| The link below will take you to an image of a booklet published in 1962 by the San Antonio, Texas Public Library called THE ESSENCE OF CREATIVE WRITING. The booklet consists of "Letters to A Young Aspiring Writer", sent by Ray Bradbury to a student at Rice University. It is not known how many copies of this booklet were issued, but there cannot have been that many as it is very scarce: IMG_0789.jpg (61 Kb, 12 downloads) |
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| One of Ray Bradbury's more obscure and hard-to-find short stories is "The Hour of Ghosts", from 1969. Why is it so scarce? The reason is that it originally appeared as an AT&T ad! The story/advertisement, which dealt with three-dimensional holograms, originally appeared in two magazines of which I am aware: the October 25, 1969 issue of SATURDAY REVIEW, and the December 1969 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. While the story later appeared in the Peter Haining-edited anthology GHOST TOUR (from U.K. publisher William Kimber in 1984), that really did not help the story become more well known as that collection is one of Mr. Haining rarest books. To view the advertisement from its magazine appearance, click on the link below: IMG_0793.jpeg (116 Kb, 32 downloads) |
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| Per the Peter Haining anthology, the story was copyrighted by Ray Bradbury in 1969. |
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| As noted in my posting above, one of Ray Bradbury's more obscure short stories is "The Hour of Ghosts", which appeared in 1969 as part of an AT&T ad. I had always wondered how that situation came to be, and finally found out in a book called THE RIGHT BRAIN EXPERIENCE: AN INTIMATE PROGRAM TO FREE THE POWERS OF YOUR IMAGINATION, by Marilee Zdenek (McGraw-Hill, 1983). The book is a series of articles and interviews on creativity. Those interviewed include Peanuts artist Charles Schulz; actor, composer and TV host Steve Allen; writer and director Ib Melchior; dancer and choreographer Marge Champion; and a fellow by the name of Ray Bradbury, whose interview I had not seen re-printed elsewhere. At one point in his interview, Ray discusses how "The Hour of Ghosts" came about. AT&T approached him and asked him to write a story for an ad AT&T was planning about holograms in the future. Ray declined, saying that he did not take commissions or write ads, and that the chances of him coming up with anything good were very small. AT&T asked him to think about it. Ray said that about a week later, he visited a friend, who brought out a laser beam and began creating holograms right in front of Ray. Ray continued: "I went right out of my head it was so beautiful...And I did a whole thing about a home of the future where everyone in the house has his or her own holographic ghost in their own rooms. The girl has the ghost of Cathy from WUTHERING HEIGHTS...And the boy has the hound of the Baskervilles...The father has Hamlet's father's ghost speaking Shakespeare to him...And mother has a cooking witch in the kitchen who leans over her shoulder...The whole thing wrote itself in twenty minutes, eh?" |
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