Despite a inauspicious start, Overlook Press has thrived for the past four decades. Founded in 1971 by Alfred ("Fredy") Mayer, a retired glove manufacturer, and his son, Avon Books head Peter Mayer, Overlook's first office was an apple shed in Woodstock, N.Y. Its inaugural list contained a single title, in German. But on the strength of that one book, Aufbau, Penguin agreed to distribute Overlook, which it does to this day, and Fredy was encouraged to ask his son, "Aren't there some other books we could do together?"
Mayer, now 75, who headed Penguin for two decades before coming to Overlook full-time in 1996, acknowledges that it was "a mad way" to start a publishing house, but it worked. "If we like a book, we just do it. We don't have that many rules. My dad would be pleased to know in our 40th year we had our first New York Times bestseller, and it was #1," he says, referring to the press's success with the movie tie-in of Charles Portis's True Grit. Until last year, the closest that Overlook came to the bestseller list was Robert Littell's The Company, which reached #16. That's not to say that its books haven't done well, like Miyamoto Musashi's A Book of Five Rings, which sold more than 700,000 copies with Mayer's tagline: "Japan's answer to the Harvard M.B.A.!"
Early on, says Mayer, "we decided that the image of small companies is that they get very narrowly focused. My background was very catholic. I think our eclectic list is the result of that unpredictability. Nobody ever expected to get the first sudoku book from Overlook. We ended up with nearly two million books. True Grit was unpredictable. [But] what's most interesting is we're a publisher of authors. When we revived the Freddy [the pig] books, we did all 27 of them. When we buy one book, we generally buy the entire backlist." In the case of P.G. Wodehouse, Overlook brought out nearly 80 titles in hardcover, and according to Mayer, they outsell the paperbacks.
In addition, Mayer is proud that "our percentage of foreign language books is higher than 10% of our list." In 2002, Overlook acquired Ardis, a leading publisher of Russian literature, which contributed to the strength of its Russian list. Earlier this month, for example, it published Ludmila Ulitskaya's novel Daniel Stein, Interpreter, winner of the Russian National Literary Prize. Unlike many small publishers, Overlook does big visual books. "It's no accident that Milton Glaser did our 40th anniversary poster," says Mayer. Or that one of Overlook's lead titles for the fall has 250 plates: William Rubin's A Curator's Quest, about his tenure as head of the Museum of Modern Art's department of painting and sculpture. And the press recently expanded its presence overseas by purchasing Duckworth in England.
At its booth (3439), Overlook is giving out anniversary posters and galleys for Alan S. Cowell's The Paris Correspondent. YA novelist Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series, will sign ARCs of his crime debut, Plugged, today, 2–3 p.m.
