to get introduced to the office and get settled “without the phones ringing so much.”  That was 18 years ago–we didn’t have the internet.   We had a 386 computer with a sickly yellow font that took 20 minutes to warm up. Worrying about the phone ringing seems so…quaint.  The day was dense with activity but the pace wasn’t agitated or worried….no worrying about the hundreds of daily emails, or the information we weren’t staying on top of in dozens of blogs/articles/newspapers one must read, or the proposals and mss. virtually landing.

I spent that first day leisurely going through the deal memo book with David, hearing the stories behind the deals, about the relationships with clients and how they’ve come about.  I got a mini-history of our little world within the publishing world in one day. I loved the tangible proof of our purpose and clear role in this mission to publish. It was 1993 and writers needed agents to get published. Manuscripts in boxes and bound by rubberbands were everywhere. The supplies closet had a  tower of manuscripts that nearly reached the ceiling.  All queries.  How the hell so many writers could even locate us back then, I don’t know. The mandate: we were to read through all of them (usually on what we called “query night.” Also quaint.) We owed that to writers, this was our duty, we believed.  OK, so we also had a rule that anything at least a year old must simply be thrown away (no such thing as recycling either back then!) It was just cruel to keep a manuscript that long and twice reject the writer…a long drawn out assumed rejection, and THEN a formal rejection.  We actually had several different form letter rejection letters that were tailored to the rejection’s theme (“sorry, we don’t handle children’s books” or “we’re not taking on new clients” if we felt that suited.) So we didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have information to jam into our brains at every moment of the day.  We had the task at hand.   Talking to writers….talking to each other…actually talking and brainstorming about ideas.  Newspapers and magazines stacked up for us to read and find writing we loved, writers we wanted to represent.  Letters to type up and mail.  Manuscripts to read.  Publishing stories to share to one another, face to face, over morning coffee on a (probably) snowy holiday in February.

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