Peter: One of the ways my father prepared me to face the world was to instill in me a sense of irony, so mostly I feel a mix of amazement and amusement. And I wish I had one!

Connor: You do. It’s only semi-mint, though, so it only cost me $300 to add it to your archive.

Peter: The thing is, that’s product we’re talking about. That’s a thing, an object. The book is something else than that. It is what it is, it is what it always was, and you have to remember that when I was through with it, I hated it. When I was through with it I thought “I just managed to get to the end, okay, they’ll publish it, maybe there will be some money…but Lord, I don’t ever want to think about this again.” And people don’t believe that, but it’s so. It took me a year and a half, maybe two years, before I could even look at it properly, to thumb back through it and think “Maybe it’s not as bad as all that.”

Connor: The book might well have vanished and be completely unremembered today, except for what happened in February 1969.

Peter: Yes. That’s when Ballantine Books published it and A Fine and Private Place as the first two titles in their Ballantine Adult Fantasy line of paperbacks. They had lovely covers by Gervasio Gallardo, and being the launch for the line brought them a good deal of attention.

Connor: Even with that boost, the real credit goes to one man.

Peter: As far as I can see, Jim Beauchamp did it all single-handed. He was Ballantine’s West Coast sales rep, and he fell in love with both books, but especially with The Last Unicorn. He pushed it everywhere he went, all over his territory, and if he suddenly called me to ask if I could come down to this or that bookstore and sign copies, or talk with the owner, I went. His faith in the book was so overwhelming, and he put in so much effort, that I really think he made the difference. It caught on and has been selling steadily ever since. For nearly four decades I’ve felt like I owed him big time.

Connor: The next big step in terms of The Last Unicorn’s impact and spread has to be the animated film version, which came out in 1982. How did that happen?

Peter: One day a producer named Michael Chase Walker came into my life, and he wanted to make a movie out of The Last Unicorn. It would have to be animated, of course. In those pre-CGI days there was no possible way to do it in live-action. Michael was a red-haired, blue-eyed hustler‌—‌hustling being a good and necessary character trait in a film producer‌—‌and we got on very well: I think we amused each other. And he was dogged about The Last Unicorn. He managed to come up with the option payments, and when it came time to buy out the book, he found the money. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but at that time it was the biggest check I’d ever seen. I didn’t quite know where he was taking the property, or who he was pitching it to, but I’ve dined out since on the story of how he finally confessed to me that he’d made a deal with Rankin-Bass. I was utterly contemptuous of the company. To me they were Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and they’d just done a godawful Return of the King and a Hobbit I didn’t like at all. I actually snapped as straight as you could when sitting in a VW Bug, banging my head on the roof‌—‌Michael was driving me to the Burbank Airport at the time‌—‌and screamed at him “Rankin and Bass! Why the hell didn’t you just go all the way and sell it to Hanna-Barbera?” And Michael just looked at me with immense sadness and said “They were next.”