Emilie's Back
After a two-year retirement, Emilie Buchwald, 70, founder and publisher emeritus of the respected Milkweed Editions, is launching a new press in Minneapolis. Gryphon Press will publish children's picture books focusing on animal issues for k—3 readers. "I have a little bit of a niche that nobody has picked up on, and I'd like to establish it," said Buchwald. Gryphon will do about half a dozen titles a year. Consortium will distribute.
Q Is Browner Than K
You'd know that, if you were blessed with synesthesia, like Vladimir Nabokov. Readers of his classic memoir, Speak, Memory, will recall Vlad's riff on audition colorée—or colored hearing. Now, Gingko Press, a small house based in Corte Madera, Calif., and Hamburg, Germany, reprints the "fine case of colored hearing" excerpt and illustrates it with watercolors by New York artist Jean Holabird. Alphabet in Color is bound in black cloth over boards and features terraced color pages. Gingko, founded in 1986 by Mo Cohen, formerly a manager at St. Mark's Bookstore in New York, does a variety of "Pop Kulch" books (McLuhan, Bukowski, skateboarding), handles its own sales and distribution and does about $2 million worth of business in the U.S. and the same in Europe. Cohen loves the Alphabet book—"I went back and read all of Nabokov, Ada twice," he said. The $25 book, with a 4,000 first printing, pubs in February, has "big museum orders" and is a must-have in "the Nabokov network."
Amber-Allen's Magic
Spiritual teacher Don Miguel Ruiz spent this week leading a "power journey" to the Sun Pyramids outside of Teotihuacan, Mexico. Ruiz also regularly runs dreaming weekends ($300) and evening darshans ($25) for his followers. One beneficiary of the peripatetic, charismatic Toltec wise man is Amber-Allen Publishing of San Rafael, Calif. Founder Janet Mills discovered Ruiz in the mid-'90s and has become his sole publisher. Ruiz's Four Agreements,published in 1997, has sold more than three million copies to date, reached #1 on the New York Timesbestseller list in 2000 and was on the L.A. Timesbestseller list (#5) as recently as last week. Another Mills, sister Joyce, said the company and its three Ruiz titles all had a "very good holiday season, thank you." PGW distributes.
—With reporting by Claire KirchContact us at PWIndieNews@reedbusiness.com
