Poor Frank MacShane, the biographer and editor who died in 1999 after a lengthy bout with Alzsheimers Disease. He did so much for Chandler's reputation, and really worked hard on his behalf, and now, in Harper Perennial's disastrous reprinting of MacShane's edition of Chandler's notebooks, he has been very nearly erased out of existence. He's not on the spine of the book. He's not on the front cover; not even on the back cover. They have his name on the title page, but it comes after Edward Gorey's, and he gets a tiny credit on the copyright entry. It's as if Harper Perennial wants us to believe these notebooks just got up off the shelf, edited themselves, and slipped into the display window a quality paperback pretends to be.
Then Harper Perennial prints the whole volume on--is it recycled paper? There's no other excuse, it's like your very worst nightmare of ugly, yellowed, tarnished cheap newsprint. What a disaster, especially when they're printing a selection of photographs which are now nearly totally unviewable, while Gorey's illustrations to ENGLISH SUMMER seem to dissolve into the rag fiber as you're examining them. This is the kind of visual presentation you'd expect to see a publisher give a book by Pauly Shore, but it's Raymond Chandler for goodness sake!
Okay, so he's not at his best here and his notebooks are far less interesting than one would think, but he deserves better treatment than what he's getting here, and as for MacShane it's a travesty of his work.