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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Two last baby steps

September 13, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I went through today’s snail mail and found an envelope from Harcourt that contained the dust jacket for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine–the real thing, not a photocopy. It’s even more handsome than I imagined.


As I ogled the finished product, it hit me that I’d forgotten to ask the managing editor in charge of All in the Dances how the photo insert ended up. (That’s how distracted I was by my vacation!) As you may recall, we were having permission problems with one image, a photo of Balanchine at the piano taken by Walker Evans, and Harcourt asked me to come up with a Plan B in case Plan A fell through at 11:59:59. It was a tricky assignment: I had to find a picture that would fit into the same space, both physically and chronologically, and if at all possible it had to be out of copyright. I went on the Web and quickly located a terrific photo of Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev, and within a day or two Harcourt reported back that it was in the public domain. I breathed a sigh of relief, went off on vacation…and forgot all about it.


I just shot an e-mail off to the Harcourt back office in San Diego, which wrote back immediately to tell me that they’d had to go with Plan B. That was fine with me (I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me in the first place to include a photo of Diaghilev). And that’s really, truly the end of the story. All in the Dances went to the printer while I was on vacation. We’ll be getting back the first copies at the end of September, and it’ll be shipped out to bookstores shortly thereafter.


Order your copy today!


P.S. Harcourt just informed me that the bound galleys have gone out to reviewers. Eeeeee….

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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