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The Book on George
“Fred,” she said, “You’re a publisher. You should do a book about George.”
I had attended an exhibition opening the night before and then that morning a moderated conversation with a photographer who had documented the South of the 1930s and the rise of the American folk music movement in the Fifties and Sixties. It had been funny and surprising and charming. And we were all gathering our collars about us, ready to head into a cold Saturday.
“There’s no book of George’s work,” she insisted.
I said something about how such a book would be pretty far outside of my publishing profile. And I knew I should stop there, tip my hat and trudge away in the snow. But I must have had too much coffee. I kept talking to her, thinking out loud, really, about what I would love to do, what the power of a publishing niche is, how many projects I’ve long had in mind that have a visual aspect as well as a literary one, how the postwar decades of American artistic and literary production have been fully boiled down to a handful of makers.
(I didn’t tell her about the coffee-table book I’ve wanted to do about reading in the Sixties. Getting started on that would only have brought me back around to Walter Kirn’s NYTBR dismissal of my generation: We’ve had our bedtime story, now.)
Anyway, I think the conversation that followed is likely to haunt me. Each year, in wide conversations we consider the parameters of our publishing profile. We’re known for a particular kind of fiction — reflective, well-turned, voice driven, place and era rich, maybe even substantial. And from time to time we fold narrative nonfiction into the list (so long as it’s reflective, well-turned, voice driven, place and era rich, substantial).
Conventional wisdom has always been that a publishing house should remain faithful to its niche. And I imagine that’s true. The reviewers know us for fiction and it’s the fiction buyers we’ve been talking to and meeting with for so many years. But one of the invigorating aspects of this irrational business — and at times, it seems, its reward — is that as independent publishers we can and do select and present to readers only what we’re interested in and passionate about, what we believe is important to publish.
Everything about readership and book delivery systems seems to be changing weekly. I sit here on the weekends, facing my Marc Estrin poster and my Possibilitarian Platform print and my “Kinky for Governor” placard, and I think that, within the publishing whirl of technological changes, possibilities are not shrinking.
Anything seems possible to me right now. Maybe even that book on George.
— Fred Ramey
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