There was once a fondly known Los Angeles—based publisher called Price Stern Sloan, which was eventually sold to Putnam, where it became an imprint; Roger Price, one of the triumvirate (and the creator of its biggest success, Mad Libs), died in 1990. Now, however, the two remaining principals, Larry Sloan and Leonard Stern, have resurfaced with a new company of their own.
It's called Tallfellow Books and will be an eclectic small house, offering a mix of some of PSS's old titles whose rights have reverted, one or two big art-type books a year and a series of technical books about movie subjects, on which they are working with the Writers Guild Foundation. "We want to develop a publishing presence here because of the number of top TV and film writers around, people who can do books on aspects of movie craft, directing and writing," Sloan told PW. They also plan, he said, to do some children's publishing, under the Smallfellow imprint (Children's Books, May 28), for which they are copublishing some titles with the children's bookstore and art gallery Every Picture Tells a Story. There are also some movie animators, he said, interested in doing children's books.
The first of the big art books, redesigned and translated from a German original, is on the German artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who was a prisoner in Terezin, where she taught art to some of the children in the camp before perishing in Auschwitz. An exhibit of her work in Atlanta will be moving to New York in the fall, when the book will be published. Another volume already in preparation for publication next spring is 1936, an illustrated anthology of observations by many noted writers, artists and photographers who were alive then, on the significance of that pivotal year in the development of Nazism and the runup to WWII.
Among the books the company will be reissuing from the old PSS list are Droodles and a book of leaked memos from TV executives, titled A Martian Wouldn't Say That. Price's Mad Libs series, however, remains with Putnam.
