Post #557190 by bigbrotiki on Thu, Sep 30, 2010 11:43 PM

On 2010-09-28 00:06, Otto wrote:
I remember when BOT was just a concept, a slide show, a pamphlet that was a book proposal that no publisher would publish. The catch 22 of publishing is that no publisher wants a first time author!?! Publishers wanted you to be published first!?

But even knowing all that I did at the time, even seeing the artifacts that you were shooting for the book, and going on urban archaeology expeditions, when the book finally came out even I was amazed at the breadth of the presentation of the concepts and the rich imagery therein! Anyone who has discovered Tiki in the last 10 years through your book could easily take it for granted. It is hard to believe that before the BOT there literally was NO chronology, no lineage, no written history of Tiki anywhere. The truth is, you practically created the history of Tiki single-handedly.

Thank you all for your praise of the "good book". And thank you Otto for adding your insider perspective. Actually, the irony was not so much that the publishers wanted ME to have something published, but they want something on TIKI to be published: They kept on asking "What else like it has been published already, what can we compare it to?" And I was going "Nothing, that's what's so exciting about it, it hasn't been done yet, it's something completely NEW!" But they didn't get it. Case in point is this rejection letter by Chronicle Books:

By 1992 the spine of the book, the chapter line up, was pretty much in place, and I had a pretty fat proposal, xeroxed and bound. But the publishers did not believe me that there had been a pop culture that had come and gone un-noticed, and that only now had all the elements been collected and put into a coherent context. The time of Tiki had not yet come. It took a European publisher to see the light. :)
Again: Thanks to Benedikt Taschen, the Gutenberg of Tiki!