RAY PALMER'S NEWSLETTER

The Ray Palmer's Newsletter below was Rap's explanation ... why he piggybacked Shaver's rokfogo book, This Ancient Earth-Its Story in Stone onto a Ray Palmer autobiography titled Martian Diary.

If you read between the lines (or Richard Toronto's book, War Over Lemuria) you'll soon realize that Rap knew he couldn't charge $10 (in 1974) for a 37-page autobiography, the sum total of his output after five years of writing. He was in a real pickle! Somehow, Rap needed to pad Martian Diary. Well, lo and behold there was Shaver's rokfogo manuscript, just sitting there doing nothing on his desk! Being a shrewd businessman, Rap knew that by combining two books into one press run / binding, he would save money. He'd been taking advance payments from subscribers and plugging Martian Diary for more than five years as the "first volume" of possibly hundreds of thousands of words that would soon follow. Only one volume, The Secret World, was ever produced.

The other 98 pages in The Secret World belonged to Shaver's profusely illustrated manuscript, This Ancient Earth-Its Story in Stone. Nevertheless, Ray Palmer's name appeared on the cover of The Secret World -- the new name for the two books in tandem. Shaver showed up on page 7 in "Contents."

Then Ray Palmer's mind slipped and he forgot to mention any of this to Shaver, who actually thought Rap was about to publish an all-rokfogo manifesto with Shaver's name on the cover. Dream on, Dick! As you'll see in the newsletter below, Rap billed Shaver's rokfogo manuscript as a "chapter" of his own book, Martian Diary. It also slipped Rap's mind to send Shaver a comp copy of the "new" rokfogo book, possibly anticipating heavy negative fallout from Shaver over his bait-and-switch.



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