On angels – Sarah Lonsdale in TLS:

‘There are many other beguiling, intriguing and sometimes mysterious references to the various angels who helped bring Outpost to life. “I’m a travel writer who doesn’t drive”, says Richards. “There are lots of people to thank.” We learn about Hekla the dog and Peggy the square-dancing Samaritan and Simon, the provider of scrumptious Danish lunches. But we also learn a lot about Richards. His acknowledgements, thanking by name more than 150 guides, friends, fellow writers, archivists and lighthouse keepers, show how the intellectual and, to some, almost mystical work of writing is firmly tethered to the lowly real world where authors have to eat, sleep and rely on the kindness of others.’

(…)

‘The authors’ note to the second (1941) edition of Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Long Weekend: A social history of Great Britain 1918-1939 reads: “We were lucky to get the work done before research facilities ended and before our chief assistant, K. G., got interned as an enemy alien”.’

(…)

‘In her acknowledgements for Magnificent Rebels (2022), Andrea Wulf confesses that unlike her previous book The Invention of Nature, for which she travelled the world meeting myriad researchers, this was a “lonely book to write”. When the world shrank and libraries closed, Wulf tells us, “I travelled inside, rather than outside”. She found herself mixing with the Romantics of her book in their eighteenth- century parlours and dining rooms. As a resultMagnificent Rebels is “unlike anything I have ever written”.’

(…)

‘My favourite response was from Teresa Doherty, head of the Royal College of Nursing Archives, whose comment is a lesson to every author who may be tempted to skimp on thanks: “All too often archives are ‘discovered on a dusty shelf’, when in fact they have been discovered through online catalogues, or through enquiries answered by an archivist, and are produced before the author in distinctly not-dusty archive boxes”. Credit where credit is due.’

Read the article here.

The dream is to produce a book with just acknowledgements.

I’d like to thank my son for sleeping while I wrote this text.
Also, thanks to my girlfriend, his mother, for going to a party tonight.

I read and reviewed Andra Wulfs’s Magnificent Rebels (2022). Thanks, Andrea.
The review can be read here.
Only in Dutch. I ask for forgiveness.
The quote from this book is telling.

I’m waiting for a book that ends with the note: ‘Nobody helped me, but there were many bastards who worked hard to keep me from writing.’