It was tiny, the slightest piece of prose ever published under my name. If you were nearsighted or preoccupied, you might easily have missed it. It probably went unnoticed by many readers of The New York Times Book Review when it appeared, at the foot of page twelve, on March 14, 2004, under the heading “Author’s Query.” What followed was a variation on a standard theme:

For a biography of the legendary fashion editor Carmel Snow (1887-1961), editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1957, I would appreciate hearing from anyone who might have relevant personal recollections, memos or other correspondence, photographs
or other material.
Penelope Rowlands
22 Hamilton Avenue
Princeton, NJ 08542
penelope8@aol.com

It was the very last time that one of these long-familiar author’s queries—diminutive written requests by writers seeking help with their research—appeared in the Book Review. According to a Times spokeswoman, they were dropped because of space constraints.

Such requests first ran in the Times’s book review section in about 1949. Their authors, over the years, ranged from the celebrated—the biographer Richard Ellman; Ralph Ginzburg, the controversial publisher—to the now deeply obscure, such as Dorothy Laughlin McGuinn and the wonderfully named Ernest Earnest.

As a book-addicted teenager growing up in New York, I thrilled to those items, which provided a clue to the mysterious process by which books actually got written. Their very matter-of-factness seemed delicious to me. That one could secure a book contract and soberly announce it to the world! And now and then, to my delight, I’d spy a favorite writer’s name—Janet Malcolm, for one—sometimes, amazingly, with an address attached. I felt privileged to be able to learn what an author I admired was working on, long before the book itself appeared in stores.

The queries...

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