Cheers for independent thinkers and doers

With the publishing business changing daily, making it ever more difficult to get published, two recent New York Times stories were heartening. They highlight the importance of independent-minded editors and small presses now and in the past.

In his review of The Letters of Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), Dwight Garner writes about the literary figure’s courage to publish Ulysses when no one else would touch it. He says:

“If the world’s dwindling independent bookstores have a patron saint, an exemplar to cling to in moments of duress, she is Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), the soulful and fearless owner of Shakespeare & Company, the English-language bookstore she founded in Paris in 1919 and operated on the Left Bank until the German occupation during World War II.”

Beach was the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses and helped smuggle copies to readers in the United States.

Motoko Rich writes about Paul Harding, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. After his novel Tinkers was rejected by many publishers because “Nobody wants to read a slow, contemplative, meditative, quiet book” it was picked up by “the tiny” Bellevue Literary Press.

Harding has high praise for Erika Goldman, the editorial director of Bellevue, whom he describes as a “deeply empathetic reader”; Lise Solomon, a sales representative in Northern California for Consortium, the book’s distributor, who passionately advocated for the novel with booksellers; and the booksellers and critics who embraced the book early on.

--Elfrieda Abbe, publisher

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