Jim Garner, a comedian who lives in Chicago, wrote "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" several years ago as an offshoot of a cabaret-comedy routine in which he made fun of current sensibilities by rewriting old fairy tales using seriously non-offensive language.
He might have known comedy, but he didn't know publishing, because his book was turned down by the first 27 publishers who saw it."Mainly they were form letters," Garner said of the onslaught of rejections. "Some of the letters were nice. One publisher encouraged me to write more, and then when I had a full book they turned it down."
He had better luck when, using a time-honored method, he capitalized on connections and tried again, and one editor - Rick Wolff of Macmillan - offered to buy the book.
"It was one step away from the slush pile," said Wolff, now a senior editor at Warner Books. He also said that while he had felt right away that Garner had hit upon a perfect idea for the times, he had had no way to gauge how the book might fare in a marketplace where humor books are a dime a dozen.
"Every time you get a little book like this you don't know what's going to happen, because most fall by the wayside," Wolff said. "You pray that this one will be the one that breaks through." (Or, as Garner put it, "It wasn't a cat book or a Southern humor book or a co-dependent book.")
But the book - in which Cinderella's mean-spirited stepsisters treat her as if "she were their own personal unpaid laborer" and the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood" is able to wear Grandma's bonnet and nightgown because he was "unhampered by rigid, traditionalist notions of what was masculine or feminine," has surpassed everyone's expectations by becoming a bona fide best seller. This week it was up to No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list. And Macmillan has printed more than 72,000 copies.
The book has certainly found its niche, mostly next to the cash registers and checkout counters of bookstores, the perfect spot for it, because it qualifies as an impulse buy at $8.95 a copy.
Kathryn Kavicky, a spokeswoman for Waldenbooks, said the book was selling most briskly in cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where readers appreciate good political satire and where, as she said, people are "relatively sophisticated."