ChooseCo: how not to reprint a series
Apr 11 '09
The Bottom Line R.A. Montgomery's ChooseCo can in no way be said to be carrying out what they claim with its Choose Your Own Adventure reprints.
As a child, almost my entire reading apart from a number of (quite advanced) technical books was of Choose Your Own Adventure and the related Time Machine. I found it very interesting to feel involved in what was going on, although even as an extremely immature child in the 1980s I was somewhat repelled by many of the titles in the series, such as War With the Evil Power Master or You Are A Shark. As I matured, my parents and brother insisted that Choose Your Own Adventure books were for highly immature people and consequently I donated a fairly substantial set of early (the latest being Danger at Anchor Mine) Choose Your Own Adventure books to a small market at my school. I retained the first three Time Machine titles for a much longer time and even occasionally re-read them during the 1990s (this re-reading served to cement my knowledge of the structure of these books in a way that was ultimately to prove highly valuable).
When asked by RMIT University in 2006 to write about my fiction reading as a child, I knew immediately I had no choice but to study Choose Your Own Adventure and Time Machine books. It was a godsend that my minder had one of the three Time Machine books I had read as a child, so that I was able to do the assignment very well and to illustrate how my perspectives on these books had changed over the years. However, reading one Time Machine book again was enough to ignite my curiosity about the two series mentioned above, so that ever since I have been interested in collecting them on eBay and reading whatever information exists about the later books which I missed completely. The reviews I did find, like the music ones I have loved to read for many years, were fascinating and challenging despite Choose Your Own Adventure being very much books for a highly immature audience. Their revelations are also important for the main part of this essay below.
What has been most noteworthy in news about these books is that not only did both series extend far beyond what I had read (I did as a child read Terror in Australia, written 33 months after Anchor Mine, but disliked it), but that Choose Your Own Adventure was being reprinted by a company based in Vermont and largely controlled by one of the major authors of that series, R.A. Montgomery, along with his wife Shannon Gilligan, who wrote five books in the main Choose Your Own Adventure series. As with most things I have written about since beginning to use the Web regularly, this subject took time to capture my interest but it has been an utterly dominant part of my thoughts of late.
Discussion of the reprints of Choose Your Own Adventure books by ChooseCo has been surprisingly limited among collectors of the series, presumably because they believe ChooseCo's work will not reduce the value of older copies of reprinted titles. The sole complaint that one can notice from discussions of ChooseCo's work is that not a single book by Edward Packard, the most prolific and for many, the best Choose Your Own Adventure writer, has been reprinted. they tend to argue that it was Packard who invented the concept of Choose Your Own Adventure and that Montgomery is trying to whitewash Packard's contributions from history by re-numbering reprinted titles.
The truth is that an observer of ChooseCo can and should actually make a much more serious and general criticism of the choice of titles to reprint. Of the twenty-nine titles out of 184 reprinted, all but four are by R.A Montgomery, his wife Shannon Gilligan, or his son Anson. Of the most prolific Choose Your Own Adventure writers, there is not only no books by Edward Packard on ChooseCo's roster, but also not one Richard Brightfield title, not a single Louise Munro Foley title, and only one Jay Leibold selection. The two other authors outside the Montgomery family (out of twenty-six) whom ChooseCo have reprinted, Jim Wallace and Jim Beckett, wrote between them only four books out of eighty-three not written by the Packard or Montgomery families.
R.A. Montgomery and Shannon Giligan have said in an interview they will reprint titles "that had been bestsellers and those we thought had special editorial merit". However, if one actually looks historically to see which titles were bestsellers, one sees that there is almost no correlation with those books that ChooseCo are reprinting. For a start, apart from his first two titles Journey Under the Sea and Space and Beyond which remained consistenly in print until the original series was discontinued by Bantam, there were no "best-selling" R.A. Montgomery titles at all. To illustrate this fact, not one R.A. Montgomery title after number 10 The Lost Jewels of Nabooti was reprinted with the new cover after the original cover from the first sixty-nine books was discontinued in 1989. Moreover, of the dozen or so longest-in-print amongst books after number 70, not one was an R.A. Montgomery title! The only support for claiming that ChooseCo have reprinted titles that are bestsellers lies with their reprinting Secret of the Ninja, which became a bestseller because of the popularity of martial arts and is the only one of fifteen Jay Leibold titles as yet reprinted. This point can be disputed, however, simply by observing that Richard Brightfield's (see above) Master of Kung Fu and Master of Tae Kwon Do were not similarly reprinted despite being equally popular. Of other authors, the only "best-selling" title that ChooseCo have reprinted is Shannon Gilligan's The Case of the Silk King, which was probably reissued after the phase-out of the original Choose Your Own Adventure cover because it was based on a real-life mystery and was made into a feature film in 1990. Even The Case of the Silk King did not remain in print for more than a year after this.
The very highest-selling Choose Your Own Adventure titles (which remained in print throughout the publication of Choose Your Own Adventure by Bantam) excluding the two initial R.A. Montgomery titles and the martial arts titles mentioned in the preceding paragraph, were:
#1 Edward Packard's The Cave of Time
#5 Edward Packard's The Mystery of Chimney Rock/The Curse of the Haunted Mansion
#31 Tony Koltz' Vampire Express
#52 Edward Packard's Ghost Hunter
Other big-selling titles that gained relatively limited reprints included:
#6 Edward Packard's Your Code Name is Jonah/Spy Trap
#7 Edward Packard's The Third Planet from Altair/Message from Space
#22 Julius Goodman's Space Patrol
#58 Ellen Kushner's Statue of Liberty Adventure
#63 Ellen Kushner's Mystery of the Secret Room
#71 Edward Packard's Space Vampire
#77 Ben M. Baglio's The First Olympics
#80 Edward Packard's The Perfect Planet
The following early titles, in addition to The Lost Jewels of Nabooti (reprinted as The Lost Jewels) gained extremely limited and rare reprints after the phase-out of the original cover style:
#3 Douglas Terman's By Balloon to the Sahara/Danger in the Desert
#8 Edward Packard's Deadwood City
#9 Edward Packard's Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?
Not one of these seventeen titles has yet been reprinted by ChooseCo. As it is unlikely that relative demand for titles has changed drastically since Bantam ceased printing Choose Your Own Adventure books, one can only conclude that Montgomery's and Gilligan's claim they are reproducing popular titles is dubious at best. This becomes even clearer when one discovers how Julius Goodman, the author of Space Patrol, has himself been involved in reprinting some of ChooseCo's titles (he is credited on the reissue of Escape). Julius Goodman's second title The Horror of High Ridge also has close links with R.A. Montgomery in using characters from House of Danger. One would expect on those grounds that these two (and probably the other Julius Goodman title Treasure Diver) would have been reprinted long before ChooseCo had done thirty titles, yet none of them have been reprinted and ChooseCo reveals no plans to do so. One could imagine that Julius Goodman has disowned his Choose Your Own Adventure titles and desires them out of print, but that seems unlikely if he really wanted to work with Montgomery and Gilligan.
Demian recently suggested to me that some Choose Your Own Adventure authors have retained ownership of their work. Alternatively, some Choose Your Own Adventure writers may well have never been contacted and discussion of rights to their books never made. Since most Choose Your Own Adventure writers were from the "Silent Generation" born between 1922 and 1939, it is possible that because of their age writers like Richard Brightfield and Louise Munro Foley are hard to track down. With authors who wrote only a few books like Ben M. Baglio and Tony Koltz, this is even more probable even if they are younger (most Choose Your Own Adventure authors do not have known birthdates). However, it is known that at least sixty seven of the one hundred and eighty-four original titles are by authors who have surrendered ownership but not had a single book reprinted. (If Edward Packard has retained ownership, that would mean no other author has). This certainly renders Demian's argument questionable, although authors without a big-selling title like Louise Munro Foley, Doug Wilhelm or Deborah Lerme Goodman could conceivably have surrendered ownership with the expectation that their books would not be reprinted, because they felt no alternative option or knew nobody could guarantee reprinting.
Yet another explanation for the non-reprinting of some popular titles is objection to re-illustration. Evidence that some Choose Your Own Adventure illustrators, including Judith Mitchell, Ted Enik, Stephen Marchesi and Tom La Padula, do object to re-illustration of their books can be seen
1) from the ChooseCo site on Jay Leibold, where a number of his titles not yet reprinted are listed, among them #99 Revenge of the Russian Ghost (illustrated by Stephen Marchesi), #117 The Search for Aladdin's Lamp (illustrated by Judith Mitchell) and #155 Ninja Cyborg (illustrated by Tom La Padula). These titles' listing on ChooseCo's Jay Leibold page suggests that ChooseCo do want to reprint them but refuse to risk legal trouble concerning illustrators' rights.
2) from the fact that of the three Jim Wallace titles, only the Ted Enik-illustrated #69 Rock and Roll Mystery has not been reprinted
3) from the non-reprinting of R.A. Montgomery's Stephen Marchesi-illustrated #94 Blood on the Handle while later books have already been done.
The fact that ChooseCo insists upon adding completely new illustrations to the books instead of reprinting the original ones is further reason to condemn its approach - and not only because some illustrators might object. Having looked at the illustrations of the new editions in two Borders shops, they seem exaggerated in size and possessing much less detail than those of original Bantam editions.
Apart from cases where illustrators' objection to re-illustration may preclude reprinting, however, one still concludes that reprinting choices reflect purely the tastes of R.A. Montgomery and Shannon Gilligan. The non-reprinting even of Julius Goodman (involved with their work) suggests that if Montgomery and Gilligan do not think a book has requisite merit, it will not be reprinted. For young children reading books, that can only be described as a tragedy. Amongst people who know the original series really well (in other words, serious fans), R.A. Montgomery and Shannon Gilligan are generally not well-respected authors, probably because their style was often incoherent and/or childish in a manner noticeably absent from most other Choose Your Own Adventure writers I have read. It is fair to say that Choose Your Own Adventure's initial success attracted writers more mature than Montgomery or Packard, and that these authors' books are more to the tastes of collectors than those of Montgomery or the children for whom the books are designed.
Another, final, major problem with ChooseCo's reprinting of the Choose Your Own Adventure series is that the experience of myself and others strongly suggests they are quite unresponsive to feedback and suggestions. Demian recently told me that ChooseCo routinely take months to respond to questions from the public, and my experience is that they may not respond at all to a question that could relate to the personal tastes or interests of Montgomery and/or Gilligan. Although there exists a blog which ought to discuss questions about authors not represented in ChooseCo's reissues, it is not updated by Montgomery and Gilligan, with the result that interested parties have little room to comment. There is also no "Frequently Asked Questions" site that could definitively answer important questions about authors like Packard and Brightfield. (Were it well done, a ChooseCo FAQ might provide a database of what is currently known about all original Choose Your Own Adventure authors and illustrators). The result is that users of ChooseCo's websites are given an inaccurate knowledge of the actual history of Choose Your Own Adventure books between 1979 and 1998, so that a naive reader may even have the impression that the series was really almost exclusively the work of R.A. Montgomery rather than of thirty-one different authors of which he was only the second most prolific and according to serious fans far from the best.
To summarise, ChooseCo have done a very poor job with reprinting the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Evidence from actually looking at what ChooseCo has reprinted and comparing it wiht what one can find out about book sales from lists published at the front of later titles in the original series removes any idea that they are reprinting popular titles. Similarly, comparing the list of books printed with reviews by serious fans show even less similarity. Worse than that, enough information exists to show that they are withholding many titles according to the whims of Montgomery and Shannon Gilligan, and refusing to ask questions about non-reprinted authors and titles.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
zhulin
|
|
Reviews written: 94
Trusted by: 5 members
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.