When Mike Shatzkin was 8 years old, he would amuse himself typing tabular lists of presidents of the United States on a portable Underwood he found at his grandmother’s house. Mike’s father, Leonard Shatzkin figured he’d better learn to touch-type. “Either we teach him the right way or he’ll teach himself the wrong way,” was Len’s assessment.
In Ossining, New York, the next village over from Croton-on-Hudson from where the Shatzkins lived, across the street from the high school, was the Squire School of Business, run by Mrs. Evelyn Squire Culp. Her school taught typing and shorthand, recruiting students from both graduates and dropouts from the public school across the street.
The Shatzkins asked Mrs. Culp, “can you teach a 8-year old to type?” She said, “I don’t know, because when you learn to type you move words from your eyes to your hands (most typing instruction is about copying something along side of you, or it was then), not letters, so I may depend on how well he can read. But we can try.”
So Mike took typing lessons twice a week for three months. He got up to 42 words a minute before he quit the Squire School, But that intercession by his father at an early age, he is convinced, is why he qualifies to have a page on Filedbyauthor, and has largely made his living because of his ability to write (although, frankly, not books).
Mike’s professional life as a strategic consultant to book publishers and their trading partners is well documented on his idealog.com web site, through his blog The Shatzkin Files http://idealog.com/blog, and through articles which have appeared in every major book publishing magazine or journal in the English-speaking world. His career as a writer and author outside book publishing is not so well known.
Mike’s first professional writing was covering the Croton Little League for the Croton-Cortlandt News in 1958 and 1959, when he was 11 and 12 years old (but typing like a bat out of hell!) He continued sportswriting for local papers through high school.
At UCLA, Mike created a weekly column for the UCLA Daily Bruin called “The View from Underneath”, a commentary on campus politics, national politics, and student life.
Mike’s first book was written the year after he graduated from UCLA and moved to Manhattan for the first time. “The View from Section 111” was a fan’s diary of the 1969-70 New York Knicks season, which turned out to be a championship season. It was published to virtual silence by Prentice-Hall in October of 1970. Mike has a copy and if the Knicks ever get good again, he might re-issue in it as an ebook or in print-on-demand.
One of Mike’s lifelong friends is Peter Funt, the son of and successor to the creator of Candid Camera, Allen Funt. In 1979, Peter dreamed up and wrote a book, on which he generously shared co-authorship credit with Mike, called Gotcha!, a collection of practical joke ideas. That one was published by Grosset & Dunlap’s Stonesong Press imprint in 1979, just as the companies were separating and Grosset was basically exiting the book business. More silence.
In the late 1980s, Mike produced a number of baseball books.
In 1987, Mike published Baseball Explained with Pelham Books in the UK. Baseball Explained was never published in the United States.
In 1986 and 1987, Mike and longtime book packager and author Jim Charlton sold The Ballplayers, an encyclopedic work of narrative baseball history, to the Arbor House imprint of William Morrow and The Baseball Fan’s Guide to Spring Training to Addison-Wesley. The Guide was published in two editions, first in 1988 and then 1989. Mike completed the creation and editing of The Ballplayers in 1989. The book was published in April 1990.
The Ballplayers and a book later written by Charlton for Macmillan, The Baseball Chronology, formed the core of Mike’s baseball web site, http://www.BaseballLibrary.com
In the late 1990s, a collection of trivia questions originally developed for the BaseballLibrary site by Steve |