Looking to build a press focused on psychoanalytic texts, Michael Moskowitz and Judith Gurewich joined forces in 1999 to launch Other Press.
Moskowitz, a practicing psychoanalyst and former academic, and Gurewich, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and professor at Harvard, serve as copublishers of Other Press. "We're a mission-driven house, committed to a view of the world that offers ways of viewing people's lives complexly and deeply," Moskowitz told PW .
Since 1999, the two copublishers have built a modest but growing publishing operation that Moskowitz said generates about $3 million in annual sales. "We're not in the black yet," he said, "but we've got generous investors." The house publishes in the broad areas of psychoanalytic theory, gender studies and cultural studies. And Moskowitz explained that as "other publishers abandon the field, we're picking up their authors." Direct sales to professionals represent "50% to 70%" of OP's sales, Moskowitz said, but the press is in the market for a trade distributor and, for the first time, will attend BEA this year.
To augment its professional titles, the press is adding fiction—four novels this year—to the list, and has also launched a poetry imprint, Handsel Books. Other Press publishes about 40 books a year, and Karnac, its U.K. subsidiary, publishes about 30 books annually.
Moskowitz's publishing career began in the early 1990s working for the New Jersey—based psychology publisher Jason Aronson. In 1998 he teamed up with Gurewich, and they put together a group of European investors ("investing in publishing is still highly regarded in Europe," said Moskowitz) to fund the new U.S. press.
Around the same time, Moskowitz visited Karnac Books, a publisher and bookseller in London, long considered "the most significant psychoanalytic bookstore in the U.K.," said Moskowitz. Originally looking simply to buy the rights to several Karnac titles, Moskowitz and Gurewich decided instead to raise additional capital and acquire Karnac, including its two London bookstores and its 300-title backlist.
"It gave us instant prestige as a publisher," said Moskowitz. It also led to the launching of Other Books, a bookstore on West 20th Street in Manhattan that carries more than 5,000 titles in related fields. OP also operates OtherBooks.com, an online retail site with more than 50,000 psychoanalytic-related items for sale. Moskowitz told PW that Karnac's London store was an informal center for the profession, "So we decided, let's do one in New York as well."
