$1.22

October 23, 2001

This Year's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island Year List

Today's Reading:
Autumn Across America by Edwin Way Teale, The Gilgit Game by John Keay

This Year's Reading:
2001 Book List

Real life, real dialogue. Y'know, I just go right to the heart of the matter. No "Good Morning, Esteemed Co-Author" or "How are you?" Nope. The morning encounter went like this:

Me: "$1.22!"
Esteemed Co-Author: "What?"
Me: "Did you get your statement yesterday?"
EC-A: "It was great while it lasted."
Me: "$1.22!!!"
EC-A: "We owe them $1.22."
Me: "I never thought it would last this long."

I mean, come on, the first edition of the Great American Driver Manual came out in 1988. The second edition came out in 1991. When it came out in 1988 there wasn't even a computer section in Andover Bookstore or any of my local bookstores. One day I was in the Andover Bookstore when the staff was making a fuss over a local author, showing her where her book was and all that. I, a regular customer who spent (and still spends) far more money there than the local author in question (on account of I had then a pretty lucrative day job), said half joking "Gee whiz, I'm hurt you don't have my book here." They asked the title. I told them. "We don't carry business books," they said. Sigh.

Meanwhile, as the years rolled by, other people caught on to the idea that the UNIX device driver interface could in fact be documented by mere mortals especially after AT& T documented it for the 3B2, and all stuff like that there. Yet, our little project we were too young and dumb to know couldn't be done, remained in print.

Over the years the checks got smaller, but they still kept coming. Until yesterday. No check. We owe them $1.22 each. They'll carry that over to the next statement period to charge against whatever sales happen then. However, I don't expect there to be any sales.

On a whim, I checked the publisher's web site and determined that neither the hard cover nor the paperback second edition is in stock. While I was at it, I logged into author services and checked past statements for the cumulative sales. The total of both editions in their hardcover and paperback incarnations comes to 36,959. Esteemed Co-Author is right. It was great while it lasted.