NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Roderick ‘Rocky’ Stinehour is a very pleasant, accomplished gentleman from Vermont. He’s also recognized internationally as a printer of high repute and a designer of beautiful, scholarly books. His career spans over much change in printing technology and the way in which books are produced and distributed. In 1950, after graduating from Dartmouth College, he, along with his wife and brother, established The Stinehour Press in the village of Lunenburg, Vermont.

From modest beginnings the Press flourished thanks to persistence, vision, and the ability to attract skilled passionate co-workers; due to the quality of its books, the company will long be remembered as one of America’s finest scholarly publishers. 

I visited Rocky in the ‘Northeast Kingdom’ recently. Listen here to our conversation

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Karl Siegler is a founding member of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia and the Literary Press Group of Canada; he has served as president of the Association of Canadian Publishers twice, and was one of the founding members of the Simon Fraser Centre for Studies in Publishing and its Masters in Publishing Program. He’s also the publisher at Talonbooks.

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Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s literary publishing house. ‘ It is dedicated to connecting readers with great international authors and their works. Publishing twelve books a year and running an online literary website called Three Percent, Open Letter is one of only a handful of U.S. organizations with a commitment to cultivating an appreciation for international literature.’

‘Chad W. Post is the director of Open Letter, a press dedicated to publishing literature in translation. He also runs Three Percent, an online blog and review site focused on international literature. Prior to starting Open Letter, he was the associate director at Dalkey Archive Press. In addition, he co-founded Reading the World, a unique collaboration between publishers and independent bookstores to promote world literature.’ We talk here among other things about the dominance of great non-English speaking novelists, Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortazar (Hopscotch is one of Post’s favourite novels), Jose Saramago and the phenomenon of one-foreign-author-at-a-time, reasons for the success of 2666, why American authors have the inside track, how economics works against translation, and the opportunities that exist in publishing foreign authors.

Please listen here: (Apologies for the rather abrupt ending).

Copyright © 2009 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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Stephen Johnson is Managing Director of the recently formed South African publishing firm Random House Struik. We talk here about the merger, the independence of SABC (the state owned South African Broadcasting Corporation), Cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, Random House Struik’s political power, Apartheid’s banning of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, the current government’s under-funding of libraries, political corruption and the loss of early promise, Apartheid by other means, freedom, story-telling and other explanations for South Africa’s flourishing publishing sector, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Jacob Zuma’s shower head, and plans Johnson has for the future of his company.

Please listen here:

Copyright © 2009 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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Find out how author Tosca Reno and publisher Robert Kennedy teamed up with National Book Network to produce The Eat Clean Diet series of books and turn them into a best-selling success story. By channeling passion into action, translating experience into friendly words on the page, cutting no corners, emphasizing quality in design, paper, photography and cover art work, these two, through persistence and hard work, have seen their initial ideas transformed into an exhilarating finished product.

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Kathryn Court joined Penguin Books in 1977 and became Editorial Director two years later. In l984 she was named Editor in Chief of Viking Penguin and in 1992 Senior Vice-President, Publisher, and Editor in Chief of Penguin Books. She was named President of Penguin Books in August 2000. Authors she has worked with include: Reinaldo Arenas, Andrea Camilleri, J.M. Coetzee, Slavenka Drakulic, Mary Relinda Ellis, Robert Fagles, Josephine Humphreys, Garrison Keillor, Nora Okja Keller, Donna Leon, Mary McGarry Morris, John Mortimer, Richard Rodriguez, C.J. Samsom, Jim Trelease, and William Trevor.

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Curt Mathews is CEO of the Independent Publishers Group, a book distributor for independent publishers throughout the USA and worldwide. IPG represents a stable of small publishers, providing them, for a fee, with the clout, presentation and sales force required to sell books to booksellers successfully. We talk here about the IPG business model, growth coming from outside bookstores, special interests and faceless mobs, concern about the brand of the book as a product of considered thought, the publisher as muse, wooden boats and commercializing the creative process.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

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If books were once hallowed buildings that publishers constructed for lucky readers to enter by invitation through the front door, today they are just one of an increasing number of competing sources of entertainment and escape. Buildings that today will stand empty if new more creative, welcoming entrances aren’t blown open. Backdoors, windows, heli pads on the roof…the easier it is for visitors to get in and see not only the drawing room, but the bedrooms, bathrooms, basements, plumbing, the less likely it is that these buildings will face the wreckers ball. Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, 2005), and lectures throughout North America on the future of reading and publishing and the role of technology in the arts. We talk here, among other things, about what book publishers need to do in the face of fast charging competition from other easily digested forms of entertainment.

Please listen here:

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

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Michael Cader, is the creator, founder, and do-it guy of publishersmarketplace.com, the "biggest and best dedicated marketplace for publishing professionals to find critical information and unique databases, find each other, and to do business better electronically." We talk here about publishers as brokers between readers and writers, about transparency and how modern readers have a thirst for the inside scoop, for knowing what goes on behind the scenes in a publishing house, about Updike and Eliot and Pound, and writers who don’t give a shit about publicity tours. This interview is full of useful advice on how publishers can benefit and prosper from the Internet. Michael is passionate and articulate about publishing. Listen and learn.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

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Please don’t take my f—ing photograph…

Jamie Byng appreciates and understands that myth and The Bible lie at the core of creative imagination and the Western Canon. He marries this knowledge with a skill for presentation and promotion that few other publishers can match. I met with him at BookExpo in Washington D.C. recently. We talk here about how he does it, about ambiguity, about the responsibility we parents have to make the lives of our children interesting if not easy, and about living without fear.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale.

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