Phew.  What a month.  First galley copies of THE SUPERGIRLS and JAM TODAY, and they’re all off to the 28 Consortium sales reps, who today sent ‘round their various reports on the state of the book buying nation.  Fascinating.  And how sensible. Every body’s got their own voice, and they’re pretty much all voices bung full of common sense.   How amazingly comforting it feels to know there are all these competent people watching our back.

And the galleys went off to various to get quotes for the covers.  Now THAT is the reward for all the time spent laboriously combing the manuscripts for the niggling typos that everyone missed, no matter how many times we all went over them.  And for the hours spent compiling the indexes, nipping and tucking the text to make it fit properly on the allotted pages. You get a quote from somebody when you least expect it, my God, somebody you actually admire, and you sit back for a minute and think, “whew.”  That’s about it.  Just “whew.”

The first one we got for THE SUPERGIRLS was from Stan Lee.  You can imagine how that affected Mike.  I think it was probably the first thing he thought about every morning for days.  And that’s on days when he had quite a bit to think about.  Even without me calling up every five minutes to make some kind of change in his layouts of the books and of the really stellar catalog he’s designed for us (“I like it—it’s modest, yet grandiose…just like EAP.”)

Then there was JAM TODAY.  Yeah, yeah, so I wrote it too—see the JAM TODAY blog from which it sprang.  But let me tell you, being a publisher kind of trumps being a writer while you’re in the production phase, and I don’t think I thought about it one way or the other except as a piece of a project that had to be done as well as I could manage.  So when I sent it out, the first time I sent it, to one of my most admired cookbook writers, it was gone about two days when I suddenly realized.  Oh my God.  No one’s ever read that manuscript but me.  I mean, it was a little bit the overworked oldest daughter in the family, if you know what I mean—the other two books got more of my close attention; THIS one was just supposed to get on with it and help me with the rest of them.  I didn’t pay her any attention.  Oh my God, I thought.  Both Mike’s book, and Brian’s book—which comes out in November (Correcting Jesus, EAP’s Christmas book, nice touch that)—they’d both been edited and edited and discussed and discussed.  But not mine.  Oh my God.  What if it is an incredible piece of crap?  I never asked!

So when I got back the most generous, amazing quote from Deborah Madison,  I almost keeled over dead with relief.  And you know what?  As the publisher, not as the writer.  Because the publisher was thinking, dear God, what if I was about to launch a total lemon? But the writer said to the publisher:  Well.  Dear.  It can’t actually BE a lemon, not completely, not if Deborah Madison is willing to say nice things in public about it.  Now CAN it?

By the time I got an even more heartening quote from similarly admired John Thorne, I was back to being a writer—maybe because it was two in an insomniac morning, and the publisher was beaten to hell, leaving only the writer to moon over the emails.  And the pleasure I got from that quote…well.  I can’t say anymore.  Just…WELL.

And in other news…we may have an intern.  Yes, we may have found an intern. Yes, and she may turn out to be such a perfect fit that I cannot be blamed for originally thinking she was an April Fool’s joke perpetrated by my friends, until I noticed our introductory conversation was taking place on April 2.  She lives in Seattle.  I’m sending her your way, Bruce of Chin Music, and Rick Simonson at Elliott Bay Books.  Oh, please, Goddess, let her be as she appears.  Her name is Jessica and her works are good.  But more on that at a later time.

Next month:  our first sales conference.  New York City, just like I pictured it.

Mat Capper, EAP’s special correspondent from Liverpool, reminded me the other day about the first time we met.  It was in Sefton Park, in Toxteth, in Liverpool, on the set of REVENGERS TRAGEDY.  I was producing the film, and he was acting in it.

The scene that day was a marquee in an open field, where a wedding takes place.  The bad guys invade the tent, kill the guests, and proceed to steal their money.  Mat played one of the bad guys. The guests were all extras, recruited from who knew where…just people who wanted a laugh, or people who knew one of us, or people passing by…that kind of thing.  All Liverpudlians.  Scousers, as they’re otherwise known.

Some minor prop error had occurred, and we discovered we didn’t have the play money needed for the robbery.  Heads went together.  No problem–Lucy, our excellent production accountant, was there with the cash to pay the day players. ?3000 is what I remember, then about $6000.  Without much more ado, we scattered the real cash all over the extras playing dead, and shot the scene.  Collected the cash, went on with the day, and didn’t think much more about it.

Until I had to listen to the horrified cries of outsiders, .  “You did WHAT? Where?  In TOXTETH?  One of the worst neighborhoods in Europe?  Don’t you know about Scousers?  They would’ve stolen you blind!”

Only they didn’t.  We didn’t lose one ten pound note.  It hadn’t occurred to us we’d lose one ten pound note.  And you know why?  Because everyone there was having fun, they were all essential elements to the film, everyone was being creative together.  There isn’t much more fun you can have in this world short of having sex with a loved one.  Which is another form of creative group activity, come to think of it.

I thought about that this week, when Alex and I were on a road trip together, sharing the car (we brought the dogs for fun) so I could go to San Francisco to spend the day finalizing design for the first two EAP books, and he could show the rough cut of REPO CHICK to a roomful of technicians who are going to do the effects.

The EAP designer and I had a blast.  It was (and is) a ton of work. But there’s a big difference between the kind of work you do because you’ve got a creative and practical goal, and the kind you do because you think you have to, for whatever reason.  We got through everything we had to do, and I suggested we hop over to Berkeley and watch Al’s screening.  (On the way over, on BART, we designed the EAP catalog. That was fun, too.)

The screening was at Phil Tippett’s place.  Phil Tippett Studios, you may or may not know, is one of the most highly regarded special effects joints on the planet.  They do a lot of the high end studio special effects.  And they wanted to do REPO CHICK, outside of normal working hours, for just about zero money–just for fun.

So this was after hours.  All thirty or so people sitting in the room rigged up for a screening had finished their work-for-pay for the day.   The mood was festive and alive; when Mike and I got there, we discovered my dogs had been given the run of the facility (along with a surfeit of corn chips).  There was pizza and beer.  We sat down and watched the film; a discussion followed of what had to be done.  Phil stood up and warned his crew that it was a lot of work, and that they had to remember about their day jobs.  Everyone greeted this news cheerfully and went back to discussing REPO CHICK.

Later that night, sitting over a cup of chamomile tea, Phil said, “This reminds everyone of why we got into all of this in the first place.  Everyone’s always asking me what it was like back in the day when you worked with creative people just for creative reasons, and not all the time for money.  And this is it.  We need this; it reenergizes everybody.”

When Alex and I talked it over on the drive home, we laughed about the reason why the dominant culture drives it into all of us that to do something for fun is childish, not serious, not worth anything culturally.  That’s because if everyone indeed acted as if the purpose of human endeavor was joy rather than gritting your teeth misery in order to collect some cash, some dominance, some prestige, the whole economic house of cards would just come down.  And the Great and Terrifying Wizard of Oz would be revealed for the shamefaced snake oil salesman he has been all along.

(And if you want to read something by someone who has spent a lifetime working for joy, read Danbert Nobacon’s PERFORMANCE AND EVOLUTION? in this month’s EAP. It makes you want to get out and start your own rock and roll band. What is it with these guys up North?)

There were fourteen people peering benevolently at me from around the table.  The effect would have been overwhelming, if it wasn’t so comforting—rather, as I said later, like being lifted up by a particularly cosy tidal wave.  Each one of the people nodding and smiling had their own specialty, and each specialty was something I wanted to know more about.

Best of all, all their specialties and mine were going to combine into a force heading for one goal.  And there was nobody on top, nobody ‘in charge’ (except where it was somebody’s job to be in charge of some specific project), nobody who could suddenly and capriciously bring the whole thing to an end…nobody who would want to, anyway.  I could tell that right away, looking around the table.  This was a group of people who were happy in their jobs and absorbed in their work.

It was my meeting with the distributor Consortium, a book distributor specializing in the needs of independent and small publishers.  Their list is an impressive one—many of the small publishers I’ve admired over the years turn out to be parked there—and the atmosphere in the office is a pleasant, functional, get-on-with-it-and-have-fun-why-don’t-you kind of a thing that you can feel right away.

Consortium has a policy of spending a full day with any new publisher, so you (the publisher—me) can meet everyone, put faces on functions, understand what they do…and so they, presumably, can get a look at you (the publisher—me).  A little overwhelming by the middle of the day, when I have a stack of handouts and cards in front of me, and my mental hard drive is beginning to call for back up.  But exciting.  Really exciting.

Faces on functions.  Jaime covers Amazon, Nan does Barnes and Noble, Bill sells to wholesalers.  Michael knows production. Natalie settles the catalog.  Heather can tell me everything I need to know about libraries and schools…

My notes are all over the place, and all over bits and pieces of paper.  But when I’m back at my desk and survey them, they do (satisfyingly enough) make sense.

Here’s what made the most sense, though, when I had time to settle and think things over: this is a nonhierarchical way to work.  This is not a pyramid arranged with someone on top, and people spreading out, with various rights and responsibilities, on varying tiers, below.  This is an equity of work.  The point is the work, not the structure; the structure serves the work, not the other way ‘round.  When someone’s in charge, it’s to get something done; it’s properly situational.

It is, all ‘round, the way I like to work.  The way I’ve started and mean to go on.  So I think EAP’s ended up in the right place.

(And by the way, the above is why I get nervous hearing people talk about ‘submissions’ to EAP, when I think of them as ‘contributions’.  ‘Submissions’ makes me think a piece of work is being submitted to my judgment of its worth, and that’s something I don’t feel at all competent to do—how many things of worth have been ignored or scorned because the person doing the ignoring or scorning just had no judgment at all?  ‘Contributions’, though, that’s about sending something in to add to the general conversation.  And if I say no, that’s not EAP, I’m not judging its worth—whatever that means—but whether or not it adds to the conversation.  We’ve gotten a lot of stuff sent over the electronic transom that was competently, even beautifully, written, but that seemed utterly oblivious to the subject of partnership and equity, and how they can be achieved in a culture based on domination and hierarchy.  And when I say, well, this piece should go somewhere else, those writers sometimes get very, very annoyed.   Because, I suppose, they’re used to being judged on a whole different set of criteria, and not fetching up somewhere where the judging function is not exactly the first one we reach for.  What function is the first one EAP reaches for?  Hmmm.  The curiosity function.  Is this telling me something I didn’t know from someone who knows better than me?  And since anyone writing, or photoing, or filming, or any other form of expression, exactly what his or her own experience truly is knows that subject much better than me, that’s the kind of expression that gets my attention every time.)

There’s a lot to be said for arranging a business around maximum agreement of values, rather than around maximum attempt for profit.  It’s more fun, for one thing; it’s creative; it’s arranging things more on a human scale than an inhuman one…it lets you mesh your work life with your real life, and with no sacrificing of the values of either.  It’s more efficient, it’s happier, all in all it’s a better way to live.  And if you don’t make as much money as you would have if profit was the main motive?  So what?  I mean, if you’re not starving.  After that, it’s just a case of do you want more prestige than the next guy, and if you can forego that (this is a lesson I learned a long time ago), it’s amazing how much the sacrifice of it adds to your general freedom of movement.

It’s amazing, also, how, when you’ve set out to act out of a certain set of values, how many coincidences (or seeming coincidences) there are, that lead you to people who think, or feel, or both, in ways compatible with yours.  Sometimes I think that the largeness of the world is just an illusion, that any feelings of being alone are self indulgent, almost romantically adolescent, nonsense.  I had a lot of evidence of this, this past month.

There was the search for illustrations for the Jam Today cookbook we’re putting together.  I’d had a slightly dispiriting experience trying to coax a neighborhood artist into doing the sketches; they just hadn’t worked out, and I was hitting my deadline, along with having done in my budget with the first try.  Then I remembered a picture I had, one I’d valued for years, and thought a lot about.  It’s done on cardboard, of a stove in the house where the artist and I lived as roommates about two or three lifetimes ago, and it says on the back, in his fluid handwriting, “A phantom stove for Christmas.”  I hadn’t seen the artist in years, not out of any lessening of affection, just the usual time and space limitations…and we hadn’t talked since the woman who owned the phantom stove, who we lived with when we were just out of college, was found dead, drowned in her own bathtub while drunk, in the very same house.  We were sad then, and she was all we’d talked about, of course.  I remember thinking, as I always did when I thought of the artist, how very annoying it was that when he was starting out in his career, it was so unfashionable to do pictures that showed the…what’s the word?  specialness?  particularity?  sacredness?…of everyday objects.  And since it was unfashionable, he went, uncomplaining, into teaching and curating, and was hugely successful at both.  Which I was glad to hear of every time I did, and every time I did, I looked again at my phantom Stove and thought how annoying it was that his art didn’t find his rightful audience, all because of a trick of fashion.

And I knew he had gotten very busy, and was becoming famous for curating art exhibits all over the world, and I suppose I was always afraid I’d be just adding a burden to an already busy person’s time, so I never called, until now, when I wanted to ask if it was all right to use the picture of the stove for the cover of the book.  Of course it’s all right, he said, and what are you doing about other pictures?  Well, I sighed, and I told him about shooting my budget already, and not having anything to show for it.

Then there was this kind of silence that it took me a moment to interpret, it seemed so unlikely.  “Mark?” I said cautiously.  “Would you be interested in trying to do a few sketches for it?”

“Oh,” he said.  “I’m not sure you’d like my style.”

So I took a deep breath and said, “There’s no money in it.”

Another pause.  Then, gently, “When, Tod, exactly, have you ever known me to do anything for money?”A few days later he sent me these:

And it was a little like falling out of a skyscraper in a dream, and then, at the last minute, being picked up by a large, gentle hand and deposited on some nice springy, grassy mound.

I was thinking about what I like the best about EAP, and of course, hands down, it’s the discovery of like minds working away in their various habitats around the globe.  That was a large part of why I started the website — I was thinking of it as a kind of machine to find people who were thinking in the same way as I was…as I am…thinking about how the world doesn’t have to be constituted the way it is, that it’s not inevitable that someone always be on the bottom and someone always be on the top, that there is another way to arrange it, and that way a more human one than the present structure. I knew it wasn’t only me who found the Way Things Are peculiarly alienating, and I suspected there were others out there (lots of them, I suspected) who, while of a cheerful and optimistic cast of mind, still pushed away at getting the Big Engorged Entrenched Power away from the Door Through to Equity.

It turned out it was so, as a matter of fact.  There was Mike Madrid, who I heard about through our photography editor, and who, in our first phone conversation, started to tell me his ideas, all tumbling out one after the other, until I said, “Stop!  I already know it’s an EAP thing.  Don’t tell me about it — just start writing.”  And here we are, not so very long later, the final draft of THE SUPERGIRLS on the runway, ready to be designed and galleyed and proofed and published, and I don’t know what all.  There was Brian Griffith, who had written a book I could not get over — THE GARDEN OF THEIR DREAMS – about, of all amazing things, desertification and how it affected our view of ourselves, how the stories that came out of that disaster got enshrined as unfortunate truths.  And the next thing you know, he’s writing a book for EAP, too, CORRECTING JESUS, about how THAT story got changed more than a little.

There are a bunch of serendipities along those lines, but my secret favorite, I think, is the ongoing saga of GREENBEARD.  The first three chapters appeared in my inbox, all too obviously sent by their author in the middle of the night, after a long evening at the pub.  I think I must have completely freaked him out when I wrote back and said, “Want to write some more?”  But he did, each chapter making me laugh harder than the last, each chapter making me think there’s an odd brain out there somewhere in a tiny village in the north of England, but an odd brain that EAP was, in a way (plate of shrimp) made for.  This month, when the chapter flow stopped, and I got an apologetic email, I replied, “Don’t worry — but why don’t you write an explanation to the people who’re following the story?”  And I got back this email…

“Tod,

it’s a thought …. but I immediately get lost in the the meta-meta-meta recursion. Should I write the apology? No! It should be the Reverend Earl T. Greybags,  for it is in the pages of his family papers that the ghost of Greenbeard walks, or should it be the Reverend’s friend, enemy and sometime secretary, Monsignor Stronzo Squirrelli? The Reverend himself is far too busy, of course, translating the Bible into Morse code for broadcasting towards Mars using a Cold-War-era ‘Fan Song’ Russian anti-aircraft radar that he bought from eBay. Actually, that rules out Mgr Squirrelli too, as the radar set’s instruction-manual is in Vietnamese, so he will be needed to interpret it as well as working the Morse key and making tea … ahhh! My mind goes round in circles!

I’ll think about it some more after I’ve been to the pub and had my medication.”

I voted for the Monsignor.  The result you can read this month.

That’s the kind of thing I like best, not just about EAP, but, as a matter of fact, about life in general.  When it has meaning, and the meaning makes me laugh out loud.

(Meanwhile, I continue to try to convince the poet David Budbill that he wants nothing better than to write a cookbook for the Press that reflects his experiences farming more than a hundred acres in Vermont.  A poet/farmer’s cookbook, that’s what I want.  However, I’m still trying to convince him of the incredible vulgarity of paying those huge advances, the way those New York publishing houses do.  EAP, I keep insisting, is so elegant and virtuous that it pays absolutely no advances at all!)

So I was talking to my friend and advisor, the Cult Novelist, and he, being of a cheerful doom and gloom type temperament (”Isn’t it a nice day?  Too bad it won’t last.”), enthusiastically described to me how the New York publishing industry is collapsing.  “Harcourt Brace just put a moratorium on acquisitions.  They’re not buying anything.  It’s getting awfully cold out there for writers.”  Then, on consideration.  “But that’s probably good for EAP.  You’re going to get flooded with submissions from writers who can’t get published where they’re used to.”

Without thinking, I said, “I don’t think I want to publish writers who send me stuff like that.”  And when the C.N. was obviously taken aback — “What?  What?  What do you mean?” –  I thought harder about what I meant.  And I tried to explain.

“Look.  This is a long term project I’m doing, and it’s an art project, too — not a business, not the way most people mean a business anyway.”

“Of course it’s a business.  You have to make money to publish more books.”

“Oh, yeah, of course that.  And I’m going to do that.  I’m certainly not going to fold.  But that’s part of that project itself.  That’s like selling your sculptures to make enough money for materials for the next one. Artists have always had to be canny about making enough dosh to go on, historically, if they weren’t going to starve.  Rembrandt was good at it; Van Gogh wasn’t.  Robert Graves was good at it; William Blake wasn’t.  But they were coming from the same place, essentially…from the same point.  The point is to make the art and get it out there, and then make some more.  The point isn’t to collect large amounts of capital.  

“So I guess what I’m saying [I went on meditatively] is I’m looking for a particular kind of writer — one who takes, maybe without even knowing it consciously, that position, too.  One who thinks of EAP not as something that’s supposed to facilitate their being famous in exchange for our making a profit off their books…but as a partner in creating, presenting, and refining, a certain point of view:  that the dominant story we take for granted, that the major media promotes in its sleep, needs to be changed, replaced, transcended.  I want to find writers who understand we’re all working together in a small corner of that particular vineyard.”

(Okay, so maybe I didn’t put it quite like that.  But that’s the beauty of being a writer — you get to rewrite.)

“Hmmmm,” my friend said.

“It takes me awhile to figure out if a writer IS that kind of writer.  When I just get stuff over the transom, sometimes I really like it.  But if I email the writer back and say I can’t plan to publish it now, but would they like to play with it on the website and see what develops?  And they don’t respond well to that answer.  Then I know what they’re doing is something other than what I’m likely to be interested in.  And we part quite easily at that point with no regrets on either side.  But when I find a writer who emails back and says something along the lines of, ‘Hot damn, when do we start?’, then I start to get interested.  Then I start to think long term and wonder where they might fit in EAP.”

I thought about that when I got off the phone, and thought about how I’ve gone in sideways to develop writers and relationships…slowly and cautiously…to fit what I want for the project.  I mean, I have to do that from a practical standpoint; EAP’s got a limited amount of capital and time, and both have to be spent for maximum advantage.  And my maximum advantage is not about making back maximum profit.  It’s about being engaged in a particularly fruitful way with ideas, and with the writers they come from.  

So EAP’s looking for a particular kind of writer.  The writer has to be a self starter.  He or she has to be someone who would write whatever it is without EAP being there, through compulsion, or just for fun, or (as so often happens) a weird hybrid combination of both.  The writer has to be someone who’s eager to engage with other people about their subject.  And who has a good, solid sense of reality.  A certain kind of reality, mind.  They don’t have to live permanently on this planet, is what I’m saying, but when their feet do touch ground on Earth, I expect them to understand that certain rules do apply.

In other words, the writers we’re looking for a.) wonder permanently why the world has to be the way it is, and, without lapsing into despair or destructiveness, constantly imagine other ways it might become,  b.) endlessly experiment, and on their own, in their chosen subject, with how and what these other ways might mean, and c.) are actual functioning human adults who don’t expect the world as it is to be much different than it is while we’re tinkering with ways to change it.

If that makes any sense.  I mean, it does to me.  But it’s a constant amazement to me, how many people take as their basic principle the idea that for any activity to be worthwhile it has to 1.) grow huge and 2.) make a lot of money.  Because it doesn’t seem to me that point of view has done much for Western civilization, not recently, anyway.

To the UK for a week, and, working on the continuing principle that I don’t know half as much about being an independent publisher as I think I do…or even a quarter, come to think of it…I keep up my basic plan of coaxing meetings out of anyone who can tell me I’m an idiot and that why didn’t I think of this…or this…or this.  So Katherine Bright-Holmes, the Consortium representative in London, takes pity on me, and meets me on a pouring rain down day, for tea, in Russell Square.  The minute I see Katherine hurrying through the square toward the caff (we’re both late, the traffic was, as it so often is in London, unbelievable), I know it’s her.  Not just because we’re both wearing the usual black and dark grey clothes,  both with black scarves slung around our necks, and not even just because of the same slightly anxious lift to the back of her legs of the person who’s worried she’s keeping someone waiting that I can feel tightening my own tendons.   There’s just something about book people that’s always familiar.  What could it be?  I  wonder about it briefly, but can’t get beyond a vague intuition that people who love books tend to look a certain way.  They tend to look like they’d like to be curled up in front of a fire on a rainy day with a book and a steaming cup of something.  (Unless they’re in Portland, in which case they tend to look like they’d like to be stretched out with a book on a grassy knoll on a sunny day–same principle.)  They tend to look curious, I breezily conclude, they tend to look friendly, and, yes, they tend to look a little anxious, too.

Most of all, I decide as we sit down, they tend to look like they’re more likely to give information than withhold it.    Book people, I decide, like to talk about books to other people who like to talk about books.    They’re not in it for the money; they’re in it for the love of the thing.  And, of course, when you’re in love with something, you take every opportunity you have to talk about it.  In fact, you can tell what someone loves by what they DO talk about.  (Just ask my friends who are completely bored by hearing about my dogs.)  As I can never be bored by any book talk, and, to my surprise, find I am almost equally fascinated by any conversation about the business of books, this suits me down to the ground.  And of course, the more interested you are in a subject, the more IN LOVE you are with a subject, the more painless, the more fun, the intake of information.

Katherine pours the information out, and I sit there, intently filing it in the appropriate brain folders for easy access later.   The two mistakes beginning publishers make:  not enough thought to marketing and not enough capital.  (About this latter, thinking wryly of the recent crash and my own difficulties raising capital for a business that everyone agrees is break even at best, I say “force majeure,” and laugh…though not very hard.)  We race through a variety of strategies, differences between UK markets and US markets, more info about Consortium, and she tells me about a fascinating project I hadn’t heard of, the Persephone bookstore and publishing house, run by Nicola Bowman, in Lamb’s Conduit Street.…

I don’t even notice I’m almost late for my lunch, at which I am very much in danger of boring my companion about EAP.  He, however, is very kind, and even offers some suggestions about the cover of THE SUPERGIRLS, which I just happen to have on my computer and casually take out in between courses–as you do.  And as he himself is an avid reader, and so knows a few owners of independent bookstores where he spends a great deal of his time, he suggests making introductions.

He’s a Media Person, and so normally doesn’t fit the rather romantic description I made of Book People above, looking rather, on his most Media Person days, like someone who is not likely to want to talk to you unless you are on first name terms with the bartender at the Groucho Club.  This is deceptive, obviously–elsewise, why on earth would he be taking me to lunch?–but then, as I babble on, and I notice he is actually listening to me with every expression of real interest, I think to myself, no, he looks like a Book Person after all.  As we talk, he looks more relaxed, and more open, than he does when the subject is, say, the Cannes Film Festival.  And I enjoy myself very much.  I even enjoy the conversation more than my food, which, since it’s being served up at my favorite restaurant in London, is really saying something.

Then to an espresso with another book lover/mentor, Philippa Brewster, an editor at the publisher IB Tauris.  Another person who has kindly offered to let me pick her brain.  She’s wearing black and a nice black scarf wrapped cosily around her neck, so I laugh at that, unwrap my own black scarf, and sit down, and we have a rollicking time, me babbling about what I’m planning to do, and she entering into it with enthusiasm, kind of in the same way someone who travels the world for business enters enthusiastically into the plans of a friend making her first trip abroad.  She’s brought a clutch of print outs of emails between an editor and one of their authors, going back and forth about the actual period of production–the copy editing, the proofreading, the index making–that’s really helpful.  And she brings up Nicola Bowman and the Persephone project.

I end the day with dinner and a nice long chat with my favorite Media Person in the world, Margaret Matheson, who, come to think of it, is one of my favorite people in the world, period.  And she says, “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the independent film world.  There’s no independent movie costing more than a million pounds that makes money, but nobody’s admitting it.  The whole thing’s in flux; I’ve never seen anything like it.”  We talk about how publishing seems more controllable, you don’t need large amounts of someone else’s money, for one thing, and because almost every sensible person involved in it knows they’re not going to get rich and famous on the back of it, you can just get on with the job–which is getting ideas out there.  That’s why she’s in the business of making films, a drive to get ideas out there, and, now I look at her, I see she looks just like a Book Person too, and so I’m forced to reassess my little theory.  Because of course, the look I’m talking about is the look of people who love Ideas, not just books, and I have to remember that there are people like that in the film business, and that I know and love some of the best of them, too.

That’s good to remember.  And also good to remember is that the next time I’m in London, I’ve got to go to Lamb’s Conduit Street to meet Nicola Bowman and check out the Persephone project…

Gerry Dongaghy, the Backlist Tsar of Powell’s Books, sent me a care package the other day, a kind of arsenal of support for the beginning publisher.  Among other items found as I dove into the seemingly bottomless box:  a publishing trends newsletter, way too expensive for me to consider actually subscribing to (very thoughtful, Gerry, thanks), two DVDs made as support materials for books (something I’m obviously interested in, since we do a lot of in house DVD making around here), a copy of BOOK FORUM (which I have to get a subscription to, I see), a really terrific nuts and bolts book about publishing, and a postcard advertising the Pope’s cologne (I don’t think that had anything to do with publishing, but it does show that Gerry’s on the same page with the rest of us here at EAP).

Best of all — well, best of all was the nuts ‘n’ bolts book, which is truly helpful — but most fascinating was a sociological study of attitudes toward bookselling in the US:  RELUCTANT CAPITALISTS.  The thesis of the book is that the cultural and economic battle between independent, community bookstores and the big box corporate superstores shines a light on a too little explored question:  i.e.  what is the purpose of economic activity?  Is it really, as our dominant story says, and as every schoolchild can tell you by rote, to maximize profit?  Is the responsibility of the individual consumer, therefore, to guard her/his interests jealously, always making sure to get the best possible deal, while the responsibility of the seller is to make as much profit as possible?  That, anyone can tell you, is how the free market works.  And that is supposed to be for the good of all.

However, as the author points out, if this was completely true, then the big box stores, with their greater convenience and their marked down prices, should have wiped the floor with the small, independent, community embedded bookstores.  Yet that hasn’t happened.  In some places, the independents are growing.  Why?

Laura Miller, the sociologist who wrote RELUCTANT CAPITALISTS, points out that bookselling, and book publishing (and book writing, too, of course), are areas where one can see that the purpose of economic activity is not necessarily to maximize profit.  As she points out, independent booksellers and independent book publishers don’t make much profit.  More than that, they know they’re not going to make much profit — sometimes they know they’re not going to make any profit at all.  What’s more, even the people who purchase books from them assume that these groups are not in it to make much profit.,  And the consumers who recognize this actually question their own buying habits, and will frequently go against what, under classical theory, should be their own best interests.  Instead of buying cheap, they buy dear — instead of going to a big box store that provides deep discounts on books, a lot of people will consciously decide to go to a community bookstore that can’t afford to.

Now why is that?

Naturally, if we were all little computer generated models, this wouldn’t be happening.  We would behave ‘rationally’ at all times.  And yet we don’t.

Or rather, I would argue — and this is why Miller’s book is so interesting, because it’s a great attempt to start asking other questions than the old tired one of how do we maximize profit — our concept here of ‘rationality’ is too limited.  For example, why should it be more rational to choose having lots of money over a better quality of life?  Anyone can look around and see for themselves that if you have a decent income, a clean environment, good neighbors and warm community relations, family involvement, good food and health, that this is better than any amount of cash you might be offered in its place.  At least, I would hope anyone would be able to see that.

On second thought, though, not everyone can see that.  People get fooled.  They get fooled by the abstract idea.  A million dollars a year is obviously of more value than, say, the fifty thousand dollars a year that might provide the comfortable life.  Million is more than fifty thousand.  Therefore it’s better.

Of course, it’s not better.  It’s just more.  The two concepts are different.  More is not necessarily better.  You can prove that one right there in your every day life, every minute of your every day life.  Are five cups of bad coffee in the morning better than one perfect cup?  No way.  Are five lovers better than one loved husband (come to think of it, I would guess even a bad husband would be less trouble than the lovers)?  Are twelve children better than the one child you have and love?  Of course not.  But why one thing is better than another is impossible to quantify.  You just know it is.  You can’t prove it mathematically.  Which tends to promote anxiety — the lack of our control over our own feelings.  I think that’s why we get so anxious when we try to talk about feelings in any meaningful way.

So what Miller points out is that there is a dimension of feeling, of meaning, in economic activity which we tend to overlook, but which shows up quite plainly in the bookselling arena.  There are feelings involved here, and feelings trump the idea of abstract advantage.  People sell books and independently publish them, and write them, most often, too, are thinking about the economic activity involved.  Of course they are. How could they not be?  Everybody’s got to live, and to live you have to be part of an economic structure:  that’s part of being a human.  But they are not thinking ONLY of economic activity.  They are thinking about meaning, and what gives meaning to our lives, and that to participate in forming meaning, and relationships that both convey that meaning and ARE the meaning itself simultaneously (and what a mind bender that is), that that is the most worthwhile kind of activity.  And it’s activity where it’s worth taking a cut in pay.

Now of course there are plenty of other areas where, in theory at least, meaning trumps economic activity.  Religious activity springs to mind — although not the activity of large religious organizations, which are, to my mind, the big box stores of the spiritual life.  But take the Catholic Worker.  The people in the Catholic Worker movement actually refuse to participate in traditional economic life.  In that they’re quite radical.  And then there’s the ideal of the starving artist, who also traditionally refuses, out of principle.

But why the example of bookselling is so interesting is because that is an area where someone who is not called to a ‘heroic’ (or extreme, maybe, depending on what you want to call it) stance, someone who is just humbly a part of the human race along with the rest of us, where that person can wrestle with the issue of how to balance finding and passing on meaning while still participating in the human market that’s existed for about as long as human history.

Because the questions are opening up, these days.  The story, that we’re all pursuing our own rational self interest, the story that Ayn Rand told, that Alan Greenspan so happily enshrined in our financial systems, the story that a lot of us out here (the ones who, from birth, never particularly cared about how much money we made as long as we weren’t starving to death or otherwise trapped) never found satisfying, never found real, never found to be a part of our own experience — that story is breaking up, and showing an opportunity of transformation into something new, something closer to our real experience.

I find that quite exciting.  And much truer to my own experience.  So now we’ll see how EAP does — if it can pursue that search for meaning without being starved out of the game.

Just got home from a tour of the Pacific Northwest, which, since it is where me and the husband live most of the time, we’ve both been really curious about…but somehow never found the time or the reason to explore, being too frantically busy getting on planes to go to Europe or Latin America or who knows where.

But I’m starting this small publishing business, and I’ve got a firm belief in regionalism being at least one of the answers to the many things spiraling out of control these days, and also a firm belief in the concept that if we don’t hang together we will certainly hang separately.  So when Alex — who has come to love the place more and more almost in spite of himself (after years of taking me to one place on the planet after another and saying, “Isn’t this great?” and me saying back, “Yeah, great — but not as great as Oregon,” finally one year, he looked around some place — I don’t remember where…Tokyo?  Veracruz?  Edinburgh? — and said, “This is nice.  But not as nice as Oregon.”), when Alex worked out a tour for his film Searchers 2.0 that took in a bunch of the independent cinemas of the Pacific Northwest, I thought it was a great excuse for me to tag along and find out what was going on with independent booksellers around.

A few names from our new Consortium Pacific Northwest sales rep, Bob Harrison, and I was off.  And you know what?  It turns out that the independent booksellers in the Pacific Northwest are a particularly vigorous bunch, obviously not just holding ground but gaining it, against all expectation, too, when you think about what the media image is:  booksellers in retreat in the face of the Giants, booksellers freaking out because of Amazon.com, etc.  Instead, what I found was that the bookstores I visited — Grassroots in Corvallis, Powell’s in Portland, Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books, and (maybe most surprising and even impressive of all) Bellingham’s Village Books – were real centers of their towns, stable and creative, buzzing with energy.

This kind of depressed Alex, who said, “They’re obviously doing better than the cinemas,” all of which were manned and womanned by some terrific people, and most of which seemed to be hanging on by their charming and well meaning fingernails.

I said I thought it might be because what was happening to independent cinema now was what had happened to independent booksellers and publishers in the last ten years — years that were merciless on the independent book scene, when a lot of really hardworking and terrific places went belly up.  The places that are left seem to be powering forward now, making alliances, working at being not just sales outlets but community cultural centers as well (and in the case of Powell’s, the community is pretty much world wide).

Powell’s, of course, is the Ur-bookstore, the archetypal one that all members of the species dream of as the place to browse.  And Powell’s, let me tell you, is an authentic blast.  A city in itself, used and new books cheek to jowl, you have to have a map to get around.  There’s a cafe — there may be a couple of cafes, come to think of it — there’s a committed and stable work force who absolutely love what they do, and there is a feel to the place that makes you glad to be a book person.  What I mean is:  there are people FILLING the store at all hours of the day and night.  I know because I stayed a block away, and checked.  They’re all reading books.  They’re all talking about books.  And they all look pretty happy to be doing it, too.

The plan was to have one drink or two with a couple of guys from Powell’s — Gerry Donaghy, who assured me well into the evening that he doesn’t drink at first meeting generally, and Kevin Sampsell, who joined in after a long day of Heading Literary Events — and the unaccustomed head I had the next morning tells me we may have gone a tiny joyous bit over the one or two drink limit (I definitely remember Gerry, at the end of the evening, kindly taking us down the road to show us a park where we could walk our dogs, and I’ve had an email from him since, so I know he got home okay — Portland has terrific public transport, so you don’t even need to worry about those you’ve enticed of an evening).  Gerry’s card says he’s the Backlist Tsar of Powell’s, and while I have no clear idea what that is, I like the sound of it.  Mainly, I liked sitting on the sidewalk outside a restaurant with a bunch of people and our dogs, talking about books with a bunch of people who actually like them.  There’s stuff happening in Portland.  There’s definitely stuff happening in Portland.  I mean, Kevin Sampsell is Powell’s small press guy, and he doesn’t just commune with small presses, he IS one, too.  FUTURE TENSE PRESS.  Check it out.

Seattle left me a little dazed, in fact, there were so many bookstores downtown, all of them bustling — not just Elliott Bay, which is like a fantasy big town bookstore, something out of a fairy tale.  Later, when I was talking this over with some people at a video store, they said that it was Seattle’s policy not to let big box stores into city neighborhoods — Barnes and Noble and Borders are exiled to the suburbs.  People in Seattle, I was told by Seattle-ites, love their neighborhoods and rarely venture out of them…so that every neighborhood NEEDS a good bookstore.  Also a good cinema, which the Grand Illusion cinema is, a jewel box of a place, around the corner from an array of cheap and great restaurants — also a pub that insisted we bring the dogs inside.  One of my heroes, Bruce Rutledge of CHIN MUSIC PRESS (devoted to making the most beautiful books imaginable, mainly about Japan, the most recent one a really good eyeopener about what’s going on in Japan these days), came to watch the movie and say hi.  And, of all people, DANBERT NOBACON of Chumbawamba.  Now, I almost hadn’t believed Alice Nutter when she told me Danbert and Laura had moved to Twisp, a tiny rural community about four hours outside of Seattle.  As Danbert himself says, “I’ve lived in three towns in my life:  Burnley, Leeds, and Twisp.”  And if you know any of those places, you know how mindboggling that is.  This made me wildly happy, to see Danbert and talk about our mutual rural problems of getting the wood in for winter, growing something more than turnips in a bad year, putting snow tires on the Subaru, etc. etc. etc.  The last time I saw him, I was miserably unhappy, producing Revengers Tragedy with too little money in a too dour English town, and he was lounging in his extra’s costume atop, I believe, a piano, while an awestruck production slavey pointed at him and whispered to a colleague “That’s DANBERT NOBACON.  He threw the bucket of water on John Prescott!”  This would mean nothing to the good people of Seattle, but it still makes me glow with admiration, and it makes me laugh, too, especially to wonder if Twisp knows what it’s got.  And there he was, sitting quietly after the film having a pint with us, looking as urban as ever, and talking about how he and Laura had just gotten this place, the kids love it, “It’s not like I thought it would be, living in America!”  And it turns out Laura crafts handmade books, too.

Next day, on the way to Bellingham, we played his new CD.  And my mind started revolving with pleasure around the fact that my concept of regionalism in the Pacific Northwest gets to include Dan and Laura, too.  I looked at THAT one from all angles, and figured maybe I was onto something here.

Even more when we got to Village Books, in the Fairhaven section of Bellingham.  A beautiful, lovingly tended, enormous light filled barn of a place.  There’s a big sign on the door that says, “DOGS WELCOME: WE HAVE TREATS INSIDE!”  Well, we didn’t quite believe them.  But then we got inside, and met Robert, who didn’t just assure us it was true, but expressed an earnest desire to meet our dogs, and I had a chat with Rem Ryals, the independent press buyer, and we ended up buying a couple of books, having lunch in the upstairs cafe with the dogs (much admired by waitresses and all passersby) at our feet, reading the Village Books magazine, which reports on the Village Books Radio Show, the Village Books Book Clubs (there seem to be half a dozen), the Village Books Authors’ Readings, the Village Books…it goes on…I mean, it leaves you breathless, anyway, it left me breathless, thinking how much care and attention goes into the whole.

Days later, coming down the Washington and Oregon coasts, and Alex and I had a lazy talk over dinner in some beach pub, and one or the other of us asked, “So what was the most memorable place?”  And both of us said, simultaneously, “That bookstore in Bellingham!”  Because, I think, it was the last thing we thought we’d find — a bookstore being the obviously prosperous heart of the community, and a bookstore that has as its first exhibit as you walk through the door a selection of “Banned Books” for sale…and upstairs, shelves dedicated to the favorite books of all the staff members.  Real books, ones you haven’t read but you’ve wondered about, eccentric choices, above all, INTERESTING, personal choices.  Come to think of it, that was what was most impressive about Village Books.  The personal stamp on it.  The obvious fact that a clearly understood set of values underlies all the choices made by the store, and that those values are benevolent, progressive, community oriented.  It was a whole package, is what I guess I’m saying.   And the package makes you feel good, like a nice Christmas morning, too.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve been thinking a lot about those places, and how heartening they are — and I’ve been thinking about my publishing mentors, TWO DOLLAR RADIO, Eric and Eliza Obenauf, who keep thinking about moving their act to New York because that’s where the independent press action is.  And I’m saying now, Eric and Eliza, don’t do it!  Get out here to Portland!  We need you out here…and PDX is a shorthop skip and a jump to Manhattan any day.  Come on out, and I’ll drive up, and we’ll go to Village Books together!  And then we’ll drive back and have another drink with the guys from Powell’s…

First the Pacific Northwest…then…the world.

It could happen.