I’m in an odd spot. I just read in a book by an author who died since the book was published (so no way to contact him—the book was Hype and Glory by William Goldman) where he mentioned in passing that “a famous Hollywood producer” had “recently” (Hype and Glory came out in 1990) read a rave book review of a novel from the 1930s and tried to get in touch with the author in order to acquire the film rights. Goldman mentioned very little else, other than the book reviewer was a woman.
I’ve figured out that the rave review was of a reprint of the novel whose (re-)publication date was January 1, 1985. (There are more details here to give, but they’re irrelevant and distracting. If you want them, or think they’re helpful, I’ll be happy to supply some, including why I’m looking for this stuff.) So I’m looking for a review written by a woman sometime between 1985 and 1990, probably closer to the former, of a specific novel.
My local librarians tell me that my information is too spotty to be of use, and I won’t have access to a world-class library for a couple of months, but I vaguely that there exists some sort of database of book reviews in a given year, or some organized way to look for this information, even if it’s rather tedious (like looking through a book of review titles one by one). Does anyone know what reference book I might be looking for?
Or am I imagining that there is some sort of database of book reviews organized by year? Does any part of this resonate with anyone?
Even in just the U.S., there were probably dozens, if not hundreds of newspapers and magazines that published book reviews at that time – and many were probably written by reviewers who were employed by those specific publications, rather than syndicated reviewers.
I’m unfortunately skeptical that there’s a database where someone has gone through many many thousands of reviews (which were originally published only in print form, as your 1985-90 time period predates widespread electronic distribution of such items), from periodicals large and small, and not only categorized them, but saved the text of each review. (Then again, I could well be wrong.)
Individual periodicals may have scanned their pre-web print articles, and uploaded them to the web, but they might not have, as well.
If you had an idea of in which publication said review was originally published, it’d make your task a lot easier, but it doesn’t sound like you know that information. One could guess that “a famous Hollywood producer” probably read the review in a major publication (e.g., New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, etc.), rather than from a smaller-city newspaper, which would narrow your search.
Umm, assuming all the facts you’ve shared are solid, and its a 1980s review of the reprint and not one from the original publication, then it would most likely have been published in a newspaper, a general periodical magazine [like Time or something], a literary magazine or a scholarly journal. This narrows it down to about a million things to check.
Each may have different sorts of online presence which are searchable, although the mid-1980s were not natively digital, so they may be captured as PDFs or in other non-indexed forms, or only exist as bound copies (if anyone bothered). If indexed, unless you know the author’s name or the name of the book, how will you even know when you’ve spotted it?
Newspapers may have searchable sites going back that far, but unless you know author, book or year, you may have to do a search on ‘review’ which will give you a billion hits. Your newspaper may no longer exist - very few do, and most whose archives still exist are behind some sort of paywall.
Most literary magazines die after a while and are so ephemeral and inconsequential that no one will have ever bothered to digitise them. There may be physical holdings in libraries scattered around the US.
Literary journals - of which there would be some hundreds - may have an annual index bound in with them.
Where are you located? There may be a college nearby that has a set they’d let you slog through. There’s also Book Review Index, which doesn’t have excerpts.
How did you figure out the date of the book’s re-publication was 1/1/85?
I seem to remember that book reviews were typically in the Sunday paper. Many libraries have access to online, searchable databases of newspapers. You may even be able to access those databases through the library’s website by logging in with your library card. You could go through the Sunday editions of a few major papers and see if you get lucky in their book review sections.
Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was originally published in 1939 under a different and decidedly politically uncorrect name and reprinted on 5-15-85 under the new name (although I’m not sure of the reliability of the source of that date).
It was a very popular novel, do you think that could be the one?
ETA - Lots of suggestions upthread on how to search for this. I typed “1930’s novel republished in 1985” into Google’s search engine and it popped right up.
ETA again……I just realized you were looking for a particular review, but identifying the book could be a good start.
A publication date of 1 Jan 1985 sounds a lot like a database default date, and may mean that it was not issued on a specific date during the year, just released whenever the ink was dry. That’s how we rolled in the olden days before Y2K and paper grew on trees.
Wikipedia does a list of novels by year - it has 155 entries for 1985, but since more than several million new works are published annually now, it might be reasonable to expect that half that number were published in 1985. That means you are not just trying to find the right book in a million book haystack, but doing it via an alleged review referencing that [unknown] book in an unspecified, unknown further hiding place.
Maybe start with the Wikipedia list for 1985 - all 155 books, and then brace yourself to repeating that 10,000 times over to cover all the possible books published in that year.
But perhaps before you start on that, look up the definition of the term ‘mug’s game’.
I know the title and the author. I omitted them because i thought the information was extraneous and possibly confusing. The novel is Hope of Heaven by John O’Hara and Carroll & Graf published it on January 1 1985.
Book Review Digest is what I was trying to remember, thanks
Now i have a less solvable problem, finding the name of the producer who asked about the rights 40 years ago. Probably dead. As is Carolyn See, who I’d hoped to ask once i learned her name
It’s a good guess (and a great book), but And Then There Were None (and its various older versions published under different titles) had already been turned into several films by 1990. So it’s unlikely a 1990 film producer would begin negotiations about the rights.
