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Bethanne on Small Publishers Punching Above Their Weight. Plus: All Your Reads
Dear Wags,
Let’s tally up why you think small presses are irrelevant. 1). Who has time to read? 2). Who has time to read anything but that bestseller assigned by your book group? 3) Who has time to go digging for something obscure when the latest Ann Patchett is but a click away?
But work nurtured by tiny publishers — enterprises so scruffy and small they may as well be called nano presses—has had an enormous cultural influence. Take Ulysses by James Joyce (Oh, I see you running. March right back here and take it).
You haven’t read the book, but at least you know you should. Thank an American woman named Sylvia Beach, the force behind the famed Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris, who commissioned a limited run edition in 1922. Joyce’s run-on sentences then entranced Harriet Shaw Weaver at London’s Egoist Press, and so on and so forth, until the tome finally came out from Random House (then under the management of Bennett Cerf) in 1934.
Here are a few other titles that got a shot thanks to little presses:
Tinkers by Paul Harding – Released by the Bellevue Literary Press in 2009, the novel went on to win the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer – That’s right, America’s most famous cookbook (18 million copies sold) was self-published by the intrepid Rombauer in 1931.
Stoner by John Williams – Written in 1965 and published by Pocket Books, this novel finally gained recognition in 2006 when the NYRB Classic imprint re-released it.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter – Potter, a 35-year-old writer and illustrator, printed 250 copies on her own before hopping to a publishing contract.
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust – Rejected again and again by big publishers in 1909, Proust paid for an original print run of 100 copies.
A Time to Kill by John Grisham – In 1989, the Wynwood Press offered Grisham a limited run of 5,000 copies. Turns out, readers had a lot of time for it.
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling – Raincoast Books in Canada was its modest first publisher, not fancy Bloomsbury or Scholastic.
The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy – First released by the Naval Institute Press!
Still Alice by Lisa Genova – Genova self-published her first novel with iUniverse in 2007; after Simon & Schuster picked it up, it remained on the NYT Bestseller list for 40 weeks.
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley – Brinkley’s 2023 Witness secured his place as a modern maestro of the short story. His first collection came out in 2018 thanks to Minnesota’s Graywolf Press.
These books and thousands like them are a credit to small, independent publishers. That’s why the recent dissolution of the Small Press Distribution group (known as SPD) is so distressing. It’s an existential threat to nearly 200 little creative enterprises. The digital economy has not replaced them. Every future Joyce needs a Sylvia Beach.
It’s only civilized to support businesses mostly focused on literature as art, and writers who won’t hit the mainstream overnight. When their talent is nurtured, the impact on the mainstream is anything but small. Here’s a piece about how you can help.
Yours Truly,
BKP
The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
Bardugo is a master of the dark campus novel. Her books Ninth House and Hell Bent delved into Yale’s secret societies; this time out she’s transferred to 16th-century Spain during the Inquisition. Luzia Cotado, a Sephardic Jew, has supernatural gifts her aristocratic mistress wants to exploit. When those talents come to the attention of a disgraced courtier, she’s thrust into a netherworld of alchemists and con artists. Before long, she’s hoping the bitter and mysterious Guillén can protect from the Church’s fanatical prosecutors, but his own secret may doom them both to a ungodly fate. Or, as Mel Brooks would say: What a show!
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