Over The Plum Pudding

MP3 Audio CD. Over The Plum Pudding


I have been asked so often and by so many persons known and unknown to me
why it was that a Christmas book that was to have been issued some years
ago under my editorial supervision never appeared, although announced as
ready for immediate publication, that I feel that I should make some
statement in explanation of the seeming deception. The matter was very
annoying, both to my publishers and to myself at the time it happened,
and while I was anxious then to make public a full and candid statement
of the facts as they occurred, Messrs. Hawkins, Wilkes & Speedway deemed
it the wiser course to let the affair rest for a year or two anyhow.
They failed to see my point of view, that, while they were responsible
for the advertisement, I was assumed to be responsible for the book,
and in the event of its failure to appear it would naturally be inferred
by the public that my work had not proven sufficiently up to standard to
warrant them in continuing the venture. I did not press the matter,
however, being too busy on other affairs to give to it the attention it
deserved, and until now no opportunity to explain my connection with the
unfortunate volume has arisen. I should hesitate even at this late date
to give a wide publicity to the incident were it not that my mail has
lately been overburdened by rather peremptory requests from the several
contributors to the volume to be informed what had become of the tales
they wrote and for which they were to be paid on publication.
Ordinarily, letters of this kind I should refer to my business
principals, the publishers themselves, but in this emergency it happens,
unfortunately for me, that the publishers have been retired from
business and are now engaged in other pursuits: one of them at the
Klondike, another as a veterinary s