Back in the early 1990s I was an editor at Crown and I got a really smart proposal from a new author/packager for a book with a novel idea: it would show how to find a job using the internet. This was way before Monster.com or Hotjobs came into being--in fact as I recall it was before most people even had web browsers. You used clunky services like AOL or Pipeline to access the net (in my case, on a Mac SE with a screen the size of a coaster).
I thought this was a terrific, ahead-of-the-curve idea. But it was
too far ahead. We finally turned down the proposal because a) for the reason just mentioned, very few jobs were actually listed on the internet back then and b) it was going to be too much of a hassle to package the required 3.5 inch floppy disk with the book.
The really smart guy
