Last year was the 40th anniversary of Berkeley publisher North Atlantic Books, and the 50th anniversary of Io, the alternative literary journal that marked the company’s beginnings. In 1964, Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough founded Io as college undergraduates; the journal featured authors such as Stephen King and Rob Brezsny. Ten years later, they started North Atlantic Books, a nonprofit publisher, which has built a reputation for books with alternative perspectives on health, spirituality and martial arts.
Last year’s landmark anniversaries were accompanied by some significant changes, as Grossinger and Hough moved to new roles; both will remain on the board, though Grossinger’s title changed to founding publisher, and he remains involved with acquisitions and maintaining key partnerships. Douglas Reil took over as publisher and executive director; Tim McKee was promoted from acquisitions manager to director of publishing.
Reil, a veteran whose been in the publishing industry for more than 25 years, first became aware of NAB when he was at PGW. “I’ve had a firsthand relationship with their titles all the way back into the 1980s. I got firsthand knowledge of what was resonating with audiences,” said Reil. “When I joined the company, it was a great opportunity to apply all the skills I had learned in distribution, while also stepping into working directly with authors in and around the transformative topics I have always been interested in.”
McKee joined North Atlantic Books in 2013, from the magazine the Sun, where he worked as a managing editor for seven years. While at the Sun, McKee worked with North Atlantic Books, which distributed the books published by the Sun. “When I knew I wanted to come back to Northern California, North Atlantic Books was the place that made sense to work after the Sun. To me it was a natural evolution that I would be working at another place where I would be helping tell potent stories that I feel society needs to hear.”
The 2015 spring and fall list reflects many of the topics that have long been important to NAB, including contemporary ones. The list includes Peter Levine’s Trauma and Memory, Gabriel Cousins’s book on conscious parenting, two titles about cannabis as medicine, and books on grief and death, including The Smell of Rain on Dust, by Martin Prechtel, and Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, by Stephen Jenkinson.
The list also features new books from NAB’s Sacred Activism series, a partnership with Andrew Harvey, the global mystic and thinker who coined the phrase sacred activism. The series includes titles that explore the relationship between activism and spirituality. “There is sometimes this perception that activists and people working on their spirituality are in two separate camps. Instead, there’s a unity between the two that needs to happen,” said McKee. In all, McKee expects NAB’s title output to be about 50 books this year, roughly the same as the last few years.
For McKee, NAB’s publishing philosophy helped make the company stand out over the years. “I do think there is a shared understanding and appreciation that our bottom line at North Atlantic is always the story line, and not profit. We look at books inherently less as products and more as outlets of information.” Grossinger noted that North Atlantic is “not like a regular company, in the sense that we started as a lit journal as college undergrads, and now we are a full-sized publishing company that has put out several thousand books over our history. As a nonprofit, the company has always been defined by its mission and vision, rather than commercial success. Yet paradoxically it has been commercially successful, because people believe in the kinds of things we are doing.” NAB’s mission is centered on nurturing spiritual and ecological disciplines and disseminating ancient wisdom.
Though NAB’s original mission continues to guide the company, McKee was quick to emphasize that the house is “entering a new chapter.” McKee said NAB is “actively trying to bring a greater diversity of voices to the press—across gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, and nationality.” And the changes at NAB are taking place throughout the company, not just at the executive level. Seventeen of the company’s 25 employees are women, he said, including many moving into new senior positions in production, publicity, and editorial departments after recent promotions. “We believe transformation is the business of everybody and are therefore actively trying to widen our tent,” McKee said.
After an unsuccessful attempt to turn over the reigns once before, Grossinger is confident this changing of the guard will work. As he described it, each member of the present group supports the company in his or her own way, which “keeps it on track. We tried several other people to handle the transition, and they didn’t work. This is a transition from within. It’s the best way. When you bring someone in from the outside, you create an artificial situation, grafting something on from the outside.”
North Atlantic’s clear mission is what has carried the press through 40 years and is at the center of its focus going forward. “We are always going to hold true to our mission-driven publishing. We want to stay in the worldview with our authors and have the progressive and radical messages inform the publishing process,” said Reil. “This is an important looking-back moment, even as we look ahead. We are excited about the next wave.”
Correction: Tim McKee's previous position was acquisitions manager, not associate publisher and managing director as stated in an earlier version of this story. The forthcoming books listed are from the 2015 spring and fall lists, not just the spring list. Also Martin Prechtel's name was misspelled.
