Notes from the coast
What we read, what we print, and why the long tide still matters.
The wetsuit is drying over the back of a chair, the board is propped by the door, and I’m supposed to be writing you a letter about what we do here. The trouble with letters about what you do is that they almost always become mission statements, and mission statements are what companies write when they want to be mistaken for small presses. Real small presses don’t have mission statements.
They have stacks.
Here’s ours, today.
On top: a Lucia Berlin paperback with somebody’s old boarding pass for a bookmark. Under that, a galley of a novel about a woman returning to her childhood town on the coast of Maine to discover nothing has changed, which is the ambient subject of half the novels published by women in this country. Three chapbooks from a poet in San Pedro. A library copy of Colette, due back eleven days ago. And because nothing ever stops arriving in the mail, a fresh hardcover about the death of reading.
That’s what we read. It’s also, more or less, what we print. Books we’d be reading anyway. Books we’d keep on this desk whether we paid to make them or not. Books a person can take to the beach without apology.
What we don’t print: trends. Hype cycles. The fourteenth variation on whatever just sold. We’ve watched enough houses chase the wave and discover, late, that they were in the wrong water. The wave turns. The tide, though, keeps coming.
That’s the line worth saying out loud. The tide moves on a longer clock than the industry does. Books that outlast their publication year tend to be the ones that weren’t trying to outlast anything. They were just good, and good books have a way of finding readers even if it takes a decade and somebody’s aunt passing it along at Thanksgiving.
We’re not in a hurry.
It means we publish fewer books than we could. It means we turn down things that would probably sell. It means our release schedule looks, from the outside, lazy. From the inside, it looks like we’ve read the thing forty times and still want to read it again, which is the only bar that reliably predicts whether anyone else will.
The readers who find us tend to find us on their own. We don’t shout. We don’t run author contests, we don’t gamify newsletters, we don’t have a TikTok intern. We have a desk, a chair, a lamp, and the stack. That has been enough for longer than anyone would have predicted, which suggests it will be enough a while longer.
Shoulders are sore, the coffee’s gone cold, and the poet from San Pedro just sent another envelope.
More soon, from this desk.