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AT FIRST it seemed simple enough. A few years ago I was employed in
the biology department at Zurich University, supposedly unravelling the
mysteries of plant population genetics. There I sat one morning at coffee,
engaged in my usual practice of bemoaning the lack of interest in my particular
line of research. It was a colleague who put the idea into my head. ‘If
you feel so strongly,’ he suggested, ‘why not write a book about it?’

Something about the idea appealed as I travelled home that evening.
Writing a book was out of the question (too little time, too few ideas,
too meagre rewards) but what about editing a book? Editing is simple enough,
or so I thought. Editing is just a matter of dotting a few Is, crossing
a few Ts and, hey presto, sending the whole caboodle to the publishers.
Let the others do the donkey work, and anyhow, a book of the kind I was
proposing was bound to be better (or better received) for the combined experience
of its contributors. If only I’d known then what I know now.

I put my idea to a German publishing company. They drove down to see
me in a shiny new BMW. There must be money in academic books, I thought,
begrudging the fact that I hadn’t considered publishing it myself. A bargain
was struck and, a couple of weeks later, their confirmation was in the post.

Accompanied by a sample issue from a series of monographs, their letter
explained that they would be happy to publish the volume, provided I could
supply a list of chapters approved by my authors. Meanwhile, I glanced through
the freebie they’d generously enclosed, noting with pride that, while the
authors were relegated to small print inside the cover flap, the editor’s
name appeared in a bold typeface on both front cover and spine. Authors
were authors but editors were stars. Fame into the bargain, I thought greedily.

The following week I ran off a bunch of invitations together with chapter
listings and comments (or pleas!) to those prospective contributors I knew
personally. They replied immediately, as did several others who presumably
shared my enthusiasm for this grand undertaking. ‘I am interested!!!’ wrote
one. ‘Congratulations on this worthwhile endeavour!’ said another. ‘I’ll
be working on my chapter starting right away,’ added a third.

Others were less convinced. ‘Is there really a need for another book
of this sort?’ one respondent wrote. ‘Sorry but I’m tied up doing fieldwork
in Tierra del Fuego until Christmas,’ claimed another (when scientists make
excuses, they don’t do it by halves). Typically, the remainder were of the
‘I’ll try, but don’t expect too much,’ category, with worries about teaching
schedules, grant applications, tenure pressure and all the other guff that
goes to make up a scientific career these days coming to the fore.

Still, the publishers duly received the list and in autumn sent out
contracts, instructions to authors and promises of a minor fee on completion.
I set a deadline of January 1989, agreed to write a 10-page introduction
and to deliver the final manuscript to the publishers by March 1989 (then
almost two years away). Any reservations were fading fast. No doubt the
issuing of contracts would get things moving I thought, perhaps naively,
since nothing could have been further from the truth.

January approached and the letters started flooding in. Half of my authors
were already begging for an extension of the deadline, others claimed their
acceptance had been provisional, that their agreement to write a specific
chapter must now be changed since they had decided on some other topic,
or, worst of all, that they had since suffered some mishap, fatality or
incurable injury that now made participation impossible. My half-book was
shrinking to a third. Then I made the fatal mistake of anyone in this situation:
I extended the deadline until August.

Months passed without result. I tried pleading, sarcasm and fruitless
encouragement. I even considered bribery, but, as I didn’t have any funds,
this was hardly a sensible proposition. Our letters crossed once, twice,
several times, sometimes amicably but with growing tension. When one author
resigned, five others wrote asking whether they should follow suit. Our
collective confidence waned. Obviously something was going on behind the
scenes of which I was not aware. Perhaps they didn’t trust me. Would you
trust me? Would I, for that matter? Fortunately, several of the contributors
met at a conference that summer in the US and decided to forgive and forget.
At least, I presume that’s what they did since I was on holiday at the time,
soaking up sun, drowning myself in Martinis and generally trying to forget
the whole idea. I returned to a mailbag of renewed promises. The August
deadline came and went. I received four chapters with seven apparently ‘on
the way’. Even contributors who had previously pleaded death or insanity
as cause for their dropping out had now been miraculously cured and (if
only I’d lengthen the deadline) were eager to send something ‘as soon as
possible . . .’ I was in business again, but the magic was gone. I gave
amnesty till Christmas, moved to Britain and kept on hoping.

Now Christmas has passed and what did I get? An abstract promised almost
a year previously, two manuscripts hopelessly overdue, and a belated promise
to send the ‘final version’ of a chapter that I have yet to see in a ‘couple
of weeks’. That was over two months ago . . .

So, as my own deadline draws near, I’ll go pleading to the publisher
for another extension. ‘Not my fault,’ I’ll claim, though of course it is
my fault, all the way down the line. I lost interest you see, not consciously
but it drifted away. Does it matter, I ask myself? Besides, I haven’t even
started on that damn introduction . . .

Marc Nicholls is based in Leamington Spa.