Books: Publishing Rises in the West

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Shoemaker notes that recognition brings some liabilities: "When agents hear of the $210,000 paperback-rights sale, they step up their asking prices for new manuscripts. And there is the danger that maybe the adrenaline won't flow quite as fast after our first big success." But fears like that belong to what San Francisco Novelist Herbert Gold has labeled the Age of Happy Problems. North Point has not only put itself on the map, it is helping to redefine the boundaries of U.S. publishing.

Black Sparrow Press, located in a sunny villa some 300 miles south of North Point in Santa Barbara, is an even smaller house. Its staff of six includes John Martin, 54, publisher, and his wife Barbara, 45, designer. The Martins, who work out of their home, are relentlessly noncommercial: "If Evan Connell came to me with a Custer book," claims Martin, "I wouldn't be interested in publishing it." Black Sparrow began in 1966, when Martin, then an office- supply executive, sold his valuable collection of D.H. Lawrence first editions and decided to go into business for himself. He sedulously imitated a famed boutique publisher of the '20s, Black Sun, down to the art nouveau design and the name.

Black Sparrow's first book was by a hard-drinking roustabout, Charles Bukowski. Says Martin: "He was the kind of guy that drank in sailors' bars, got into fights with everyone in the room and wound up drinking alone with everyone stretched out on the floor." Between bouts Bukowski wrote terse, explicit poetry and fiction in the self-advertising style of Henry Miller ("The young coeds came up with their hot young bodies and their pilot- light eyes . . ."). Martin offered to pay the author $100 a month if he would quit his postal worker's job and work full time on a novel: "He left on the last working day of 1965. The next time I heard from him was at the end of January when he called to say he'd finished his book."

It was called At Terror Street and Agony Way, and the account of a disorderly life in Los Angeles launched two careers: Bukowski's and Black Sparrow's. Since then Bukowski has produced 15 books. None have been American hits, but many have been best sellers in Europe. More than a million copies of his works are in print in at least a dozen languages; they account for about 40% of Black Sparrow's $750,000 sales volume.

Bukowski is typical of the outsider author Martin tends to favor. John Fante, a neglected proletarian novelist and screenwriter, was rescued from obscurity by Black Sparrow in the last years of his life. His reissued novels, Ask the Dust and Dreams from Bunker Hill, sold more than 10,000 copies each. Martin's current favorite is the late Wyndham Lewis, a novelist and critic whose work, & said T.S. Eliot, combined "the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave man." Lewis also dabbled in art. To Poet Edith Sitwell, his pictures seemed "to have been painted by a mailed fist in a cotton glove."