Ecco Press has come a long way from its original offices in Daniel Halpern's cramped apartment on 30th Street and Fifth Avenue. In 1971, with financial help from heiress Drue Heinz, the press sprouted from Halpern's renowned literary magazine, Antaeus, launching Halpern's career as publisher of what would become one of the country's premier independent presses. From the start, Ecco's mission was grand: to publish the great neglected works of the 20th century. Office space, however, was less grand. "I stored the copies of books in various girlfriends' apartments," recalled Halpern. "Those relationships didn't work out, but my girlfriends had a lot of storage space."
From his executive offices at HarperCollins's midtown Manhattan headquarters, Halpern said he no longer struggles to find warehouse space or authors willing to accept tiny advances in return for literary cachet. Instead, he's watching the press he began celebrate the dawn of its fourth decade with special editions, national events, a five-city bookselling and publicity tour, and the support of a powerful corporate parent.
When Halpern joined HarperCollins as a v-p and editorial director of the Ecco imprint in February 1999, industry reaction was mixed. "No one called me a sellout to my face, but the feeling out on the street was, 'there goes another independent,' " said Halpern. But the alliance with the powerhouse has made Ecco's anniversary celebration possible. Without HarperCollins and the support of its president and CEO, Jane Friedman, Halpern believes Ecco would have had to close its doors for good three years ago.
Love Turns to Pain
For nearly 20 years, Halpern said, he published "books he loved"—sometimes at a small profit, but almost always to excellent reviews. Ecco and Halpern performed what some saw as cultural philanthropy, resurrecting forgotten works and supporting new literary voices. "We started by publishing the great, lost books of the 20th century," recounted Halpern. "I think I bought Sheltering Sky for $300." Halpern published Cormac McCarthy's novels, for example, before McCarthy became a household name with All the Pretty Horses. And then there was the Ecco American Poetry Series, dedicated to publishing young poets such as Louise Gluck, Robert Hass and James Tate.
As an independent publisher, Ecco never had a bestseller, though many of its titles blossomed into impressive backlist performers. For example, in the early 1970s, Halpern bought Bells in Winter, a collection of poetry by a then-unknown Polish statesman named Czeslaw Milosz; it had initial sales of only 600 copies. But when Milosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980, Ecco went back to press for 20,000 more. Halpern estimates that, in the years since, Ecco has sold more than 30,000 copies.
But even with prize-winning authors and praise from critics, the small press was hitting a wall. As Halpern put it at Ecco's recent 30th-anniversary celebration, "Our deficit was like a fly hovering in a train compartment, traveling at high speed, rather annoyingly, right along with us." But at the time of the HarperCollins merger—six years after he had closed down Antaeus after publishing 76 issues over a quarter century—Halpern wasn't as whimsical: "Let's not be sentimental about this stuff. This is not a time when the small press can survive."
By the late '90s, economic vicissitudes, book auctions that became bidding wars, the strain of competing with multinational publishers, and the decline of independent retailers were making it almost impossible for Ecco to carry on. Despite publishing up to 60 titles a year, the press was barely breaking even. Halpern explained, "In 1992, my wife, Jeanne Wilmot, took over management and basically turned a nonprofit plan into a real publishing plan. We realized we had to ship five books a month. I started to publish books I didn't love because we just couldn't compete on the advances. I had to buy what I could, and the fun had gone out of it."
Love, Again
In 1999, Friedman had lunch with Halpern, whom she had known since they were both newcomers to the industry, and asked, "Don't you think it's time to line up with a major publisher like us?" To Friedman, bringing Ecco to HarperCollins made good business sense. "I'm known as the queen of backlist publishing, and Dan had the backlist of backlists. I knew we could make his list at least twice as profitable and, more than that, I thought we would have fun," she told PW. Indeed, Harper has since increased paperback sales of The Sheltering Sky from well under 1,000 copies a month to an average of 1,500, according to Carrie Kania, Ecco's marketing director. Other backlist titles, such as the hardcover edition of Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking (originally published by Ecco in 1973) have jumped to just under 3,000 a month from around 1,000.
For the last two and a half years, Halpern has had the capability to buy and market books like a large publisher, ushering Ecco into what Halpern calls a "new growth period." He has attracted frontlist books from major authors such as Jaffrey, whose Step by Step Cooking is coming in October, and Joyce Carol Oates, whose novel Blonde anchored his first season with HarperCollins. For Oates, coming to Ecco was "a natural move." Halpern is an old friend who had encouraged her over the years to write in genres she "never would have tried without his influence," such as the children's book (Come Meet Muffin, 1998) she wrote for his daughter, Lily. Poet and singer Patti Smith, who had met Halpern in the early 1970s at Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, signed with him for a memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, attracted by Halpern's editorial sensitivity and his newfound ability to produce the elegant illustrated book she had in mind. Halpern was also able to sign Robert Stone's The Sixties: The Decade That Changed America for an advance commensurate with Stone's reputation. Last year, after Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential had spent 17 weeks on the bestseller list, Halpern bought the paperback rights, a purchase that would have been unthinkable back in the days of independence.
Perhaps the biggest change is cosmetic. Ecco's trademark squiggle figure is gone; the little man who seems to be saluting readers with a high-five has been replaced by "ecco" (Italian for "there it is") spelled out in arty new lettering, as recently unveiled in Joyce Carol Oates's latest novella, Middle Age. Halpern remembers the day he and Paul Bowles selected the imprint's original colophon from a sheaf of line drawings by a Moroccan artist. "He was great, but over the years people tortured me over that little guy. People would dress him up, or they'd have him holding weird things. We thought it was best to get a new logo to reflect our new home." Wherever he is now, that little squiggle man is probably holding a bottle of champagne.
