Joe W. Bratcher III got into publishing by accident, literally: "I came into some money in the early '80s—an accident I was in—and made some prudent and very lucky investments." Bratcher, born in Fort Worth, Tex., but raised in Austin, Tex., was a graduate student in English at the University of Texas, where he met his future wife, Elzbieta Szoka, a native of Lodz, Poland, and at the time a Ph.D. candidate in drama at U. of T. "My wife speaks seven languages," Bratcher told PW in his Texas drawl while manning a booth at last weekend's Small Press Book Fair in Manhattan. "I had this idea about publishing a literary journal, and when Elzbieta came along, we switched priorities."
They published their first title, 3 Contemporary Brazilian Plays, translated by Szoka, in 1988, and Host Publishing ("We wanted to play host to a literary feast") was launched. Since then, Host has published 20 titles, all with a very literary bent—plays, poetry, and fiction from writers Chilean, Brazilian, Ecuadoran, Polish, Belgian and Czech, as well as a couple of Texans. Books by Pablo Neruda, Uruguayan Mario Benedetti and a new Afro-Brazilian voice, Conceiçáo Evaristo, lead the list. They also started that literary journal—The Dirty Goat—which has become a regular repository for literature of the Third World.
Having relocated to New York City in the late '90s, when Szoka got a job teaching at Columbia, Host Publishing finds itself in the midst of a growth spurt.
"It is downright risky," said Bratcher from his two-man office on Greenwich Street in TriBeCa. "We are doing five titles this year and 11 next year," nearly doubling the press's 15-year output in 18 months. "And Elzbieta's devoting herself to the film side," said Bratcher. In fact, Szoka was in Los Angeles as we spoke, attending the screening of Screen Door Jesus, a feature film based on Christopher Cook's book of East Texas stories, which Host published in 2001. "We are looking for a distributor. The film is really good. It won seven independent film prizes, including Best Film at the Hamptons International Festival."
Bratcher won't say he's looking for a sales and distribution partner on the publishing side, but he knows that, by ramping up toward a dozen titles a year, he might be in the running. "We just signed with Small Press Distribution, and Ingram and Baker & Taylor handle our books. But till now, we haven't really needed someone calling on bookstores. For the most part, we've hit the academic market. We advertise in the MLA and the New York Review of Books."
Host is among just a few presses that concentrate on literature in translation, along with Archipelago, Dalkey Archive and Green Integer. "It's tough, but it's what we love," said Bratcher. Susan Bergholz, a New York agent who handles such Latin American writers as Mayra Montero and Eduardo Galeano, welcomed Host to the fold. "It is especially urgent right now to understand what is going on in other cultures."
One of the benefits of moving to New York, said Bratcher, is being in New York. An interesting if anomalous title on the Host list is The Hasty Papers, a haphazard document compiled by famed artist and downtown New York figure Alfred Leslie. Bratcher and Szoka met Leslie when they first arrived; Leslie expressed interest in what they were doing and agreed to update his unclassifiable 1960s compendium of texts, letters, photos, novels, drawings, paintings, speeches. "It's an incredible book," Bratcher said. "I can't figure why it doesn't sell more. For the new edition, Alfred had all his correspondence scanned in—handwritten notes from Kerouac, William Carlos Williams, incredible stuff. I've got loads of books in a warehouse."
Perhaps not for long, if Host's gamble on growing takes it beyond academia into the general trade market.
