The Distinguished Guest [antikvár]

chapter 1 In 1982, when she was seventy-two years old, Lily Roberts Maynard pubUshed her first book. It was put out by Tabor Press, a small feminist publishing house in Chicago. Tabor Press was named for and funded by the estate of Judith Tabor, whose husband had made a fortune in refrigerated transport vehicles. Though their names, Judith and Gabriel Tabor, appeared linked on plaques here and there in Chicago—in public libraries and museums and hospital wings—Tabor Press had been Judith Tabor's own project, endowed by her after her husband's death, and run exclusively by women. The first printing of Lily Maynard's book was only five hundred copies, but they were beautiful books, carefully designed and produced, with marbled endpapers, and a woodcut reproduced at the start of each chapter, a church with a narrow spire. Lily loved to hold her book, loved to turn the thick, cream-colored pages slowly, to read her own words, so transformed by the authority—the heaviness, as she felt it—of print, that she was often startled by them, by their power. The book was called The Integrationist: A Spiritual Memoir. Tabor Press was at that time run by a committee of four women who rotated being chair. As it happened, the woman in charge of the watch on which Lily Maynard's book was published, a thin, energetic person named Betsy Learning, was also