IT IS CUSTOMARY for authors of books requiring research to append at this point pages of chapter notes or, at the very least, an impressive bibliography.
Monumental research went into the preparation of Sex and the Office, but it was simply not the sort that is usually pursued in a library. Like Mrs. Browns previous book, Sex and the Single Girl, this book is based largely on her own experiences and those of her many friends. Specifically, Mrs. Brown has drawn on her “lives’* in nineteen offices, embellished with field trips into those areas that were somewhat too exotic to have fallen within even a remarkably wide range of personal experience.
We felt her account of Sex and the Office would not be complete without revealing some of this source material, however, so we asked Mrs. Brown to gather together her early “notes*—bibliography, biography or whatever—for this hook. She did, and we were delighted.
Then the page-counters and cost-watchers came to us in alarm. Mrs. Brown had had a lot to say about sexy office life, and the book had grown. The budget wouldn’t allow all those extra pages of notes—they would have to go. Sadly we reread them, feeling more and more certain that they should stay. A dilemma.
The solution, like all solutions, was a compromise: small type. So if you’re as bright-eyed as we think you are, and if you’re really interested in how this book (and this author) got to be the way they are, the following pages will he a breeze, and a fresh and amusing one at that. (Actually, we’ve just been thumbing through a few paperback books in our office, and we’ve concluded that small type must really be less of an annoyance than we had thought, since millions read them without ill effect.)
And really, even if you do have to squint a bit, we assure you that this particular bibliography will be well worth it.
BERNARD GEIS