Greg Ruggiero, an activist pamphleteer turned influential editor at Seven Stories Press, has taken his services to City Lights, where he will begin acquiring books for his Open Media Series and the house's general list. After working as a senior editor at Seven Stories for eight years, Ruggiero was in the process of establishing his own nonprofit press when conversations with an old friend and associate, Elaine Katzenberger, associate director of City Lights, led to their joining forces. It is City Lights' first hire in 20 years.

City Lights publisher Nancy Peters said that she and co-owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti had been talking for some time about how the 50-year-old press might expand its political nonfiction publishing, and that Ruggiero's departure from Seven Stories in October was fortuitous timing. "We've long admired the Open Media Series from the first pamphlet," Peters said. "This seems like a really wonderful new direction for us."

Ruggiero started the series with the publication of Noam Chomsky's lectures critical of Operation Desert Shield in 1991. Ruggiero sold his pamphlets on New York City streets before independent booksellers—City Lights among the first—began stocking them. He published a couple of bound anthologies culled from the pamphlets with the New Press before bringing the Open Media series to Seven Stories in 1997. Bestselling books that came from the collaboration with Seven Stories included Chomsky's 9/11 and Power in the Age of Empire by Arundhati Roy. Ruggiero's pamphlet of Cindy Sheehan's letters to George W. Bush protesting the war in Iraq will be the first book published in the City Lights Open Media series, in April.

While Seven Stories' Dan Simon said Ruggiero will be missed, he was pleased that he found a home at City Lights. "We need more, not fewer political publishers," he said. Ruggiero, who will work out of his Brooklyn home, said, "It's like starting from scratch without starting from scratch. I am humbled to be a part of City Lights' long literary tradition."

Both houses are distributed to the trade by Consortium.