After producing four books with Doubleday, we were in contract negotiations for the Sam Houston biography, when they were taken over by Bertelsmann Gesellschafft Verein, a German bank holding company. Projects were dropped; editors hit the sidewalk. (Most people are unaware that only about 20% of the American publishing industry is still American owned, but there it is.)

There was in those days a particular editor at St. Martin's Press who made something of a hobby of picking up other publisher's fumbles and running them in for touchdowns. After my agent got me in touch with him, he picked up a paperback license for TEXAS: An Album of History, which had sold through three hardback printings at Doubleday. He retitled it TEXAS: From the Frontier to Spindletop so that he could commissioned a sequel volume to cover the history past World War II. It was to be a matching volume, and he envisioned a third volume up to the present day. After the Bertelsmann debacle at Doubleday, I thought that my career was saved.

The process of researching and writing the book was as much fun as TEXAS I had been, the editor was perceptive and stimulating to work with, and I got to discover that Texas history did not end with the frontier, but actually became richer and more interesting. Then once the book went into production, reality set in. The finished books did not match the first volume; they were an awkwardly different size, and instead of the high-quality stitched cloth binding I had at Doubleday, Spindletop was pressed paper and glue. Maybe 10% of the entire press run was print spoil.

And while my editor knew I was a road warrior at book publicity, somewhere in the marketing department a decision was made to put a torpedo into its side. The worst day came when the publicist phoned to tell me there was a bookstore in Wichita Falls that wanted an autographing. They day came, I drove six hours to Wichita Falls, to find the bookstore manager livid at being unable to get any books from the publisher. When this happened three more times, I wrote my editor an ultimatum, which went unanswered, and the next time I saw copies of Spindletop they were on the Death Table of remainders at Half-Price Books.