Mr Wells and Mr Buchan
Kate Macdonald uses 508 rediscovered letters from John Buchan’s early years at Thomas Nelson’s to illuminate his wide-ranging work as an editor, rights negotiator, marketer and architect of the cheap Sevenpennies series. The correspondence shows Buchan enthusiastically pursuing H. G. Wells’s fiction and, in 1908, urging Nelson’s to acquire Ann Veronica after reading it, while requesting that Wells revise a sexually explicit passage. Wells instead sold the novel to T. Fisher Unwin, which published his preferred text in 1909, prompting controversy that later made Buchan call it “indefensible.” Subsequent disputes over Wells’s publications and threatened litigation hardened the relationship, revealing both Buchan’s initial commercial optimism and Nelson’s growing concern about the reputational risks of publishing Wells.