From the January/February 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Acceptance

by Joan Dash

’m absolutely overjoyed to be here. To be honored at such an event is like being told, “I really love that child of yours,” and who can hear those words too often?

The book has an odd history. About twenty-five years ago, when leafing through a four-volume history of mathematics, I found a chapter devoted to John Harrison and the marine chronometer. Thinking it would make a fine book for youngsters, I wrote some notes, set them aside, and read them through a few days later. They seemed rather tepid. Alive, but just barely. I went on to something else.

Seventeen years later, while rummaging through my desk, I came across those same notes, now fresh and vital, rejuvenated by the passage of time. I wrote out a proposal, my agent Charlotte Gordon sent it around, and everybody liked it — except they needed it to be written for a younger audience. The young-adult market was wobbly; picture books were holding firm. It seemed to me that Harrison, longitude, and the workings of the marine chronometer were a considerable swallow even for middle-schoolers. But Charlotte believed in the project, so I wrote a younger version, and we tried with both. Nobody was interested.

Months later, Charlotte phoned, amazed and happy, to say that Frances Foster at Farrar wanted to go ahead with the book. And in the pleasant afterglow of this news, I did what I’d already done dozens of times — consulted Amazon to make sure nobody had suddenly published a book about John Harrison. Since the birth of the American republic, nobody in this country had written such a book — but on that particular afternoon I learned that one was forthcoming. No, not for children, and on closer inspection I found that the publisher was a smallish one, unlikely to make much of a splash. The title was Longitude; the author, Dava Sobel.

Frances said, wistfully, that it would have been better if ours were the only one, but of course it was a different audience. Charlotte pointed out that a modest success for the adult book would actually be helpful; people would become familiar with the name.

Soon it became apparent that Dava Sobel’s Longitude was having an immodest success. It was followed three years later by The Illustrated Longitude, an expanded history, also by Sobel, packed with handsome photos, including glowing portraits of all the Harrison chronometers; and this in turn was followed by the made-for-television movie. I did my best to work undistracted by so much brouhaha.

One day Frances suggested, in the gentlest of editorial tones, that there was something amiss. We had a biography in which little was known about the subject. We were well informed about what he did and the era during which he did it — the eighteenth century being a treasure house of autobiography and memoirs — and the necessary scientific concepts were all in place. But where was the man himself?

I did a quick re-reading of the manuscript and was unable to find him. Although I’d been aware from the start of how limited the source materials for Harrison were, I thought that the story itself, the intensity, the persistence of the man would create a sense of his personality.

But it didn’t happen that way. Hmm, I thought, Maybe we could present a history of the search for longitude — making no secret of the fact that John Harrison was the lead character — and at the same time bring the reader face-to-face with the problem. That is, we don’t know much about him, but we can guess here, we can estimate there, we stand on firm ground here, here, and here, and this is why the ground is firm. In other words, discussing how we know the things we know — the artifacts we call history.

Frances read this new version with interest and encouragement, and began sending back copy-read pages. Meanwhile, I was troubled by a curious problem. I couldn’t think of anybody to discuss it with; it was insoluble; and seemed to be mine alone: we were going to need illustrations. But of what? Well, naturally, those chronometers. Nothing could be more appropriate. A few ships, maybe, perhaps a quadrant. Mostly the chronometers. I began flinching whenever I came across a picture of those elegant old-timers.

Frances called to ask what I thought of drawings by an artist named Dussan Petricic, whose work could be seen in the most recent New York Times Book Review. I felt as if I had been thrown a lifeline. Dusan’s drawings, as they turned out, were wildly imaginative, usually funny, and capable at times of knowing what I meant to say better than I knew it.

The appearance of the finished book took me by surprise. I had it in front of me for several days — “those days when you bond with your book,” as a friend of mine puts it — before I realized how remarkable it was. The paper, for example, seemed to have been cut at the edges the way books used to be. Each chapter began with the first letter of the first word exploded into a witty design — the L for London becoming a broad avenue on a map, with narrow, eighteenth-century houses jammed into squiggly squares on either side of the broad avenue. The double-page-spread illustrations were packed with information as well as hilarious — Sir Edmond Halley, in his study at the Greenwich Observatory, turning toward young John Harrison while holding a telescope with one hand, the other hand cupped to catch a falling star.

The paper has a certain weight; the jacket is carefully designed, front and back; and every physical element of the book has been planned by the human hand and eye. So when you say, “I really love that child of yours,” you mean the offspring of several people: the incomparable Frances Foster; Dusan Petricic; Filomena Tuosto, who designed the jacket; the three professors, two of physics and one of astronomy, who were my consultants; myself, the author; and that stubborn, short-tempered, shadowy person hovering grumpily in the background, John Harrison.