“A small press with a big reach” is how founder and publisher Barbara Ras describes Trinity University Press, the San Antonio, Tex., house that is celebrating its 10th publishing anniversary this year. “It’s been exhilarating to have started something from scratch that in 10 years has grown to a significant publishing program.”
Among other successes, the house started out of the gate in 2004 with Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, which the New York Times Magazine cited as one of the 100 best nonfiction books ever. Turchi’s long-awaited follow-up, A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic (Nov.), explores the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. Galleys are available at the Trinity booth (1230).
“We were lucky to have the Ewing Halsell Foundation, a local philanthropy, give us startup funds and an endowment to support operations,” Ras says, explaining the original Trinity blueprint. “We’ve also been ambitious in pursuing funds for books that would otherwise be beyond the capacity of a small press.” Barry Lopez, W.S. Merwin, Bob Shacocchis, and Rebecca Solnit are among their nationally recognized authors.
The press is not, despite its name, a channel for academic or scholarly work, but sticks strictly to trade-oriented books that will appeal to a smart readership, such as Solnit’s The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (Nov.), in which the author brings together the vast world of political observation, art commentary, and observations on social justice (samplers available at the booth); and Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Place by Gary Snyder in conversation with Julia Martin (Nov.), featuring three interviews and a correspondence during a 30-year friendship.
Associate director Thomas Payton, who acquires books along with Ras, is building the list to encompass books on architecture, urban design, and city planning. He is excited to announce the launch in fall 2015 of a new—and unique—series about architecture, the Best Architecture Writing, a gathering of the best in the English language from around the world, with noted architectural critic and writer Edward Lifson overseeing the series annually.
The young press now has more than 150 books in print, a staff of six full-timers, and a huge amount of pride in itself. All of the press’s titles are published simultaneously in print and electronically, with some done in e-book format only, including, just released this month, 48 titles in the WPA Guides to America series, individual guides to each of the states commissioned originally in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration.
