You’ve got your big fellas, your expected-to-be bestsellers whose
corporate-giant publishers produce hundreds of thousands of copies.
(According to The New York Times, Martha Stewart’s 2005
how-to The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving Success as You
Start, Build, or Manage a Business had an initial print run of half
a million copies.) Then you’ve got their diametric opposite: books from
tiny independent presses that issue only a few hundred copies, or one
hundred, or even fifty. Then again, those tiny presses have a far
better chance of selling all those copies of their books than the major
publishers do of selling theirs.
Founded in 1969, Berkeley’s Small Press Distribution is the nation’s
only distributor devoted wholly to independently published literature.
Some of the publishers it handles — Heyday, AK Press, City Lights
— are well-known. Others — Book Thug, Tombouctou,
Ithuriel’s Spear — less so. SPD’s All Star Reading
Extravaganza and Poetry Trading Post on Sunday, December 14 at the
SPD headquarters (1341 7th St., Berkeley) features an array of
headliners including Rusty Morrison, Craig Perez, Stephanie Young,
giovanni singleton, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Dan Fisher, Jovon
Johnson, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Brandon Ware, and Asia Taylor.
Multi-award-winning poet Morrison (sample lines: “Concocted my meadow
foxtail./Too quickly I pinnate each floating with the hyperbole of
flight”) helms the Richmond-based poetry and fabulist-fiction press
Omnidawn with her husband, Ken Keegan. Because the pair is “interested
in innovation,” she says, explaining the company’s name, “we want to
publish work that brings a dawning, an opening of mind and heart. …
We want to offer readers fertile terrain to seed their insights.”
Nonetheless, she concedes: “Practically speaking, this ambition is
difficult for a publisher to sustain, since the survival of the
business depends upon sales that are constant. Yet risk-taking is
necessary to sustain our vision of what we feel we should be
publishing.” For Omnidawn, sometimes those risks manifest in
avant-garde new work such as Randall Silvis’ In a Town Called
Mundomuerto, whose heroine may or may not have mated with a
half-man, half-dolphin.
But the company’s latest risk entails old work: Selected Poems of
Friedrich Hölderlin compiles the writings of the 18th-century
German poet diagnosed (and largely dismissed) in his time as an
incurable hypochondriac but now hailed as having influenced the likes
of Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse. “Even though this is
considered classic work,” Morrison explains, “it has been made new by
the poet-translators Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover, who have brought
a new clarity, lucidity, luminosity to this English translation. In
this respect, a work from the past can be as mind-opening as newly
written work.” At the SPD Extravaganza, each attendee is welcome to
trade a story or poem of his or her own for a free book. Noon-4 p.m.
SPDBooks.org
