Clash Cadillac wrote:The Lost Theatres of Dublin
by Philip B. Ryan (Author), Philip Chevron (Editor)
Philip, after reading your post on another thread regarding Soho it occured to me that you should be working on a book Philip Chevron: 50 years through my eyes or something like that. When I did a search to see if you had published anything previoulsy, I came up with the book listed above. Am I correct that Philp B. Ryan and Philip Chevron are indeed one and the same? When can we expect the release of your next book? Love your writing style.
Philip B. (Brendan) Ryan was my father, author of a small number of fairly-definitive tomes on Irish vaudeville and variety, notably biographies of Noel Purcell and Jimmy O'Dea. When he was dying in 1997, his final book,
The Lost Theatres Of Dublin was, theoretically, with his publisher, but his final illness had prevented him, unsurprisingly, from giving it his fullest attention. About a year later, I made good on my promise to him to "finish" the book. Primarily, this just involved editing and repairing some of the text, adding substantially to what had, for some unexplained reason, been an uncharacteristically small supply of illustrations. Finally, I added a Foreword explaining the circumstances of the publication and paying tribute to my dad's devotion to both theatre and Dublin and the part his enthusiasms played in my own life. By neat symmetry, this piece worked well with an Afterword in a more minor key by Noel Sheridan, the son of Cecil Sheridan, the great Dublin comic for whom my father had written some early comic sketches in the 1940s and which Pop had admitted into the book's text several years earlier.
It has to be said that the prominence of "my" credit on the edition you spotted (Amazon, presumably) neither reflects my importance to the book's content or to the graphic prominence it has in Steve Averill's jacket design. These additional "unique selling points" tend to creep in over the years as publishers understandably seek new ways to offload their last few copies without going to Remainder status.
If I ever write a book or books, I rather fancy it will only happen after a number of musical and/or theatrical projects are first sent floating out to find their destinies. The book I get asked to write most often is some sort of memoir but publishers and I tend to disagree with the financial value of such an enterprise. Not, I hasten to add, because I have a grossly over-inflated value of the saleability of my writing, but because the time devoted to such a project would automatically knock off my worktable 2 or 3 of the other projects I'd just rather be working on.
Posted: Sun Aug 12, 2007 6:34 pm