By Lee Duran
Globe Columnist
JOPLIN, Mo. —
Harold Seymour, author of three highly regarded books on the history of baseball, had a little help from his wife, so it turns out. Oxford University Press executive editor Tim Bent has announced that Dorothy Seymour Mills, wife of the late baseball historian, has been given formal co-author credit and her name will now accompany his on the books’ covers and title pages.
This acknowledgement as co-author has taken 50 years. Even so, it’s most unusual. A spokesman for the publisher told Publisher’s Weekly that “changing the authorship of a major scholarly work is unusual to say the least” and “to his knowledge” the press has never done it before.
Mills, along with her late husband, was recently honored by the Society for Baseball Research and received the society’s Henry Chadwick Award, which honors the great researchers and historians of the game.
The books all remain in print thanks to print-on-demand technology from Oxford. The first of the books, “Baseball: The Early Years,” was published in 1960 followed by “Baseball: The Golden Age” (1971) and “Baseball: The People’s Game” (1991), all credited to Harold Seymour.
In fact, the research and much of the writing was performed by Seymour’s wife, Dorothy.
Seymour died in 1992 and Mills continues to write and edit. She is a recognized baseball scholar as well as an editor and children’s book author.
Her memoir, “A Woman’s Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour” (McFarland), outlines her contributions. She is also the baseball book reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and published “Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places” (McFarland) this year.
Big dog offers free books
If you read romances or would like to give it a try with a free book, here’s your chance. Harlequin, the big dog in romance publishing, is offering free downloads of 16 category novels.
Category novels are those small books that show up each month at the bookseller in a variety of categories: sweet and simple, historical, sexy and so forth.
Get your book at www.tryharlequin.com, and happy reading.
Comeback
Putnam has signed 88-year-old Betty White to a two-book contract with a 2011 publication date for the first, “Listen Up!” The actress will elucidate on topics such as love, sex and aging.
White seems to be all over the place these days, including in TV ads and as host of “Saturday Night Live,” for which she received an Emmy, her fifth. She’s currently seen in the sitcom “Hot in Cleveland,” which has been picked up for a second season.
Her second book, tentatively titled “The Zoo and I: Betty and Her Friends,” will feature stories and photos of White with zoo animals. She’s a longtime board member of the Lost Angeles Zoo and well known for her support of animal health and welfare.
On top of all this, we can look forward to the release of the Betty White calendar in September with a cover of White and three chiseled, bare male chests gracing the cover.
It’s great to see an old broad (takes one to know one) hanging in there with the kids, especially one who seems as nice as she does.
Cookbook returns
Remember the “I Hate to Cook Book?” I do, and it’s also making a comeback. Peg Bracken’s book was updated, revised and re-released this summer.
The publisher hopes “to find a new generation of homemakers who appreciate the processed-cheese, canned-soup and alcohol-laden recipes that made it beloved among several million rebellious housewives in the 1960s and 1970s,” according to the L.A. Times.
The premise of the book, then considered heretical: Cooking is not joyful, and it should be done as quickly as possible, preferably with ingredients readily available in the cupboard.
Stop me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that pretty much the current attitude? It sure is mine.
Among the recipes: Sole Survivor (baked fish fillets with shrimp sprinkled on top), Saturday Chicken (chicken, paprika, cream soup) and Fake Hollandaise sauce (mayonnaise, milk, salt, pepper and lemon juice.)
Bracken, an advertising copywriter, “shopped the manuscript around to six male publishers, saw them each reject it and then found a female editor ... who loved it. After it was published in 1960, ‘The I Hate to Cook Book’ became a smash hit, eventually selling more than 3 million copies.”
It had been out of print for years, but after Bracken died in 2007 at the age of 89, a group of nostalgic executives at Grand Central Publishing decided to bring the cookbook back.
I’m glad they did. I think I need this book.
