Publishing Rises in the West

By Stefan Kanfer.

"In New York," grumbled a California editor last year, "they are convinced that nothing can happen except in the area of Manhattan bounded by the lounge of the Algonquin and the dining room of the Four Seasons." Then came Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star, a brilliant account of General George Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn. It climbed the best-seller list and remained there for six months. Not for the first time, the industry was forced to admit that some of the nation's better publishing houses are located a world away from New York.

The most distinguished is North Point Press, whose volumes are models of polish and elegance: many of its paperbacks have dust jackets. The house was founded seven years ago by Real Estate Millionaire William Turnbull, 59, and Bookstore Owner and former Salesman Jack Shoemaker, 39. Turnbull, whose bulk and authority give him the aura of an editorial-cartoon plutocrat, chose the name because "if you know which way north is you can't get lost." The firm moved into a converted church and rectory in Berkeley in January 1980. The quarters were chosen, says the founder, "because we knew we would have to pray a lot."

For more than four years North Point survived on little more than faith. Its catalog offered some 30 titles a year by such respected but noncommercial authors as Essayist Guy Davenport, Poet Donald Hall and Novelist Gilbert Sorrentino. The company debt increased to $500,000. Still, the house made a virtue of its liability. For one thing, it never insisted on exclusivity. M.F.K. Fisher, the cooking authority and memoirist, was able to publish her new works with Knopf as long as North Point controlled the reprint rights. That way, Turnbull decided, Fisher had "both a husband and a lover." Writers and agents were assured that "our small size permits very personal attention. We take our authors' calls collect. An ear is always there to listen."

One of the talkers was Evan Connell, whose earlier hits, Mrs. Bridge (Viking; 1959) and Mr. Bridge (Knopf; 1969), had been published by Manhattan-based companies. He found North Point Press "invariably courteous," and when they offered him attractive royalties and a substantial advance, he signed on. Every aspect of production was negotiated, a sharp variance from the dictatorial New York style. "Evan didn't want photographs in the book," Turnbull remembers. "We felt they might make it more salable to history buffs. Evan won." But the author conceded another point: he provided a detailed index.

North Point's original projection of first-year sales was 15,000. There are now more than 150,000 hard-cover copies in print. "It was a pleasure to be wrong," Turnbull admits. "The world now knows that we have maturity and competence." Adds Shoemaker: "Up till now we had yet to prove that we could sustain an effort and back up a best seller. Son of the Morning Star has shown that with a staff of only ten we can keep up with trade demand and follow through with a first-rate promotional effort."

Shoemaker notes that recognition brings some liabilities: "When agents hear of the $210,000 paperback-rights sale, they step up their asking prices for new manuscripts. And there is the danger that maybe the adrenaline won't flow quite as fast after our first big success." But fears like that belong to what San Francisco Novelist Herbert Gold has labeled the Age of Happy Problems. North Point has not only put itself on the map, it is helping to redefine the boundaries of U.S. publishing.

Black Sparrow Press, located in a sunny villa some 300 miles south of North Point in Santa Barbara, is an even smaller house. Its staff of six includes John Martin, 54, publisher, and his wife Barbara, 45, designer. The Martins, who work out of their home, are relentlessly noncommercial: "If Evan Connell came to me with a Custer book," claims Martin, "I wouldn't be interested in publishing it." Black Sparrow began in 1966, when Martin, then an office- supply executive, sold his valuable collection of D.H. Lawrence first editions and decided to go into business for himself. He sedulously imitated a famed boutique publisher of the '20s, Black Sun, down to the art nouveau design and the name.

Black Sparrow's first book was by a hard-drinking roustabout, Charles Bukowski. Says Martin: "He was the kind of guy that drank in sailors' bars, got into fights with everyone in the room and wound up drinking alone with everyone stretched out on the floor." Between bouts Bukowski wrote terse, explicit poetry and fiction in the self-advertising style of Henry Miller ("The young coeds came up with their hot young bodies and their pilot- light eyes . . ."). Martin offered to pay the author $100 a month if he would quit his postal worker's job and work full time on a novel: "He left on the last working day of 1965. The next time I heard from him was at the end of January when he called to say he'd finished his book."

It was called At Terror Street and Agony Way, and the account of a disorderly life in Los Angeles launched two careers: Bukowski's and Black Sparrow's. Since then Bukowski has produced 15 books. None have been American hits, but many have been best sellers in Europe. More than a million copies of his works are in print in at least a dozen languages; they account for about 40% of Black Sparrow's $750,000 sales volume.

Bukowski is typical of the outsider author Martin tends to favor. John Fante, a neglected proletarian novelist and screenwriter, was rescued from obscurity by Black Sparrow in the last years of his life. His reissued novels, Ask the Dust and Dreams from Bunker Hill, sold more than 10,000 copies each. Martin's current favorite is the late Wyndham Lewis, a novelist and critic whose work, & said T.S. Eliot, combined "the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave man." Lewis also dabbled in art. To Poet Edith Sitwell, his pictures seemed "to have been painted by a mailed fist in a cotton glove."

Black Sparrow's reprints of Lewis' iconoclastic works, like the magazine Blast (1914 and 1915) and the autobiographical Rude Assignment, were illustrated with Lewis' adrenal scrawls and became another profitable venture. Deliberately bold typefaces that varied wildly in size to emphasize certain words, according to the author's wishes, as well as surreal pronouncements ("A picture of a man either is or is not") exerted an appeal on college audiences: more than 50,000 copies of Lewisiana have been sold, and other volumes are on the way. "Lewis wrote 45 books," proclaims Martin. "And Black Sparrow has reprint rights to all of them. It's like having an exclusive option on the Inca Empire." If North Point represents the classical approach to publishing and Black Sparrow the romantic, William Kaufmann Inc. stands for the technocratic. The two letters most frequently heard at Kaufmann's modest headquarters in Los Altos, Calif., are "AI" (artificial intelligence), the science of making computers "think." In 1980 a professor from nearby Stanford came to Kaufmann, a former editor of science books, with a handbook of artificial intelligence. Most Eastern publishers might have rejected it by return mail; Kaufmann enthusiastically agreed to publish the three-volume set for $120 per set. A science book club alone ordered more than 10,000 sets, surprising everyone but the publisher. "People with unusual projects have been attracted to us since we began in 1972," observes Kaufmann. "Our image may be technical and scientific, but our range includes music and even art, then and now."

Kaufmann's list reaches as far back as the 19th century, with Martin Gardner's meticulously Annotated Snark, containing the text and original illustrations by Lewis Carroll -- and as far forward as The New Book of California Tomorrow, analyzing environmental issues that affect the company's home state. Although technology accounts for most of the firm's more than $1 million sales, its environmental and urban planning books are in many libraries. In addition, Kaufmann, like his West Coast colleagues, indulges some personal whims. Gardner's first novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm, written when the author was 59, was rejected by several major houses; Kaufmann found it "hilarious" and published it. The low-selling Almanac of American Letters was issued because the publisher found its collage of literary trivia irresistible. (Items: Horatio Alger was unfit for service in the Union Army. The original title of Death of a Salesman was The Inside of His Head. Tarzan does not live in sin, he was married to Jane by her father, a minister. Poet Robert Lowell twice tried to enlist in the armed forces; both times he was rejected. By the time he was called up, Lowell had become a conscientious objector.)

"Bill Kaufmann is the kind of publisher an author dreams of," says Gardner. "He takes chances -- something no large Eastern firm dares to do. And he won't compromise on binding, paper or typeface. There is no such thing as a 'middle book' to him. All of his books are important, all of his authors are stars."

Therein lies the difference between coasts. As Kaufmann observes, "New York publishers bring out a list twice a year, promote the hell out of the books that appear on it, run with those that are successful and remainder everything else." And along the Pacific? "Out here we put out our lists and stick with them. We don't like to see anything go out of print." Like a practiced surveyor, he knows exactly where to draw the line: "What we and Black Sparrow and North Point offer has perhaps less to do with geography than philosophy. Ten years ago, the East published the book, but we live it: Small Is Beautiful."

With reporting by William R. Doerner/San Francisco