The Bibliophile: Why We Published It

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Editors’ note: While The Bibliophile was taking its summer nap, we were wide awake and thinking about some kinds of features we’d like to run in this space. Thus, this week’s installment is the first in a charmingly irregular series we should probably call “Why We Published It,” which debuts with Vanessa’s response to Anne Hawk’s The Pages of the Sea.

Photo: You can pre-order a copy of The Pages of the Sea today!

As a kid growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time by myself. We lived on the rural outskirts of an already rural place, four miles from a town of fewer than 1,600. Between the turquoise waters of the public swimming pool—what was to me, at age six, the hallowed centre of the known universe—and the farmhouse I grew up in: cornfields and fields of tobacco and soy, rolling hills and the rocky glens and old-growth trees that stair-step the lower third of the the county down to the wide Susquehanna. A trip into town to the grocery store or drive-through at the bank was a source of excitement, and seeing my father’s brown Ford Ranger emerge from behind the woods at the top of the ridge that formed the southern edge of the little valley we lived in engendered a chanting sort of song that I’d sing as he made the left hand turn onto our little road, technically two lanes, but closer to one and a half, and into the long stone drive at the end of a day he’d spent pumping gas and changing tires at the gas station in town.

When I was eight or nine, my father got a new job, one that required he wake at 4:30 in the morning and drive an hour to a welding shop where, from what I could tell, he spent the day burning tiny holes in his t-shirts. Around this time, my mother stopped her part-time work cleaning houses and took a night shift stocking shelves at the grocery store. Now she slept all day, and left for her job as my father was coming home, exhausted, from his. What did I know, what did I know, as Robert Hayden asked, of the sacrifices they made, what it took from them to meet their responsibilities the best they could? Not much, if anything at all.

I did know there was a meadow with a modest herd of Holsteins and that sometimes there was a bull, and when that was the case I could not climb the metal gate or slip under the barbed wire to take the old dirt footpath along the dry creek to the tree with the bent trunk, the moss-covered one I liked to sit on. I knew I had to make myself lunch in the summer, and quietly, so as to not wake my mother, and when she was promoted, for her hard work, to a daytime position, I knew where we kept the key to the front door to let myself in after school. I can’t remember if I was told to lock it behind me: probably not. But other than these rules and similar, and school, and church most Sundays, I was left almost entirely to my own devices. I swung on the tire swing that hung from the weeping willow, and played in the sandbox, and practiced with my youth-sized recurve bow, shooting at a stack of haybales against the barn. I kicked a soccer ball against a wall and practiced free throws in the driveway and shot my BB gun at the stop sign on top of the hill, straining to hear the faint ping. I walked the fencerows back towards the deeper woods as far as I was not afraid to go, and I read stacks and stacks and stacks of books.

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Books: have we come round, at last, to the point? The Pages of the Sea, a debut novel by Anne Hawk, landed in my inbox one day in April courtesy of Dan, who’d received it from the good people at Weatherglass Books, an independent press in the UK. I took a galley home and started reading that night. (Some childhood habits, happily, never change.) In the opening scene, Wheeler, the novel’s young protagonist, is sitting outside watching her aunt, Celeste, go in and out of the house:

We quickly learn that Wheeler and her two sisters have recently moved into the house they now share with their two aunts and three cousins because their mother has gone overseas to work in England, and “[e]ach month a postal order arrived from England covering the sisters’ room and board.”

It’s a beautiful piece of exposition, these opening four pages: Hawk immerses us in Wheeler’s world, capturing the child’s discomfort in the unfamiliar situation and her uncertainty about the mysterious actions and emotions of adults, and establishing both conflict and setting, one inextricable from the other. Wheeler’s interior monologue, written in the rich cadences of her native Caribbean English, with dialogue rendered in the same, voice the lived experience of a time and place and together join a standard English narration in what Hawk describes as a collaboration between Englishes that complement and often overlap each other. It’s a technique that puts me in mind of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliant vernacular novel of the American South, which starts gazing out towards a metaphorical sea and then introduces a young protagonist growing up without a father or mother, and of another of our favourite Biblioasis books: Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, with its inventive English translation, by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, of an untranslatable Norwegian dialect—and another novel that begins with a small girl living on a small island, wondering about the world of adults. Like both of those books—one a classic of Modern literature, one an International Booker finalist and bestselling Biblioasis novel—this one welcomes its readers into its world on its own terms from a position of imaginative generosity and of love. It’s often said a great book teaches you how to read it: let me be one of the first, and certainly not the last, to say this is a great book.

For reasons likely obvious by now, my response was: sign it up. And so I couldn’t be more pleased to be writing this to you, Dear Reader, the week before the Canadian publication of Anne Hawk’s brilliant debut novel, The Pages of the Sea. I hope it will find you, wherever you are and wherever you are from, and it will remind you what literature is for. And I hope you’ll stay tuned for September 27, when The Bibliophile will feature an original essay by Anne Hawk on Caribbean English.

BC readers: Upstart & Crow will host the launch of The Pages of the Sea on October 3, 2024 at 7:00PM.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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The Bibliophile: The Happiness Update

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I first came across Caroline Adderson‘s work in university. I’d recently fallen in love with the short story—“Do you want to read some good shit?” my second-year creative writing prof had asked, putting Clark Blaise’s Tribal Justice and A North American Education into my hands: I did, it was some good shit, and I was very hungry for more of the same. I was also hungry for a job that didn’t involve picking flecks of metal out of my flesh at the end of every shift, a job that didn’t have me dreaming of sulphurous light and didn’t leave my hand clenched throughout the night around the trigger of an invisible welding gun. I wanted to work in a bookshop. But no one seemed to want me to work in one. I wasn’t cool enough to work at South Shore Books, and the lady on Park Street who sold leftist philosophy scared me so much I couldn’t muster the courage to drop off a resume. The Bookmark and the chain stores downtown and at the mall never called me back. And Anne Beer at the Bookroom at the Court couldn’t afford staff, though she’d be happy to train me as a bookseller if I volunteered. So I did, riding my bike down to her shop one Sunday for my first shift. I spent all of it dragging an industrial carpet cleaner across her floors, wondering all the while what exactly this had to do with being a bookseller (Anne: I understand completely now). When I was finished, she let me select a few books as compensation. I remember grabbing a blue cloth hardcover of Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Dialogues, and then I started browsing in the CanLit section. This was a new concept to me. And there was Blaise, Man and His World, and from the same publisher, with the weird little figure on the spine, a story collection called Bad Imaginings, by Caroline Adderson. I’d never heard of her, but the stories sounded interesting and it was cheap, so I added it to the pile.

Photo: Caroline Adderson’s newest collection of short stories, A Way to Be Happy, comes out September 10!

If Blaise had been my gateway to the pleasures of the short story, it was perhaps Adderson who made me an addict. I read her first collection with intense pleasure, marveling at the range and style and humour. So many short story writers’ work seemed to me at the time to be set within the slightly fluctuating boundaries of their personal universes: in Bad Imaginings, one travelled galaxies, moving back and forth through time and historical situations. Here were stories that were rich and clear-eyed and playful and generous, stories that felt, and widely.

I’ve read almost everything that Caroline’s written since, all of her adult work and even, in bed with one of my children, much of her kid lit (Very Serious Children is a family favourite). All of it shows the same generosity and playfulness. I loved her novels, especially A History of Forgetting and Sitting Practice (we have republished a new version of the former, alongside Bad Imaginings: each is worth picking up). In 2006, another collection, Pleased to Meet You, was as rich and varied as her first. After that, the odd story would show up in magazines, The Walrus and The New Quarterly and elsewhere, and we even published a couple in CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, and these I read (and sometimes reread) devoutly. But as time passed—and a lot of it did, nearly two decades worth—I became increasingly impatient for a new collection. This, for me, has always been Gold Mountain.

Photo: Check out some of these previously published books by Caroline Adderson!

This makes next Tuesday’s publication of Caroline’s A Way to Be Happy an especially gratifying experience. As a massive fan, I’ve waited too damn long. As a publisher, there’s no one in the country I’d wanted to work with on something new for a longer time. The stories in A Way to Be Happy range as widely and wildly—from a nineteenth-century women’s prison for the insane that gives me Small Things Like These vibes (though less cold, less moralizing, and with far more humour and compassion); to a story of a terminally ill Russian hitman, on what is almost certainly his final job, scouring his memory for something to take him into the darkness; to a story of two addicts crashing posh New Year’s Eve parties to rob the guests in hopes of funding their eventual recovery—as anything in her previous collections. The story “Homing” has made me cry every single time I’ve read it—and I’ve read it a lot!—and not from sadness but from hope, relief, and happiness. That’s a hard trick to manage, but Adderson does it. This is as generous (yes, that word, again) and as adventurous and as humane a collection as there can be.

Almost all of us have reservations, especially within the publishing industry, over the centrality of prizes in our literary culture. As a publisher, the relief I feel when a book of ours is nominated is almost immediately overwhelmed by a wave of disappointment and bitterness for those others on our list that didn’t make (apt phrase, this) the cut. (When the Giller people called to tell us Caroline’s book had made it onto the longlist, I had to bite my tongue not to respond with “And…?”) But I am nevertheless deeply grateful that Caroline’s work has been highlighted by the Giller jury, and if the nomination brings her more readers and more critical acclaim, as it should, because she deserves both, then I am doubly grateful. As I would be if you, dear reader, ordered the book from your local independent or through the website (or wherever else you get your books) after you finished this. Whether you read it cover to cover, or dip in a story at a time, I’m certain that reading this collection offers a way for you to be happy, as reading and working on it and now publishing it has made me so. And who, these days, couldn’t use a little help in that department

Dan Wells
Publisher

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The Bibliophile: May You Enjoy Your Stuff

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Lots of exercises are tricky: distinguishing your backlist from your frontlist; packing up your life and moving to another city; burpees. In last week’s newsletter, Vanessa helped with the first item. This week, I plan to help with the second. May god help you with the third.

I have had at least seven different mailing addresses across three cities over the last ten years. It might not be surprising then that I’ve become proficient at packing my life into boxes and bags and have completely given up on owning hangable artwork (I get tattoos now). To clarify, I never set out to be a digital nomad or minimalist. My circumstances have dictated that I choose which physical things to own very carefully. Having (approximately) exactly what you need makes the packing and moving process a lot less painful than it otherwise would be. You don’t want to trip while you’re carrying a box of deteriorating Teflon non-stick pans down a winding staircase (true story).

Photo: You can pick up a copy of May Our Joy Endure September 3, 2024.

These days, I tend to only keep material goods that bring a high degree of utility and aesthetic value to my life. The mugs that I own, for instance, are all different sizes and represent my various interests from wabi-sabi interior design to Star Wars. I also tend to only keep books I would re-read, find beautiful to look at, and are comfortable to hold. Until our author interview with Kev Lambert, I hadn’t paid too much conscious attention to what these items say about me. Kev, by the way, is the author of Que Notre Joie Demeure, a runaway bestseller that was shortlisted for the 2023 Goncourt Prize, and won the 2023 Médicis Prize (making Kev the first Canadian writer in a couple of generations to win this most prestigious of French awards). Donald Winkler’s translation into English, May Our Joy Endure will be available September 3, 2024. The novel transports readers into the lives of the ultra-privileged, primarily following Céline Wachowski, an internationally renowned architect who is accused of destroying struggling neighborhoods in Montreal with her plans for a newly commissioned project—the Webuy Complex. In a time of widening wealth disparity and rising costs of living, Céline’s depicted lavish lifestyle is simultaneously alluring and terrible. When we asked about their intentions behind these details in May Our Joy Endure, Kev shared some nice food for thought about our relationship to material things:

Q:

Let’s talk about the stuff in this novel, from the fashion (Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood and Marie St. Pierre), to the books (from Lacan, to Tremblay, to Proust), to the wine, (they don’t drink white, they drink Sancerre), to the architectural materials (one of the characters has Corten Steel on the front door of his house which is beautiful but he fears was too trendy and is now dated). This is a novel about material culture that is very detailed in terms of what our culture is made of and how it is all put together. Why are these details important to both the novel’s aesthetic and its ambivalent perspective on cultural “makers” to use an ascendant if dubious term.

A:

There’s a sociological aspect to these decisions: these are all signs of distinction. Céline is ultra-rich but she doesn’t see herself as vulgar. Even if Céline is, in fact, nouveau riche because her money isn’t old, she certainly doesn’t want to be seen as nouveau riche, because she wants to be seen as a kind of radical aesthetic figure of the avant-garde. She has to communicate this in her style. She couldn’t wear Chanel because it’s too conservative and classic. So there’s an aspect of the referentiality that is character development. While I’m critical of these objects that are completely caught up in a capitalist culture of consumerism, there are still brilliant people who have thought about these clothes in an aesthetic way. You don’t need to own the object to see it and to understand its value. These materials in the novel also operate as a kind of intertextuality—the fashion designers the characters wear, the art on their walls, the food they eat, the opening nights they attend, it’s never insignificant. It’s a way of winking at the reader, of encouraging them to gain some critical distance from the world of Céline and of the novel at one moment and of pulling them in closer the next.

Photo: Kev’s Biblioasis books May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, and You Will Love What You Have Killed.

So, as it is at the conclusion of a move, there seems to be much to unpack in May Our Joy Endure. The things we own might be valuable insofar as they: help us do things, mean something to us, and reflect us back into the world. To make matters more complex, this value might change over time as when our phone batteries die and cease to function (thanks to planned obsolescence) or when you can suddenly pull a leopard print coat from the back of your closet to look cool on a night out (thanks to the trending ‘mob wife aesthetic’). And presumably, we tend to hold onto our valuables and are more willing to let go of the less valuable. Quick—you can only grab three things on your way out of your burning home—what are you rescuing? The exercise of moving homes forces you to entertain a less intense version of this thought experiment, though it still confronts you about your relationship to everything you own.

Unlike the nouveau riche characters in May Our Joy Endure, I have grown into the habit of gently decluttering regularly and being very slow to purchase or borrow new-to-me things. My turnover of things has decreased, which in turn, has increased my awareness and appreciation for the things I have. It just so happens that this also reduces the stress associated with packing up your life and moving onto your next chapter since you already have a good idea of what to bring.

Julia Lei
Publicist

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The Bibliophile: Frontlist is Backlist

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When frontlist is backlist . . .

Last week Dan outlined one of the eternal conflicts of independent publishing: the challenge of keeping books available for readers to discover, in an industry that is perpetually forward-focused, and within the pesky confines of time and space, i.e. in the face of return windows and the media’s own short attention spans, as well as the physical limitations of our vast yet rapidly overflowing warehouse shelves. (Speaking of the warehouse, our warehouse sale—200+ Biblioasis titles for five bucks a pop—continues through Labour Day.)

Given our ongoing obstinacy in the face of short (shelf and otherwise) lifespans, there’s a particular pleasure in saying that the most recent hot new Biblioasis release happens to be a book written thirty years ago: The Utopian Generation, by the great Angolan writer Pepetela. A Geração da Utopia was first published in its original Portuguese in 1992 by Dom Quixote. (And no, a windmill is never just a windmill.)

Photo: A copy of The Utopian Generation waits impatiently at Biblioasis Bookshop for you.

The Utopian Generation tells the story of four young revolutionaries and their fight for Angolan independence from Portugal. The four are living in Lisbon at the start of the War of Independence, and each must make choices that will have dire consequences for their futures. The novel follows them on their individual trajectories, from the optimism and passion inspired by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), to guerilla combat in Angola and the disillusionment of world-tested ideals and their gradual understanding of the self-renewing global hegemony of capitalism.

Richly detailed in its depictions of African and Portuguese culture, and peopled by vividly drawn characters whose lives reveal intricate insights into the racial and psychological tensions of colonialism, The Utopian Generation is widely considered in the Portuguese-speaking world the seminal novel of African decolonization, companion to novels like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. You’ve certainly at least heard of these books, but without an English-language translation available, Pepetela’s novel has remained largely undiscovered outside of Lusophone cultures. We are terrifically excited that this edition, brought to us by longtime editor Stephen Henighan, and masterfully translated by the great David Brookshaw, is poised to change that fact.

Photo: Stephen Henighan (left) presents Pepetela (right) with copies of the English translation of his novel.

. . . and the future is the past

We’ve worked with David Brookshaw on a number of projects, among them the novels and short fiction of Mozambican Mia Couto. The Utopian Generation is a book he’s known and loved—and taught—for as many years as English-language readers have been unaware of it. We sat down to ask him a few questions about translation, but also about the context in which the novel was written, and what he said confirmed our strident belief that some of our most important lessons have already been learned, and can be applied anew to our contemporary concerns.

Biblioasis: The way the novel represents the diversity of Africa and Angola, culturally, racially, and the ways the struggle for independence united people across differences, is fascinating. Can you speak to the ways this diversity makes The Utopian Generation such a dynamic novel?

DB: One of the great challenges the Angolan nationalists had to face was how to forge a sense of common purpose and identity in a country whose borders had been created artificially by competing European colonial powers in the 19th century, to the extent that an African ethnic or linguistic group might find itself divided by a hastily drawn international frontier. This was the case of the old Kingdom of the Congo, part of which found itself owing its allegiance to Belgium, and the other part to Portugal as a result of the Congress of Berlin in 1885.

When the anti-colonial struggle started to gather strength from the 1940s, the challenge in Angola and the other territories ruled by Portugal was to overcome local rivalries, which had often been stoked up by the colonial authorities. In Angola, these nationalists embarked on a journey that might lead to a sense of “angolanidade” (Angolanity). Pepetela’s novel confronts this problem through the interactions of its characters (most of whom come from different ethnic, regional, or linguistic backgrounds), and their discussions, whether in the student canteen in Lisbon, or while sitting around a campfire in the middle of the Angolan bush, or, after independence, by a beach in southern Angola or in an apartment in Luanda.

The dynamism of the novel is propelled forward not only by the changing experiences of the characters in the different historical moments and locations, and their shifting ideals (or lack of ideals), but by debate and conversation.

Photo: Angola, Portuguese troops gathered in Luanda, 1961. Designer Zoe Norvell found this photo from the American Geographical Society Library (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries) and incorporated it into the book cover.

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Speaking of conversation . . .

We were delighted to see Olivia Snaije’s interview with Pepetela up at The Africa Report last week. Snaije outlines some of the autobiographical elements of the novel’s construction—like his protagonists, Pepetela was a student in Lisbon at the outbreak of the war, and, like two of them, he fought as a guerilla for the MPLA—and also shares the astonishing circumstances of the book’s composition and the impact of its publication:

Pepetela wrote the nearly 500-page The Utopian Generation in just one year while on a writer’s residency in Berlin. “We thought we would create paradise, but things didn’t turn out how we had thought they would,” Luanda-based Pepetela tells The Africa Report from Lisbon.

When the book was published in 1992, it became a bestseller and had the effect of a bomb due to its disillusionment and critical stance towards the corrupt post-independence government.

“My friends with the MPLA in Angola weren’t happy at all,” says Pepetela, adding that he wasn’t persecuted but that many of his friends dropped him. Today, he says, “these friends are even more critical than I was”.

The late academic Fernando Arenas wrote that The Utopian Generation was “the first novel to offer a sustained, probing, heart-wrenching as well as in-depth critique of the postcolonial national project.”

Photo: Pepetela, author of The Utopian Generation. Credit: Jorge Nogueira

You can read the interview in its entirety here. And, thanks to Stephen Henighan and David Brookshaw, you can now read a classic of African literature in English, just thirty-two years after its original publication—thereby proving once again: backlist is fiction.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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The Bibliophile: Backlist Is a Fiction (But Overstock Is Far Too Real)

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I’ve been thinking a lot in recent months about backlist. For those unfamiliar with the term, backlist refers to a given publisher’s catalogue of previously published titles that remain in print and available to the market. The designation distinguishes those books from frontlist, the ones that a publisher has only recently published, usually over the past year, and is still actively working to promote. The Oxford English Dictionary, which credits first use to Stanley Unwin in his 1946 edition of The Truth About Publishing, says that it is a catalogue of “books still available for sale by a publisher or bookseller, but no longer classified by him as ‘current’ or ‘new.’” Backlist is therefore a relatively new concept in publishing, less than eighty years old, though a tremendous amount of ink, both in contracts and media, has been spilled on the subject since.

Photo: Biblioasis inventory (seen above) is meticulously tracked by Emily Stephenson-Bowes, our Operations Manager

The majority of a publisher’s available catalogue, unless they’ve only started or have published limited runs for a set market, will almost always be backlist; and generally speaking, the more a publisher’s sales come from the backlist, the healthier and more stable they are. Backlist makes up anywhere between 50–80 percent of the average multinational’s sales, though for smaller independent publishers, perhaps especially in Canada, it’s quite often a fraction of this. At Biblioasis, we’re in a relatively healthy position, with 35–40 percent of our sales coming from our backlist of more than four hundred titles (though, in truth, only a small percentage of our backlist titles contribute much to these sales). There’s only one trade book in our soon-to-be-twenty-year history that’s gone out of print. A decade ago, in the Globe and Mail, Mark Medley wrote, exasperated, that in his time covering Canadian books, he’d “never met a publisher more convinced of the greatness of their every book,” and asserted that I believed we’re getting stronger every year. I’m still that publisher, I still believe that our list, almost every year, is better than the last (and yes, this year’s is the best ever), and I’ve therefore made a commitment to keep all of our books, whenever humanly possible, available for people to discover.

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As most reading this likely know, I got my start in books twenty-six years ago by opening a used bookstore, which means most of my bread and butter was backlist and out-of-print books. I was always much more thrilled to discover a signed Whitman photo in a moldy banana box (true story!) than to get my hands on the hottest new release; very little has changed in the intervening years. It was the near-constant demands I received for certain out-of-print regional history books—especially Marty Gervais’s The Rumrunners—that started me thinking about publishing in the first place, so the press in a very real way was formed to service backlist. And as the primary buyer for our current bookshop—now majority new—I’ve paid particular attention to growing our backlist holdings over the past five years; as a result, our sales have more than doubled. It struck me that, for many readers—at least to judge by our own shop, they are getting younger—backlist is a fiction: every unread book, every undiscovered author, is a new discovery to a reader, no less fresh and current than a title only released last Tuesday. To the TikTok generation, Dostoevsky may well be just another angsty, bearded hipster; and thanks to TikTok we sell a lot of Dostoevsky. If I could just get the best of what we’ve previously published in front of more people, including Caroline Adderson’s A History of Forgetting, Russell Banks’s Foregone, Mike Barnes’s Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, Clark Blaise’s This Time, That Place, Mark Bourrie’s Bush Runner, Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin, Craig Boyko’s Psychology and Other Stories, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study—and I’ve only quickly skimmed through to the B’s (forgive me, dear authors, any omissions: you were next on the list!), I think people would be thrilled with what they find.

Photo: Books within boxes lie dormant upon colourful metal shelves

Despite the promise that the internet would make everything available, as things have shifted from enthusiasts to algorithms real discoverability has never been harder. The relentless focus on the new, the current and the forthcoming, has made it increasingly difficult for books published only a few months earlier to discover their readers, let alone books published seasons before. If you can’t find a review anywhere, if it’s not available, even spine out, on a bookseller’s shelves, what chance does a reader have to find it? There’s nothing new about this complaint. It’s even getting hard to keep new books on warehouse shelves: storage costs have gone through the roof, and one major distributor we work with has been pressuring client publishers to destroy every single book that is returned, billing publishers as much as 20 percent of list price merely to restock it. It’s destructive and, in my view, unethical, merely another example of large, almost monopolistic corporations putting profit ahead of purpose. Publishers are pressured to adopt new technologies, such as print-on-demand, to service all backlist requirements (and even some frontlist ones), and we’ve made use of it as we’ve needed to. But too often the quality isn’t close enough to minimum standards of our usual offset printing; when I was in Cincinnati this past March and found a POD edition of one of our books on the shelves at Downbound, I was very disappointed with its appearance, a disappointment that has only amplified over the ensuing months. I wouldn’t have bought that edition of the book, and I do not doubt that others have picked it up and put it down for the same reason. Which is a real shame, because it was one of the best books we published in the last year.

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So as a result, we’ve resisted relying overmuch on POD; we’ve resisted letting our distributor pulp our books immediately on return to the warehouse; we’ve tried to resist as long as possible pulping any of our books. It was one of the reasons we purchased our nine-thousand-square-foot building here in Windsor: to try and control our storage costs and to ensure that we could keep everything available. But the costs are still catching up with us: between our various warehouses, storage costs could be as high as 50,000 dollars this year: to a small press like ours, that is an awful lot of money. So: we’ve embarked on our first major (and only second overall) stock reduction in twenty years: we remain as committed as we ever have been to keeping all of our books in print, but we need to reduce inventory and attendant fees. We’ve offered the authors of affected books the opportunity to buy stock at a small fraction of the cover price; we’re looking into remainder options where it makes sense; and we’ll be pulping what we can’t reduce through other means, while maintaining enough stock to handle sales well into the future. If we need to reprint a book at a later date to supply demand, we will do so: at this point that is still a much cheaper option than paying for additional storage. And, finally, we’re also offering readers the opportunity to stock up on some exceptional books at a fraction of the cover price: from hundreds of titles, at five dollars a book. You can pick up the aforementioned Adderson and Blaise and Boyagoda and Boyko (though not the Bourrie or the Burnet!), and many others, books that I still love (All Things Move and As You Were and The Iconoclast’s Journal and Martin John and The Party Wall and Zolitude, to scan the alphabet in five titles) as much as some of the new books we’re excited to put before you in the coming months. So, please, stock up: it’s taken twenty years for us to reach this point, and if I have my way it’ll be twenty more before we have a sale like this again.

Photo: The opening scene of a horror movie about an indie publisher who runs out of storage space

Just do me a favour: if you read something you love, please tell someone: word of mouth still remains the best recommendation engine, and every single one of these authors and books deserves to be more widely discovered and read. Thank you, and happy reading (and ordering).

Dan Wells
Publisher

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The Bibliophile: Horsin’ Around

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It’s officially too-hot-to-sleep season in Windsor, and so in between refilling our water bottles for the sixteenth time and trying to find the shadiest route down the street to the cafe, we decided it was time to wake The Bibliophile from its summer slumber.

In the spirit of fresh starts, we’ll be adding some additional kinds of content to this newsletter: alongside excerpts, essays, publicity news, and exclusive interviews with our authors, keep an eye out for industry musings and behind-the-scenes stories, featuring contributions from each of us and illuminating some of the day-to-day in the life of a publishing house, and what it is that makes us Biblioasis. (We do take requests: tell us what you’d like to know!)

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce Julia Lei, who’s recently started with us in publicity. Julia comes to us with a background in research and digital marketing and we’re delighted to have her aboard the good ship Biblio. Read on to learn a little bit about her early adventures in publishing, and a couple of the excellent books she’s been working on.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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September has marked the beginning of fall since I could remember running to catch the yellow bus on the first day of school. This has remained constant for over two decades, from elementary through grad school, despite changes over the years in fall’s hotness and my modes of transportation. This June, however, I started working as a publicist at Biblioasis, and the learning curve has dissolved my entrenched perspective on the season’s boundaries and contents.

Instead of seminars to attend and tutorials to teach, my fall calendar is now full of exciting bookish events to plan for and manage. To track preparation progress, our team consults multiple, ever-evolving to-do lists that are equally frightening and satisfying to look at. In particular, the title schedule and master media lists direct my daily triaging of tasks and toggling of tabs as we gear up for the closest batch of Biblioasis publication dates. The first of which, the August 6, 2024, publication of Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick, marks my new fall.

Establishing a new daily routine around a new job is challenging enough without the seasons shifting on you. As I try to get my steps in and drink enough water, I find inspo in the day-in-the-life of Richard Kelly Kemick, an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. Being his publicist, I was able to review his author questionnaire, which is a document authors new to Biblioasis fill out so we can get to know them better and do the best publicity possible for their work. The following is drawn from Richard’s finished questionnaire:

Q:

It’s useful to us to have a sense of your existing commitments and the lead time you might need for promotional and publicity opportunities. Give us a quick Day-in-the-Life sketch of your typical availability. What’s an average twenty-four hours like for you?

A:

7 am: Rouse from slumber
8 am: Walk dog and infant child with Litia to Litia’s work
9 am: Breakfast and then put infant child down for nap
9:30 to whenever Christ wills it: Write
12 pm: Walk dog and infant child to post office to check mail and gossip with fellow Rossland residents
1 pm: Lunch!
1:30 pm: Put infant child down for nap
1:30 to whenever Christ wills it: Write/read/nap
3 pm: Litia returns home from work
3–6 pm: Write
6:30 pm: Dinner!
7–9 pm: Go to school gymnasium and FUCKING CRUSH at volleyball
9–10 pm: Go home and gossip with Litia, talk shit about the fellow Rossland residents I gossiped with earlier in the day
10–11 pm: Read Ducks, Newburyport
11 pm: Slip into slumber

Seems like someone is adulting well . . . eight hours of sleep? I don’t know her, but one can dream. To stay on track with basic self maintenance and work, I started using a sticky note system on my desk that honestly looks better than it works. It might be time for me to try a good ol’ notebook, like the kind Roland Allen decided to write about in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. From an interview with the author, here’s a peek behind the making of this non-fiction title, which comes out September 4, 2024.

Q:

Can you tell me a bit more about yourself and how The Notebook came to be?

A:

I am from London originally. I studied English literature in Manchester University, which was great, and gave me some critical knowledge. Then I was an English teacher abroad in Poland for a couple of years. For most of my working life I’ve worked in publishing, but not on the editorial side. You might say that I’ve spent much longer working Excel grids than Word documents. Always on the sales side. Mostly illustrated books, mostly international markets—either the foreign rights market or the American market.

I’m very interested in the business behind things, so when I found that one of the first uses of notebooks was bookkeeping, it made perfect sense to me. Notebooks are so important within the bookkeeping field, and that has such an impact on other things, that it’s bound to spill over. That’s why you get really interesting things like the zibaldone, which are these Italian notebooks that normal people kept at home. People from all kinds of trades keep zibaldone. It was cheap and affordable and it’s a way a normal person can appreciate literature in an era before print. They came into existence because everyone in Florence had a notebook for bookkeeping. Because I have been working on the business end of things all my working life, I find that very relatable. On top of selling books, I started writing books under pseudonyms on the side as a fun thing to do. I’ve written eight books under five names, but they are all gift and novelty books. From a writing point of view it was good training. I’m quite good at sitting down and writing one thousand words. That was good discipline, writing about bicycles, aroma therapy, marijuana, sourdough bread, all these weird little nonfiction books.

I’d always wanted to publish a book about notebooks, but never found an author to do it, never found an editor who got it, so I started to write it myself.

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In addition to The Notebook, here are some other noteworthy reads from Biblioasis for the (eventual) upcoming sweater weather:

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Julia Lei
Publicist