SALT LAKE CITY — When a book is almost twice as short as the author's original manuscript, readers are bound to wonder what was taken out and why. Was it controversial? Was it juicy?
The original "Working Draft" manuscript of Edward L. Kimball's "Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball" was too big to be published and marketed by Deseret Book in 2005. But that was then. Now, for the first time in printed form, the "Working Draft" is available in a limited-run hardback book published by Benchmark Books.
Edward Kimball, a son of President Kimball, spoke on Jan. 20 at Benchmark Books about how Mormon Church-owned Deseret Book printed his biography — and included a CD-ROM of his twice-as-long, unedited manuscript "Working Draft." The current expanded book is a print version of the CD's "Working Draft."
In 1972, Bookcraft publishing recruited Edward Kimball to compile his father's sermons. The book was titled "Faith Precedes the Miracle." Edward Kimball suggested the possibility of a biography of President Kimball, who was then a member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve.
"Biography doesn't sell," was Bookcraft's response.
"Later, he was proven wrong," Edward Kimball said.
Edward Kimball worked with his nephew Andrew E. Kimball Jr. to write a biography anyway. "I set out to write family history for my parents," Kimball said. "We put together our efforts to create a family-oriented biography."
And then President Harold B. Lee died.
The market for a biography about an apostle may be small, but when Spencer W. Kimball became the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1973, the interest in a biography increased. It took about four years for Edward and Andrew Kimball to finish the book "Spencer W. Kimball."
"It was well-received," Edward Kimball said. "I was amazed at how many people said that they felt good after reading the book because it was candid and it gave them a sense that maybe they could make something out of themselves as well."
President Kimball was 78 years old when he became the leader of the church. "He's going to live a couple years more and then be gone," Edward Kimball remembered thinking about his father. "So what we'll do, we'll put out a revised edition with a last chapter — a very few pages to sort of finish the story. But he kept living. On and on."
President Kimball died in November 1985. About a decade later, Edward Kimball retired from teaching at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU. He wanted to take all the material he had been collecting since 1977 and write the last chapter on his father.
The "chapter," however, kept on getting longer and longer as he worked on it. "One of the things that I worried about all this writing I had done and all this stuff I had collected that was pure gold could hardly be included in a book of normal size for a normal press."
But it was painfully obvious to Kimball that the manuscript had to be cut to a publishable size. He did it himself and submitted the shorter, halved version to Deseret Book, which was hesitant at first to publish it. But after a review, Deseret Book decided to go ahead with the publication of "Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball."
Edward Kimball, however, brooded about all the "golden words" he had cut out earlier. While driving one day, he thought of a solution. "It just came into my mind that you could put the whole thing on a CD … and put the CD in the back of a printed book."
Edward Kimball's 'golden words' — including more footnotes and interviews — would be accessible for more serious students while the printed volume would be a more marketable size.
"Somebody will ask, 'What compromises did you make in writing the book? What juicy tidbits are there hidden in the CD that were rejected (for the print version)?' " Edward Kimball said.
Besides the bulk of material that he had removed on his own, Edward Kimball said the Deseret Book editor made an initial request for only 66 changes. "Many of those things were typographical errors, which any editor would have asked for."
Edward Kimball was eager to make most of the changes. He was also "quite happy" to edit passages that identified people who were not essential to the story. In other instances, he added a few sentences that clarified the context. A few specifics were generalized.
"Sometimes it was as simple as changing 'irate' to 'annoyed,' " Edward Kimball said.
On some items, Edward Kimball prevailed. Most of the other disagreements were solved by the inclusion of an unprecedented "Publisher's Preface" to the book — a sort of disclaimer that explained how the publisher and the author had differing points of view on certain events but that they compromised on some issues after "energetic" debate.
This left only about three items of disagreement. Edward Kimball agreed that one item was too ambiguous, and the other two were quotations that they decided to merely cite in footnotes.
"People hearing about all the changes that were made in the manuscript are looking for something juicy," Edward Kimball said, "you are going to have to look hard."
Curt A. Bench, owner of Benchmark Books, received permission from Deseret Book and Edward Kimball to publish the entire text of the CD-ROM "Working Draft" as a printed book. "Probably a lot of you … are like me: You don't like to read off a computer screen," Bench said. Bench's Benchmark Books published only 400 copies of the hefty 665-page book, which sells for $99.95 per copy. The text is printed in two colors to make it easy to see the differences between the versions. "It is an effort to pay tribute to my father," Edward Kimball said, "to see that there was an adequate record of his life's work."
e-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com