Last year, when Giles O'Bryen took over as managing director of Verso three months after predecessor Guy Bentham left, his mandate was clear: to prop up the company's sagging publishing program and staunch the hemorrhaging of money. Now the London-based press, which was founded in 1970 by New Left Review and regards itself as the largest radical publisher in the English language, is on track to more than break even for the first time in years.
"We were bang on budget at the end of August," said O'Bryen, who projects that sales this year will be just over $4 million, up from $2.8 million in 2005. "Sales have been up this fiscal year quite substantially," added Dosier Hammond, v-p of sales and affiliate manager at W.W. Norton, which has distributed Verso in the U.S. for the past decade (the U.S. accounts for about 65% of Verso's worldwide sales). "They're doing some important reissues, like a new edition of Mike Davis's City of Quartz."
"We're doing more books and better books," said O'Bryen. "We're doing about 65 this year, and we'll probably push up toward the 100 mark over the next few years." At the same time, Verso will move about a third of the 450 titles on its backlist to print-on-demand.
But it's not just the sheer quantity of books that is making the difference. Verso is also broadening its list. Long associated with classic leftist doctrine (think Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre) as well as literature in support of the Palestinian cause (several books by and about Chomsky and Said), Verso is looking to publish books that present what O'Bryen called "the underlying truth." All too often, he said, "truth has been swapped out for simplifications that are easier to put across in sound bites." Verso is also getting more literary.
Hence the appearance on this fall's list of Primo Levi's Auschwitz Report (Oct. 25, $17.95 cloth), with Leonardo de Benedetti. Written just weeks after Auschwitz was liberated, it provides one of the earliest documents on everyday life in the camp and prefigures Levi's later Holocaust memoirs—The Drowned and the Saved (Vintage), If This Is a Man (Everyman's Library) and The Periodic Table (Schocken). The book will certainly strike some as a departure from Verso's contrarian radical roots, but O'Bryen was confident that Verso's radical bona fides are incontestable and that a wider scope is needed.
"I'm proud that we're doing the Levi book," he said. "It gives strength to the other parts of our list." Verso is going out with 20,000-copy first printing, quadruple its typical print run. It will also do print ads and an e-mail blitz to Jewish-oriented publications and organizations.
O'Bryen hopes to broaden the list in other ways, seeking out books on the environment, women's studies and the labor movement, for example, and looking outside academia for authors. Next spring, Verso will publish a memoir by mystery writer Sara Paretsky, in which she tells about her transformation from a political naif from Kansas to a person who sees the world, and people, through politics.
Now that Verso has strengthened its U.K. operations with a new managing director and a stronger list, it is beginning a similar process across the Atlantic, where it lost several key people earlier this summer. To oversee U.S. operations, O'Bryen recently hired former Chinese publisher and distributor Gan Qi, wife of exiled poet Bei Dao, who plans to focus on acquiring titles with a strong trade profile. Although Gan Qi, who has limited publishing background in the West, acknowledges that it won't be easy, she said, "I remember an old Chinese saying: the most important thing in life is never the first impression, but the last."
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