Since its founding by veteran Pantheon editor André Schiffrin in 1992, the New Press has followed a hybrid model as an independent trade publisher and a not-for-profit company that leverages books for social change. Among its bestsellers are Lisa Delpit’s collection of essays, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (1995), and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2008). Other mainstays of the company include books by Studs Turkel and Henning Mankell.
“We have published 1,000 books in our 20 years. We’re very proud of that,” says publisher Ellen Adler, noting how gratifying it is that the New Press’s 20th anniversary celebration is taking place while the paperback edition of one of their books, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is enjoying an extended run on the New York Times bestseller list.
Though not all New Press books make it to the bestseller list, the majority of them are still in print, and many sell tens of thousands of copies, Adler says.
About Henning Mankell, whose books including the Kurt Wallander crime series have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, Adler says the New Press “was at the right place at the right time” to get U.S. rights to his works. “Mankell is motivated by social issues and uses crime fiction as a way to talk about social issues, so he’s an appealing fit. We were there in the early days. We’ve done 10 of the Wallander books and others in other genres.”
Advance copies of Mankell’s newest, The Shadow Girls (Oct.), are available at the New Press booth (3911). Also at the booth are copies of Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (Sept.), a book that has been credited as the source document for many of 2011’s global uprisings.
Today at 4 p.m. in the booth, the corks will pop during a champagne reception celebrating 20 successful years.
