The Book Acknowledgements that Changed My Life
An Analysis of Thanks Giving
Editor Breakdown: Acknowledgments
On this day of Thanksgiving, it’s time to discuss giving thanks and hand out some thanks as well.
If you don’t know what a book acknowledgements section is, you could be forgiven. For the majority of my life as a reader I didn’t care about this section of a book. I would even go as far to say that it didn’t even really register as a real part of a book. Even the Wikipedia entry for an acknowledgments section is only about a paragraph in length and doesn’t mention novels once: “The creative arts and scientific literature, an acknowledgment is an expression of a gratitude for assistance in creating an original work.” In plain English, acknowledgements are a page or a few pages in the very back of a book, where the author thanks people who helped the book get across the finish line. Their family, their dog, writing foundations, their editor, their agent, their publicist, etc.
The acknowledgments you find in the back of nearly all of the mainstream, contemporary books published today—at least a page, but sometimes as many as four pages—weren’t always there. For the majority of modern publishing there was just the dedication (much shorter) in the front of the book and the occasional author’s note in the back, which was rare and something of a precursor to where we ended up. Acknowledgements are such a niche book publishing and writer concern that researching exactly when the ubiquity of the current version of book acknowledgements emerged proved fruitless. By the highly unscientific method of going to my bookshelf, it seems thank-you supremacy began in its infancy in the 1980s, ramped up in the 90s, and became a dominant practice in the 21st century.
As crazy as this is in the age of data, I often advise new writers trying to find agents or people trying to work in publishing that going to a local bookstore and flipping to the acknowledgement section in books you like is still probably the most useful and valuable way to find information about literary agents, editors, and other publishing professionals. Better than LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Publishers Marketplace (an industry website).
Although perhaps overlooked by the majority of readers, a book acknowledgements section can be as profound as the work of literature it ends. Somewhere around 2014-2015, I read David Mitchell’s brilliant historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Having never been much of a historical fiction reader to that point, for me de Zoet upended the idea of what a historical novel could be—a book both deeply enmeshed in time period detail (18th century Japan) and a totally modern, propulsive narrative (side note: David Mitchell’s superpower as an author is to deliver undeniable momentum to any kind of story, no matter what crazy structure or setting he imposes on it, Mitchell is most famous for Cloud Atlas).
Because the book was so incredible, for the first time as a reader I paid attention to the acknowledgements sections and the accompanying essay that Mitchell included at the end of the book about the process of writing historical fiction. He writes about creating a new language for his take on an historical novel, one that is faithful in ways to the language and practices of a time but contemporary to the ear, what he calls “Bygonese.” In his acknowledgements he also thanks all the people who helped him complete the research and had a hand in making the novel what it was. Reading this was the first time I realized the quite obvious fact, in hindsight, that a novel is not just produced by the author’s pen straight to the reader’s page. And although the author is responsible for the vast majority of the work, there are in fact dozens of other people who participate in making the author’s words seem like magic. I was between careers at the time and searching for a new one, and from this small revelation I decided to pursue becoming a book editor, move to New York and attend a publishing course where I would eventually meet my wife. To say that a book’s acknowledgements changed my life is no exaggeration.
For years after, in my mind David Mitchell’s acknowledgements were pages upon pages explaining the integral role of all the people who contributed to the research and polishing of the manuscript. Over time, these acknowledgements became my big fish, getting bigger and bigger with each retelling.
Scottish national treasure Ewan McGregor tackling a big CGI fish in Big Fish
Looking back, as it turns out the acknowledgements to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are fairly standard and just a few pages long. Below, it turns out, is the mundane paragraph of acknowledgments that sparked my profound revelation (the agent and editor are thanked in a simple list before this):
“Third, specific thanks to Kees't Hart, Ship Manager Robert Hovell of HM Frigate Unicorn in Dundee, Archivist Peter Sinke of Middelburg, and Professor Cynthia Vialle of the University of Leiden for answering a plethora of questions. Research sources were numerous, but this novel is indebted especially to the scholarship of Professor Timon Screech of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey's annotated translation of Kaempfer's Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (as read by Captain Penhaligon), and Annick M. Doeff's translation of her ancestor Hendrik Doeff's memoir, Recollections of Japan.
Fourth, thanks to the in-house illustrators Jenny and Stan Mitchell, and in-house translator of Japanese sources Keiko Yoshida.”
Are Acknowledgements Important?
I know I just told you that acknowledgements may be responsible for, arguably, the most important decade of my life. And, now, they are also responsible for a lot of professional capital as an editor. While who gets credit for the success of a book (besides the author) is about the most slippery and elusive concept in all of book publishing (I could write an entire book on this, and might one day), the generous thanks I’ve received from authors for my contributions are both a welcome record and touching piece of gratitude that make a time-consuming and behind-the-scenes (as it should be, mostly) job feel worth it. So, it’s with full acknowledgement of the power of what acknowledgments can do, and entirely against my own personal experience and self-interest, in which I must say that there’s a certain appeal to not having acknowledgments in books at all.
While acknowledgements are important on a practical level, there’s also a certain feeling, which may even have a more powerful and timeless effect, of turning the last page of a book and seeing a blank page or the empty blank panel of the back cover. Somewhere between a sledgehammer and a cold bucket of water, having nothing follow the last words of a truly great book lets you marinate in the shock of it being over with nothing else to grasp on to—no acknowledgements, no author’s note, no Q&A, or advertisements. You can read the much snarkier, clearly-this-guy-has-a-bone-to-pick version of this same opinion over at The New Yorker (Between grade-A curmudgeony, this New Yorker op-ed writer kind of has a point about how acknowledgements can ruin the spell that a book casts over the reader).
Between purism—wanting the best experience of the book itself, one of the jobs of an editor—versus the pragmatism of thanking the people involved in a book and maybe changing their and other people’s lives along the way, there’s no easy answer to the question of whether to acknowledge or not to acknowledge. But in any case, I am thankful for David Mitchell’s notes of thanks and for all they have led me to, and thankful to you, Dear Reader, and your pets and your benefactors too.