Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, and was available to other markets in translation, Barber needed to undo arrangements that impeded a single paperback publisher from obtaining rights to the whole of the work. She was successful in this – Penguin now publishes Munro in Canada, Vintage in the United States and Great Britain.
    It took Barber a year to sort this out. She had to hire a lawyer on Munro’s behalf, John Diamond, who had worked in publishing and was keen to go after NAL; he ultimately accomplished what Barber asked him to do for less than two thousand dollars. Sending him therelevant materials, Barber summarized her understanding of the situation in a five-page letter supported by two appendices and sixty-four pages of documents. Writing to Munro after she had heard Diamond’s positive assessment of the situation, Barber maintained that his fee constituted “a valid investment for you – it’s hell to spend money to get back your own work, but I believe your books will be in print for many generations to come and the present license situation assures you the smallest possible piece of the financial pie.” As Barber pointed out, Penguin – in both Canada and Great Britain – wanted the titles in question, but she could not sell them the rights as things stood. “You would recoup the two thousand dollars – and more – from those sales alone.”
    Throughout the correspondence surviving from this episode there are frequent examples of Barber’s assiduous advocacy of Munro’s position and her desire to do what was right. Pushing McGraw-Hill Ryerson, which was also wronged by the licence that the Women’s Press had granted without permission to Penguin U.K., Barber wrote:
    I hope you will change your mind about not wanting to “rock the boat.” This contract is highly unfavorable to Alice Munro’s interests. Further, it is not even a contract you yourselves thought adequate. I’ve done business with Women’s Press successfully in the past and hope to do so in the future. But I don’t think that should stop me from trying to right what I see as a wrong. Why was their contract still in effect anyway? The original purchaser of U.K. rights was Allen Lane. I assume somebody at McGraw terminated the Lane contract when their edition went out-of-print. Why wasn’t the Women’s Press contract terminated when their edition went out-of-print? At any rate, so far as we know now, Women’s Press did not receive “prior written permission from the Proprietor” before licensing rights to Penguin. You have no copy of that license and have received none of the money due.
    In September 1983, when Barber was able to send Munro her copy of the termination agreement with “the McGraws,” she wrote, “I considerthis document a golden one.” She reported also that the contract from the Women’s Press was coming and that NAL ’s was in process (it would yield Munro another $15,000), and she asked Munro to send Diamond a thank-you note. “He really did a splendid job. Of course,” she added wryly, “so did I.” She most certainly did. 17
    Another particular concern for Barber were Munro’s royalty statements. Macmillan had been taken over by Gage, which now produced its royalty statements. In December 1983, after Gibson had written her asking for permission to include a Munro story in an anthology called
Illuminations
, Barber declined his proposal and offered a counterproposal with better terms for Munro. She also wrote, “I’m very sorry if we’ve made your anthology impossible: on the other hand, I can’t in good conscience give away Alice Munro’s work.” She continued: “I must tell you, too, Doug, that the royalty statements we receive from Gage are unacceptable in their lack of information and their incomprehensibility. We have now spent many hours as a result of the latest
Who Do You Think You Are
statement, trying without success to make sense of it. We are continuing our efforts, but I’ll probably have to write for clarification.” In a postscript note sent just to Munro, Barber wrote that the royalty statements were so confusing that she would “go after them. It’s ridiculous not to send an author a legitimate accounting.”
    This letter set Gibson to work and early in January 1984 he was writing Barber to report on the royalty situation of
Who
, to send her copies of missing statements, and to try to clarify things generally. In the process he turned up an anomaly