Call it the serendipitous collision of two good ideas.
Last winter, the students of Pervouralsk Middle School in the Ural Mountains found an unlikely booster in Andover Green Book Publishers (in Alton, N.H.), who provided funds to replace their school's grossly outdated books with new ones. This winter, more Russian children in poor, rural areas will benefit when all of the proceeds from Six Inches to England, an anthology of international children's stories released just before the holidays, are funneled into similar school-library refurbishments.
Ten years ago, when husband-and-wife team Jeannie and Peter Ferber founded their independent publishing company, they never could have foreseen such an international connection.
"The thing about publishing is that you somehow get linked to people all over the world," said publisher Jeannie Ferber. "It just happens." For Andover Green, it happened when Ferber wrote and published I Am Able, I Am Bound, a biography of Yury Meshkov, who in 1994 was elected the first president of Crimea. In the process, she befriended a number of Russians. "They said to me, 'Russia doesn't need money, it needs ideas, it needs to learn how to be a democracy,' " Ferber said.
Though Andover Green's goal from the outset has been to publish books "whose singular purpose is to build understanding between different peoples, nations and cultures," Ferber nevertheless didn't expect she'd be playing such a hands-on role. But when her new friends pointed out that, other than in Moscow and St. Petersburg, schoolchildren were still being taught out of communist-era books more than 11 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union because there were no funds to replace them, she was aghast.
Shock gave way to resolve, and last year Andover Green founded AIR (Access to Ideas: Russia). The organization's debut program was a modest experiment called "Journey: Crossing the World on a Bookshelf." Funded by a donation from Andover Green, last year's "Journey" removed all out-of-date books from Pervouralsk Middle School and replaced them with 1,000 new books.
The books were purchased in Russia to keep costs down and support local publishers and booksellers, and the response to the program was so enthusiastic that Ferber was determined to continue with it. It was at this point that serendipity came into play. "I thought, why not create a book that could fund this on an ongoing basis?" she said.
In fact, Andover Green already had a fitting candidate in the works: an anthology of children's stories from all over the world that Ferber and co-compiler Priscilla Harper had begun collecting. Everyone involved—authors, artists, designers, British editor Margaret Robinson Millar—agreed to donate their time and work to the project, says Ferber.
Six Inches to England includes contributions from 30 authors and artists from 24 countries. All of the contributions have one thing in common. "We made only one request," Ferber explained. "We asked for stories that showed the nobility and beauty of their country's people and culture. We wanted the book to show children how each nation and culture richly contributes to the whole."
Sales from the first printing are on track to refurbish not one but two school libraries in the Urals this winter, Ferber reported. Andover Green is also planning to expand this year's "Journey" so that every child in the school will be able to pick out a favorite book to take home and keep.
"We never could have foreseen the timing of the book coming out now," mused Ferber, referring to last fall's tragic events. "This book really shows children the best of their world. Even the making of it is a tiny voice saying it is possible to make a difference."
Andover Green Book Publishers can be reached at 603-875-5200 or at books@worldpath.net.
