One day when Bob appeared the receptionist at the big oak desk decided she didn't care for the look of him and phoned upstairs to see if it was all right to allow him to enter. It seemed funny then, because there were very few places in which he found himself unwelcome. He would go in and people would look and whisper and stand back. They thought it was poor form to press him. They didn't quite know what to say to him anyway.

We talked about his book, his hopes for it and what he wanted it to look like. And what he wanted to call it. We knew only it was "a work in progress," a first book by a young songwriter, a quickly famous shy boy who sometimes wrote poetry and who was having an odd effect on a lot of us.

We weren't quite sure what to make of the book--except money. We didn't know what Bob was up to. We only knew that good publishers give authors a chance to catch up with themselves. Robert Lowell talks about "free-lancing out along the razor's edge," and we thought Bob was doing some of that.

We worked out a design for the book that we liked. Bob liked it too, and we set it up. We also made up some buttons and shopping bags with a picture of Bob and the word Tarantula. We wanted to call everyone's attention to the fact that the book was being published. We wanted to help Life and Look and The New York Times and Time and Newsweek and all the rest who were talking about Bob. We brought a set of galleys to him so he could take one last good look at it before we printed it and bound it and started to fill all the orders that had come in.

It was June. Bob took a break from some film-editing he was doing. We talked a little about the book and about Rameau and Rimbaud and Bob promised to finish "making a few changes" in two weeks. A few days after that Bob stopped working. A motorcycle accident had forced him into a layoff.

The book might have been published just the way it had been left. But we could not do that. Bob did not want that. Now he was not ready to "make the changes." It was nothing more than that.

Time went by and the year came to an end. Some people were furious. Where was this so-called book? He had promised. The Macmillan Company had promised. They even had made those buttons and shopping bags, and there were some left over that people were snitching from the warehouse and selling because they had Bob's picture on them and maybe a picture would be better than the book anyway.

There were also a few sets of galleys that had gone around to different people who were being given a preview of the book. These advance review galleys are made of every book. Sometimes they are loose and sometimes they are bound up with a spiral binding.

More time went by. There were still many people who talked about the book and wondered when it would come out. But it couldn't come out unless or until Bob wanted it to. He didn't.

The more time that went by, the more curious and furious some people became. Doesn't matter that it's his work, they said. Doesn't matter what he wants, they said. What right has he got anyway. And so they managed to get hold of a copy or two of those galleys and they started to make some copies of the copies. They sold even better than the buttons had.

Some newspapers saw that this was happening and decided to print parts of the book and long reviews and speculations and denunciations. Bob didn't like this idea and neither did we. We know that an artist has the right to make his own decisions about what happens to his work. And a publisher should protect this right, not abrogate it. Everyone should know this. You don't take what doesn't belong to you, and the only thing that truly belongs to us is our work.

Poets and writers tell us how we feel by telling us how they feel. They find ways to express the inexpressible. Sometimes they tell the truth and sometimes they lie to us to keep our hearts from breaking.

Bob has always been out ahead, working in ways which can be hard to understand. A lot of what he wrote then in Tarantula doesn't seem so hard to understand now. People change and their feelings change. But Tarantula hasn't been changed. Bob wants it published and so it is now time to publish it. This is Bob Dylan's first book. It is the way he wrote it when he was twenty-three--just this way--and now you know.

The Publisher