Greetings all—
This is my first time posting here. Allow me to introduce myself—the name is Jherek Swanger (that’s ”mka”). In case anyone cares, I was a member of the SCA (OWS, OL) for about 20 years, but as I’m nearly completely inactive in that regard these days I’m going to eschew the persona name, especially given the topic at hand. You can think of me as the author of the Chivalry Bookshelf book that was going to be, never was, and now apparently never will.
I hope you will have the patience to read the historical background to my relation with Brian Price, which pertains to this thread:
In October 2004 I approached Brian at the Known World Academy of the Rapier, to propose Chivalry Bookshelf publishing my translation of Camillo Agrippa’s fencing text of 1553. I had had no previous interaction with Brian before then, nor knew of him other than as the head of Chivalry Bookshelf. After looking at my translation in progress there, he agreed to send me a publishing contract. I mailed him back the signed copy in March 2005.
By February 2008 the process of editing my translation and associated analysis, etc., was done and I sent to him what, at the time, was meant to be the final version of my book. Brian had started advertising it under the title “
Geometry of the Sword”, as I learned from occasional emails beginning in November 2007 from people who wanted to buy it; I was also told that an ad for it appeared in a Revival.us catalog in 2008.
While waiting for Brian to get back to me with layout (which turned out to be a very long wait, as will be seen) I dinked around with the text a wee bit, making minor corrections and additions, and in February 2009 sent him some updated files for the final version. Brian told me to expect to receive layout of the book to review before Pennsic 38 (i.e. late July 2009). I’ll reiterate that I’d been waiting for him to lay out my manuscript since February
of the preceding year. His promised Pennsic deadline came and went with nothing arriving, followed by months in which I unsuccessfully attempted to reach him by phone or email.
In September 2009, Ken Mondschein (now PhD) announced that his own independent translation and analysis of the same treatise was available for order. This was in no way a surprise, as Ken had done me the courtesy of informing me sometime in late 2005 that he was going to produce this as part of his dissertation, and in fact he and I would touch bases occasionally on some point related to our respective research. I occasionally reminded Brian that there was competition in the wings, by way of trying to inject some urgency in the publishing timeline, but Brian was perpetually unconcerned. I however regarded Ken’s announcement of publication as effectively a commercial death knell for my own translation. In late October and early November 2009 I emailed Brian suggesting that we give up on publication as no longer commercially viable, and proposing that we dissolve our contract. I got no response to these emails. When I finally succeeded in reaching him by phone, in early December 2009, he claimed to have never read them.
In that same conversation, to my great surprise, he claimed to have emailed me the layout of my book to proof at some point. I had received nothing of the sort. Whether or not he had actually tried to is something I can’t answer, since if he had tried to email me a 54 Mb attachment it would have bounced. At any rate, he promised to mail me a CD of the files in question, which finally arrived about three weeks later, at the very end of December 2009. He instructed me to proofread them as soon as possible, as he had a position in the queue of a printer in Hong Kong.
And that should have, at long last, led to me being a published author with Chivalry Bookshelf, for good or ill. However, upon proofreading the files Brian sent me, I immediately noticed that something was very wrong. He had in fact laid out a version of the translation that I had sent him back in 2006, i.e. the pre-editing version that I sent out to him and other reviewers for initial comments and suggestions. Or, if you like, the rough draft. We exchanged a flurry of email on this topic on December 29th and 30th of 2009 (
via his same email address of which he claimed on this thread: “the
brian@chivalrybookshelf.com email has not worked since 2008”). At that time I re-sent him the correct final versions of the files of my book that he should have laid out and apparently misplaced.
That was the last I ever heard from Brian, in any medium, ever, to this very day.
Which brings us to the present day. I saw a crossposting to this thread, where I read Brian’s statement “there will be no further Bookshelf titles except for my own”. This is not surprising per se, but it is news to me. To be explicit, I don’t know when Brian decided that he wasn’t going to publish my book, but
he hasn’t bothered to inform me of this. Insofar as I’m concerned, this displays all the tact and courage of letting your spouse find out you’re seeking a divorce solely by announcing it on Facebook.
Accordingly, I decided to take him up on his offer: “If authors want the rights to their books, as we have already returned to David Lindholm, then they should contact me directly for a negotiation.” On February 26th, 2011 I sent a registered letter to Brian, return receipt requested, suggesting once again the dissolution of our contract. I have yet to receive a receipt indicating that he has accepted the letter. I emailed him at his allegedly non-working chivalrybookshelf.com address on March 14th, 2011, and then at his chronique_editor address on March 17th, 2011 to inform him of the same. I have tried calling him several times during this period (since “Our phone numbers have not changed in 10 years. Email is *not* a reliable channel for critical messaging”) but no one has picked up the phone. It is consequently difficult for me to regard his offer as sincere, given that Brian seems to be making it nearly impossible for me to contact him for a negotiation.
So there we have it. I am not a party to the lawsuit proceeding against him, as he has not deprived me of any funds. There are no royalties to be paid to me, since there has been no publication of my work, despite years of good faith efforts and patience on my part. What I have lost is countless hours of work (as have my reviewers to a lesser extent), as well as suffered years of frustration, and witnessed the likely diminution if not complete loss of a viable market for this project, in consequence of his editorial incompetence. I have no delusions about the financial rewards to be reaped by taking this project to a different publisher at this point. Nonetheless I had hoped to hear from him directly that there would be formal closure to this protracted and fruitless charade.
I have given Brian far more than adequate opportunities and time to either bring my book to press or admit to me that he won’t. He apparently cannot bring himself to do either, nor muster the courage even to respond to the very attempt(s) to contact him that he himself solicited. Yet he has pulled his head out of the sand long enough to admit to the general public in this forum that he is done with publishing others’ works. For my part, I have chosen to respond by adding to the multitude of voices cautioning against the consequences of trying to do business with Brian Price.
Jherek Swanger
