New books seem to take a very long time from manuscript to
     bookstore, but at last it's happened.  Out of My Mind has been
    published by William Morrow and Company in the USA. It will also
    appear in British, Spanish, Italian,  German, French and Israeli
            editions, and later, I hope, in other languages.




                   Books by Richard Bach


  I used to  think that the purpose  of language was  to communicate.
  That if we  were clear  enough and  careful  enough,  we could make
  anyone understand anything we write, make them see anything we see.
  Not so, I found.

  The only people who can understand us are the ones who already know
  what we want  to tell them, and  then the best of  our writing  can
  merely remind, can simply whisper, "I know that, too."

  Have you ever wondered why some readers love a book and others just
  don't get it? I'll tell you why (but you'll  understand only if you
  already know):

  Some readers  love a  book because  they enjoy  remembering what it
  brings back  to them.  The ones who don't love it either don't know
  what  it says,  don't care  what it  says, or  would rather  not be
  reminded.  They have  different enjoyments  than chasing once again
  the ideas a book brings out to play.

  Following  are the  title my  books.  How  to tell if  you want  to
  remember what they say?

  Open any of them at random, put your  finger on a page and read. Do
  this three times. If every  time you open it, the page catches your
  mind, drags you against your will from word to word, from paragraph
  to paragraph,  then close the book,  hug it, buy it. If any opening
  leaves you puzzled  or unmoved, it is  not your book.  You will not
  like it. Save your money.

  When I try this test on any of my books, I am swept away down a
  current of remembering. Sometimes the writing is awkward, and the
  me who has been writing for forty years itches to change a line,
  rearrange a paragraph, cut a page here and there.

  Then I tell me to back off. The kid wrote it this way, it was the
  best he knew and it's better than half-good. A reader drawn by all
  the forces in the universe to those pages will likely not tear the
  book in half because a phrase is inverted or a preposition is what
  he ends a sentence with.

  Every book is unfinished,  is a wish-to-remind under construction,
  each  needs  us the reader  in order  to be  complete in  our  own
  consciousness.

  Dare reading, remember, only if the thing holds you three times in
  a row.

  Richard





                    Stranger to the Ground  (1963)
                            Biplane  (1966)
                      Nothing by Chance  (1969)
                  Jonathan Livingston Seagull  (1970)
                         A Gift of Wings  (1974)
             There's No Such Place as Far Away  (1976)
                            Illusions  (1977)
                  The Bridge across Forever  (1984)
                              One  (1988)
                      Running from Safety  (1994)
                         Out of My Mind (1999)