Free Girls In 3-B, The by Valerie Taylor

a special form of insanity. It sort of gets you after a while. Looking at the manuscripts when they come in -- I started as a reader, what a rat-race that is -- and then when you hit a good one it's sort of exciting. Not that it happens very much."
    Pat nodded. She had already learned not to be indignant on behalf of the authors whose cherished stories bounced back after a hasty reading. "I could write a better book myself," she said.
    "For God's sake don't. The world's full of fools who think they can write books."
    "Some of them can, too. Look at Sam Fry."
    "Sure. I was here the first time Sam Fry ever walked into this office. He had holes in his shoes. All I'm saying is, not one in a hundred."
    "What's really exciting is when the galleys come in."
    "Sure, because it starts to feel like a real book. Page is even better. I don't worry much about typos in galley, but I really sweat when the page proofs come in. Then the promotion office gets busy, they start getting in touch with the big mags and the movies and all that jazz. I don't know, it makes every other line of business look dull." Phyllis lit another cigarette.
    "And the artists. Like that girl with the long cigarette holder the other day, that you said was going to do the illustrations for the Fairchild."
    "Sure, sure, everybody gets into the act then, the ad agency people -- you ever go out with an adman? Don't." She sat down, propping her flats on the edge of Pat's desk. "Then all of a sudden -- makes no difference how long it's been scheduled, you might have the date up on your bulletin board for three months, but it always seems sudden anyhow -- then the advance copies come in. That's the book."
    She paused for breath while Pat answered the phone and took an order. "You know," she said dreamily, "you never think about it as five or ten or twenty thousand separate books rolling off the presses. Maybe the warehouse people do; I don't know, I never worked in a warehouse." She considered, shutting her eyes. "Yeah, I suppose it's different when they start rolling 'em in on skids. In the editorial office though, it's a book, a living breathing book. It's something like having a baby."
    "I never had a baby," Pat said idly.
    "Me neither, but you can imagine how it feels." The phone rang; they both reached, but Phyllis got there first. Pat said quietly, "Watch the board, I'm going to the John," and tiptoed out to give her a little privacy.
    She thought it over, sitting in the white-tiled cubicle that was so silent now compared to the nine and five o'clock clatter. Phyllis was right, it was an exciting business. She couldn't tell how much of the excitement was due to her new awareness of herself as a woman and how much was implicit in publishing itself. Even the letters she typed were unlike the letters ordinary businessmen dictated, with a vocabulary and range of subject matter all their own. She had worked summers since she was thirteen, for various uncles and cousins in the dry-goods, coal, and paper-box businesses, and the work had bored her stiff. But this was fascinating. Holding her hands under the hot-air dryer, she counted over the things she had learned in her short eventful weeks with The Fort Dearborn Press.
    She had supposed, until this fall, that writers were a special breed of people -- more cultured, less interested in money and material things. That wasn't so. She had seen a lady novelist go into hysterics because Blake Thomson wouldn't give her fifteen per cent royalty instead of the usual ten, and she had opened and answered letters from dignified college professors who screamed like wounded tigers because the accounting department had shorted them sixty-two cents on royalties. A famous poet had asked her out to dinner, and, although she had refused to go, she wasn't sure whether it was because she was awed by his international reputation or because he was sixty and practically bald. Maybe Phyllis is right, she thought, swinging the washroom door open;