British novelist and short story writer William Boyd wrote a piece for The Spectator on a curious consequence of literary fame—mass booksignings—that began with an anecdote about John Updike:
“The late John Updike once wrote an amusing article about signing books. This wasn’t at some literary event with a few dozen fans queueing – no, it was vastly more daunting. An American book club had taken one of Updike’s novels for its Book of the Month and asked him to sign 25,000 copies – guaranteed sales, of course, hard to refuse. They sweetened the pill by flying him to a Caribbean island for a couple of weeks and putting him up in a beachside bungalow. There, a team of assistants brought him 100 books at a time and he would sign away, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Updike was very droll about the discombobulating effects of signing your own name thousands upon thousands of times. It became an almost existential crisis. His signature became illegible; he began to wonder who this person ‘John Updike’ was and what relation he had to the automaton signing his name day after day.
“I feel I know something of what he went through. My publishers asked me to sign 6,000 so-called tip-in pages for the hardback of my new novel, The Predicament, that would be inserted into the book for an exclusive signed edition. No Caribbean island, alas.”
Read the whole article.