Virginia Kidd Literary Agency is said to be haunted by it’s former founders

I saw this article today about a publishing house being haunted by it’s former founders.
Interestingly enough, the current tenants report of ghostly going-ons but say that they feel no immediate threat.

By JESSICA COHEN
For the PoconoRecord
January 05, 2009
MILFORD — The 150-year-old Milford house where the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency resides looks haunted — and is — according to Christine Cohen and Vaughn Hansen, the agents who have worked there for 10 and 20 years, respectively.

Phantoms dressed for other eras appear; distinct aromas occur without cause; objects disappear, and then, upon polite request, reappear.

But, Cohen said, “The ghosts are harmless.” She is accustomed to feeling that the science fiction and fantasy novels the agency has represented for almost a half century are sometimes barely ahead of real life. Their phantoms and advanced technology echo in her brushes with ghosts and the way the Internet accelerates her days.

She is merely amused by the clue she found one morning that the ghost of Virginia Kidd, who died five years ago, had stopped by. A photo of Kidd seemed to have escaped from its frame, leaving the surrounding cardboard and plastic undisturbed.

“That’s just Virginia,” Cohen said.

In the 1940s, the mercurial Kidd wrote short science fiction stories while sharing a Manhattan apartment with another science fiction writer, Judith Merril. Kidd realized then that she “didn’t have a novel in her,” says Hansen. However Kidd’s knack for guiding writers to the right magazine or editor for their work prompted Merril to tell her that being an agent was her real calling.

And talented science fiction writers did call her. Early in the science fiction career of Ursula Le Guin, an editor urged her to accept a publisher’s stingy offer for “Left Hand of Darkness,” but LeGuin turned to Kidd, who immediately made an advantageous deal elsewhere. For about 30 years, Kidd and LeGuin corresponded, though rarely seeing each other, and after Kidd’s death in 2005, LeGuin wrote a tribute.

Of the Kidd agency, she says, “I caught a couple of glimpses of the labyrinthine psychological complexities of the establishment. It seemed a bit like a performance of Marat/Sade crossed with Der Rosenkavalier. ”

The drama’s cast became more populous as, like Kidd and her husband, science fiction writer James Blish, other science fiction writers began finding New York too expensive for their bohemian lifestyles. They drifted west to Milford in the 1950s, forming an active writers’ colony that often gathered at Kidd’s house, called Arrowhead because of the way the intersection of the Delaware River and Sawkill Creek shape the estate.

Their collusions spawned the Science Fiction Writers of America and a method of critiquing each other’s work now called the “Milford method.” And they call their annual conference the Milford Conference, though it may take place in any Milford around the world..

Kidd became a full time agent in the mid-1960s and she left many prominent clients to her protegees, Hansen and Cohen; their list includes Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and Damon Knight, among others.

Hansen, who grew up in Westfall, and Cohen, from Wallenpaupack, spend their days answering queries, coping with copyrights, and managing the impatient communication technology has wrought.

“Before e-mail we had a grace period,” said Hansen. “We had six weeks to answer queries and teacher requests. Now people want to hear next week.”

They also try to handle mail sent by the reading public to writers to guard their authors’ writing time. Le Guin, now near 80, once replied to a reader, “Consider that words in my next novel are answers to you.”

Alan Dean Foster often tries to answer his own mail, but he travels extensively, said Cohen, “to anywhere the mosquitoes aren’t bigger than the birds.”

As to fantasies that their lives as agents are exotic, spending their time at publishing parties and writers’ conventions, Cohen demurs.

“We do get to know writers and editors. It’s a close community. But for parties we have to be on our best behavior.”

And the science fiction conventions may demand superhuman powers. For instance, publishing companies often schedule readings at times that would trouble normal humans, like at the moment their plane lands, said Cohen. And though they travel, they see little, they say: They saw Disneyland from a hotel window, and a lost van driver accidentally drove them around Chicago, then disappeared, not to be seen again.

But says Cohen, “I couldn’t exist in a high rise office. I like unconventional surroundings.” She and Hansen guard their working time, as well as the authors’, in their office with its old flowered wallpaper and couch, bookcases devoted to individual authors, banging radiators, and Boise, a white cat with a strange gait and dark, studious eyes. They prefer their clients to be further than driving distance away to ensure visits will be rare.

Still, intrusions come from seemingly nowhere. Recently, they received a call from a 12-year-old, demanding to know when the next Ursula Le Guin novel would come out.

“How did she find us?” marvels Cohen.

The chocolate chip cookie smell keeps returning to the top of the stairs. But the recurring odor of cigarette smoke, which they believe accompanied the ghost of Kidd’s last business partner, James Allen, was last smelled in the sanctuary of Milford Episcopal Church when Virginia Kidd was buried.

Virginia Kidd 1921-2003

Full Source: Pocono Record