Carnifex Mardi Gras 1
- CARNIFEX MARDI GRAS 1 - A black ink and black color pencil drawing on a 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears on the dust jacket, and as a frontispiece opposite the title page in, "CARNIFEX MARDI GRAS," by John F. Carr, published by Pequod Press in 1982.
Sometimes an author can find no book company willing to publish his novel and ends up financing the publishing of his book, himself. It's referred to as a "vanity" press book.
"Carnifex Mardi Gras" is one of those "vanity" books. Carr's brother came up with the funds to get the novel published. They used, "Pequod Press" for their publishing imprint. In 2013 Pequod Press also published a sequel to this novel, "A Certain Flair for Death," which I also illustrated.
Vanity press books are not necessarily bad books just because they were rejected by publishers, lots of great books were rejected many times before finally seeing print; Frank Herbert's famous DUNE novel was rejected by 23 publishers before he eventually sold it for a few bucks to Chilton, a small publisher of business magazines and car manuals. It is now, of course, a classic of Science Fiction, and is considered to be the most profitable SF book ever published.
And the Harry Potter books? Poor author J.K. Rowling's first Potter novel was rejected by 12 publishers before one finally published it because his eight year old daughter read the first chapter and insisted her father publish it. And now the once poor J.K. Rowling is richer than the Queen of England and can afford to buy Buckingham Palace. I wonder at those publishers who rejected books that later turned out to make millions, were they fired? Did they resign and go on to do things they were more suited for? Or are they still at work rejecting more future million dollar classics?
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