How I made Prof Stephen Hawking a bestseller
Peter Guzzardi, editor of ‘A Brief History of Time’, recalls how he helped turn Stephen Hawking’s book into a bestseller
When I first set eyes on Stephen Hawking, I was running to catch up to his wheelchair as it careened towards the entrance of a Holiday Inn in Chicago. I had just flown in from New York and driven to the designated parking lot where Stephen was to meet me after giving a lecture at the Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies.
A half-hour went by. Then another. Finally, a compact car pulled in and a man got out, unfolded a wheelchair from the boot, placed a large battery beneath it, scooped up the passenger and strapped him into place – setting his hand on the joystick. Then, suddenly, the wheelchair spun around several times and took off.
Seeing me approaching, the driver shouted, “Peter Guzzardi?” “Yes.”
“Follow me. That’s Professor Hawking.”
A few months earlier the company I worked for, Bantam Books, had won an auction for the rights to publish A Brief History of Time in the US and Canada. The manuscript we had seen was just 100 pages long and uneven; sometimes overly simplistic and at other moments quite impenetrable.
Yet, as a book editor, I was drawn to this project like a moth towards the light. Its author’s life was itself the compelling story of a brilliant scientist trapped in a failing body by motor neurone disease, while his mind soared free to explore the great questions of life and the universe.
I felt good about landing the Hawking project, about getting Bantam’s support to take a big financial risk on the book, and about writing a successful pitch letter touting our ability to place copies of A Brief History of Time where traditional publishers could not – in supermarkets, on news-stands and even in airports.
That idea appealed to Stephen. But as I chased his wheelchair across that bleak Chicago car park, it seemed we were off to an inauspicious start. I was nervous about communicating with him. First, I had to come up with something to say to one of the smartest people on the planet, then I would have to sit for seemingly interminable awkward moments before receiving his response. By this time, in 1984, Stephen’s neurodegenerative disease had progressed to the point where he could only move his fingers, blink his eyes and emit mostly incomprehensible sounds.
When we got to his hotel room, I inquired politely about Stephen’s journey from London, and told him how happy I was to finally meet him. Stephen made a terse, unreadable
Even he could never have predicted it would sell over 10 million copies
response. Pause. Translation. “Professor Hawking wants to know if you brought the contract,” explained his assistant.
I pulled it out of my briefcase. So much for social niceties, I thought. But then I realised that it made perfect sense: this man just doesn’t have energy to expend on chit-chat.
As the professor looked over each page of legal jargon, flicking through them in just seconds, I could see for myself that although his body might no longer be willing, his mind was still functioning at warp speed.
I won’t pretend the road was easy from that point forward. The manuscript was a challenge, yet I knew that if Stephen could successfully explain his ideas to me – someone with no scientific background whatsoever – we would arrive at the popular book that was our goal.
After returning home, I began drafting the first of many lengthy letters to Stephen in Cambridge, parsing each sentence of the original draft, asking a relentless barrage of questions, and requesting more personal insight. Stephen, it turned out, was a tireless and willing partner. He saw immediately what I was up to, and added lovely humorous asides about how his illness made life as a theoretical astrophysicist easier by exempting him from household chores.
We were making good progress when things came crashing to a halt in August 1985. On a trip to Switzerland, Stephen contracted pneumonia and nearly died. To save him, surgeons removed a significant portion of his trachea, so speech of any kind was now impossible. The book went on the back burner, and rightly so; he had a long recovery ahead.
But not only did Stephen make it, he came up with a new way to communicate, using special software, a laptop, and a voice synthesiser. He learned to scroll through every letter in the alphabet, one at a time, to create sentences. Once he became adept, he was able to turn back to writing and we spent much of the next 18 months making slow but steady progress.
During one moment, near the end of our work together, Stephen let me know that he wanted to change the title of the book.
Instead of the one we had agreed on, A Brief History of Time, he now preferred the more formal “A Short History of Time”. I wracked my brain for an argument that might sway my strong-willed author – and then it came to me. I called Stephen in Cambridge and told him that from my perspective the issue was simple, really. The title we’d originally agreed upon made me smile; his new alternative didn’t. To my relief, that argument carried the day.
Finally the manuscript was ready for production. I had made the difficult decision to leave Bantam for an editor-in-chief job elsewhere, but A Brief History was well along now; the only things missing were several photos from Stephen and their accompanying captions.
I left explicit instructions as to where everything should go, but some three or four months later I was horrified to hear that the book had been printed with those photos and captions in the wrong place. And Stephen, having just received his copies in England, was on the warpath – demanding that Bantam recall every one of the 40,000 copies it had already shipped.
I checked in with a friend in the sales department to find out how the recall effort was going. He told me he had spent all day calling major retailers asking them to send back their flawed inventory, but they had told him that simply wasn’t possible – the books had already been sold. Almost all of them.
Bantam fixed the error in the second printing, and Stephen was mollified by the astonishingly good sales – the first sign that his book would become not just a success, but a phenomenon.
Even he, a perennial optimist, could never have predicted that it would go on to sell more than 10million copies and spend hundreds of consecutive weeks atop bestseller lists all over the world. Thirty years later, it is still going strong.
Stephen would go on to write other books, and I would move on to edit other authors. But, over the next few decades, our paths would cross here and there. Each time we met, I could tell he was delighted to see me, and I felt the same way.
We enjoyed a number of lovely occasions; a fete in his honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair and his overthe-top 60th birthday extravaganza at Cambridge in January 2002.
I will always treasure the moment, on that trip, when he proudly ushered me through his new hi-tech home. “This is the house that A Brief History of Time built,” he told me.
Stephen demanded a recall of every one of the 40,000 copies already slipped