Terrifying Steamboat Stories
From James Donahue’s Journal
In the midst of my success with Steaming Through Smoke And Fire, I received a call from a Mr. Mandel, of Altwerger and Mandel Publishing Co., West Bloomfield. He said he read my book, liked it very much, and wanted me to write a book like that for his company. I told him I was working on a second book, a review of shipwrecks and other events for the year 1872, but that the research was just getting started. I was probably a year away from getting this book ready. He wanted something sooner.
It was during this conversation that the idea was hatched to develop a book of short stories using a collection of the best of my newspaper column stories. I said I had a few very good stories that could be added that I could develop as longer pieces. Mandel liked the idea and I went to work on this book.
Most of my work involved steamships that were either wrecked, sunk in collision or storms, or burned at sea. Also I realized that I had a collection of stories that spanned the full history of steamships on the Great Lakes, from the Walk-In-The-Water, that went into commercial service in 1818, to the Edmund Fitzgerald, the last great ship to go missing on Lake Superior in 1975. I wrote two extensive additional stories, one a detailed account of the fire that swept the cruise ship Noronic at Toronto in 1949, and the Eastland disaster at Chicago. From this sprang the book Terrifying Steamboat Stories.
Once the book was put together, formatted on the Macintosh computer and sent to A&M Publishing, my work was not complete. The book was proofread and then returned to me for some professional corrections. Mr. Mandel provided me with a little style book on book publishing, which I learned was quite different from newspaper publishing. Numbers were always spelled out. Times were set in a slightly lower case, in caps, with the colon and complete time in hour and minutes displayed. There were other variations. Mandel asked me to thoroughly edit the text of my book, double checking the spelling of every word. That became a long and tedious task, but once it was finished, the book went into print in soft cover.
With a professional although new and fledgling publishing house behind me, this book was well publicized and found its way into all of the major book stores in at least Michigan, if not the Midwest. It sold well and I had invitations to give lectures and do book signings at Barns & Noble near Detroit, various civic groups and libraries. Unfortunately, A&W Publishing failed as a business and the book went out of print. I did a second publishing after I retired and established my own publishing house under the name Anchor Publications. Terrifying Steamboat Stories and Fiery Trial were among the books I put back in print, both in paperback.
From James Donahue’s Journal
In the midst of my success with Steaming Through Smoke And Fire, I received a call from a Mr. Mandel, of Altwerger and Mandel Publishing Co., West Bloomfield. He said he read my book, liked it very much, and wanted me to write a book like that for his company. I told him I was working on a second book, a review of shipwrecks and other events for the year 1872, but that the research was just getting started. I was probably a year away from getting this book ready. He wanted something sooner.
It was during this conversation that the idea was hatched to develop a book of short stories using a collection of the best of my newspaper column stories. I said I had a few very good stories that could be added that I could develop as longer pieces. Mandel liked the idea and I went to work on this book.
Most of my work involved steamships that were either wrecked, sunk in collision or storms, or burned at sea. Also I realized that I had a collection of stories that spanned the full history of steamships on the Great Lakes, from the Walk-In-The-Water, that went into commercial service in 1818, to the Edmund Fitzgerald, the last great ship to go missing on Lake Superior in 1975. I wrote two extensive additional stories, one a detailed account of the fire that swept the cruise ship Noronic at Toronto in 1949, and the Eastland disaster at Chicago. From this sprang the book Terrifying Steamboat Stories.
Once the book was put together, formatted on the Macintosh computer and sent to A&M Publishing, my work was not complete. The book was proofread and then returned to me for some professional corrections. Mr. Mandel provided me with a little style book on book publishing, which I learned was quite different from newspaper publishing. Numbers were always spelled out. Times were set in a slightly lower case, in caps, with the colon and complete time in hour and minutes displayed. There were other variations. Mandel asked me to thoroughly edit the text of my book, double checking the spelling of every word. That became a long and tedious task, but once it was finished, the book went into print in soft cover.
With a professional although new and fledgling publishing house behind me, this book was well publicized and found its way into all of the major book stores in at least Michigan, if not the Midwest. It sold well and I had invitations to give lectures and do book signings at Barns & Noble near Detroit, various civic groups and libraries. Unfortunately, A&W Publishing failed as a business and the book went out of print. I did a second publishing after I retired and established my own publishing house under the name Anchor Publications. Terrifying Steamboat Stories and Fiery Trial were among the books I put back in print, both in paperback.