We're getting everything ready for David R. Godine's 40th Anniversary Retrospective Lecture on May 6th at the Boston Public Library — hope to see you at the talk — but David's “Letter from the Publisher,” which appears in our 2010 Catalog, is posted up at The Godine Blog. Here is a snippet:
“WHEN I STARTED this company, some forty years ago in an abandoned cow barn, I was only twenty five and had no idea what the word “publishing” meant, much less how to do it. We were then, all six of us, primarily printers, producing fine books for others, and, when the presses were unoccupied, occasionally issuing a title for ourselves. As the years went by, I decided to concentrate on publishing and, like many deluded capitalists, dreamed of growing what clearly is — and should remain — a cottage industry into a major international player. This wasn’t entirely hubris; all houses were much smaller then, the capital required to produce books was modest, government support (even to tiny houses) was flowing, and the cost of mistakes was small. The narrow, personal world of trade publishing was still run by opinionated individuals, whose names were often eponymous with their companies, and who more or less published what they liked and did their crying in private. Company policy was dictated by editors, not by marketing departments. (It was Edwin Land who taught me that the size of a company’s marketing department is always in inverse proportion to the quality of its products.) It was still possible to dream of becoming a general trade publisher whose list would cover a variety of subjects and whose books could be produced to high standards, and to do it all with a minimum of fuss and compromise. . . .”
Read the rest at The Godine Blog.
0 comments:
Post a Comment