Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

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For reasons not in the least clear to me, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers has turned out to be my most enduring work, if by “enduring” one refers not to a time scheme encompassing geological epochs, or, for that matter, scarcely even to calendrical ones, but to those few scant handfuls — twenty-four since it was first published by Random House in hardback in 1966—of years barely wide enough to gap a generation. Not counting down-time, when it was out-of-print, or the peculiar half-life when it was in that curious publisher’s limbo, known to the trade (but never entirely understood, at least by this prefacer) as “out-of-stock,” it has been in print under sundry imprimaturs (Berkley Medallion, Plume, Warner Books and, until I actually looked it up in Books in Print where I couldn’t find it, I had thought Dutton’s Obelisk editions, and, now, Thunder’s Mouth Press), oh, say, eighteen or nineteen years. Set against the great timelines of history this ain’t, of course, much — not in the same league with astronomy’s skippy-stony’d light years certainly, or even, for that matter, the same ballpark as the universe, but we’re talking very fragile book years, mind, which are to life span approximately what dog years are to the birthdays of humans. At a ratio of seven-to-one (seven doggie years equalling forty-nine bookie years), that would make my criers and kibitzers, depending on how the actuaries count that half-life, either eight-hundred-and-eighty-two, or nine-hundred-and-eleven-years old. A classic, antique as Methuselah — the test, as the saying goes, of time.

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