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A little over a decade ago, a forgotten book was suddenly remembered. Its second life began when a fiction writer referenced it in a book of her own. A blogger read the new book, then tracked down a copy of the old one, and wrote about all this on his Web site. An archivist read the blog post and e-mailed it to a small publisher. By 2009, Jetta Carleton’s “The Moonflower Vine,” first published in 1962, was back in print.
Most novels are forgotten. Glance at the names of writers who were famous in the nineteenth century, or who won the Nobel Prize at the beginning of the twentieth, or who were on best-seller lists just a few decades ago, and chances are that most of them won’t even ring a bell. When “The Moonflower Vine” resurfaced and ricocheted around the publishing world, it became an unlikely exception.
What’s strange about the journey of that book—and about our moment in the history of publishing—is that its rediscovery was made possible by an independent blogger, named Brad Bigelow. Bigelow, fifty-eight, is not a professional publisher, author, or critic. He’s a self-appointed custodian of obscurity. For much of his career, he worked as an I.T. adviser for the United States Air Force. At his home, in Brussels, Belgium, he spends nights and weekends scouring old books and magazines for writers worthy of resurrection.
“It can just be a series of almost random things that can make the difference between something being remembered or something being forgotten,” Bigelow told me recently. On his blog, Neglected Books, he has written posts about roughly seven hundred books—impressive numbers for a hobbyist, though they’re modest next to the thousands of books we forget each year. “It’s one little step against entropy,” he said. “Against the breakdown of everything into chaos.”
Jane Smiley’s 2006 book “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel” contains essays about a hundred works of fiction. Bigelow recognized ninety-nine of them; “The Moonflower Vine,” about a family that lives on a farm in Missouri, was the exception. He was probably not alone in that, but he seems to have been just about the only person who did something about it. “Not one editor in New York, to my knowledge, was moved to seek out the novel,” Robert Nedelkoff, the archivist who e-mailed Bigelow’s blog post to an editor at the Chicago Review Press, told me. That editor, Yuval Taylor, made an offer to Carleton’s descendants for republishing rights. (Carleton, who was born in 1913 and worked in copywriting, died in 1999. She never published another novel.) They consulted a writer friend, who called his agent, who landed a deal with Harper Perennial. “The Moonflower Vine” was reborn.
The new edition began with a foreword from Smiley. “Most novelists, no matter how popular, fall into obscurity,” she wrote. The edition also included, as a postscript, Bigelow’s 2006 review. “This novel,” he wrote, “though long out of print, continues to hold a fond place in the hearts of readers who’ve discovered it.”