There's a whole lot more besides books and java percolating at Coffee House Press this summer. After BEA, the 24-year-old literary nonprofit press spent the rest of June moving its offices in downtown Minneapolis across the Mississippi River to a 3,500-square-foot space in the renovated Grain Belt beer bottling building—a task that involved dismantling and subsequently reassembling a half-ton letterpress that hadn't been taken apart since 1928.
And in July, the Bush Foundation, a philanthropic organization headquartered in St. Paul, awarded Coffee House one of its highly competitive Regional Arts Development Program (RADP) grants to support a year of long-term strategic planning. The $90,000 grant—plus another $5,000 to help pay the moving expenses—comprises only the first portion of what is to be a total of 10 years of nonprescriptive financial support. The full amount awarded will be determined after the completion of Coffee House's strategic plan next spring.
“Coffee House made a strong case that this was a critical juncture for them, that an investment now could really trigger a major advancement and, potentially, a successful leadership transition,” notes Nancy Fushan, senior program officer with the Bush Foundation.
Seven arts organizations have been accepted for this phase of the RADP, including Milkweed Editions and Graywolf Press; the Bush Foundation hopes by 2023 to have a maximum of 21 arts organizations participating in the program each year.
“We have a good program and don't see a major revamping of that program,” Coffee House publisher Allan Kornblum says, adding that in subsequent years he hopes to create cash reserves with portions of the RADP funds to further ensure Coffee House's continued financial stability.
A portion of the funds will be used to hire consultants and other experts familiar with arts nonprofits to work with the press during the next year. Some moneys will be used to provide for staff education, an editorial presence at Frankfurt and staff meetings with the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Another $25,000 is being allocated for general operating expenses.
Founded by Kornblum in 1984, Coffee House, which has published 275 fiction and poetry titles, of which 225 remain in print, had some lean years in the late '90s and early '00s. But by simultaneously cutting costs and increasing revenue streams through a greater focus on backlist and subsidiary rights sales, while bringing more business-savvy members onto its board, the press has succeeded in operating in the black since 2004 , after eight consecutive years of recording deficits. Its annual budget has grown in the past five years from $500,000 to a projected $850,000 for fiscal year 2009.
The press ended its 2008 fiscal year June 30 with $500,000 in gross revenues.
Key aspects of Coffee House's strategic planning are general staff development and a leadership transition. Coffee House intends to add a full-time development director to the staff in fall 2009, to build up donated income streams, and a full-time editorial assistant in fall 2011 to take on what Kornblum calls the “nuts and bolts” of moving manuscripts through the production process, thus allowing both Kornblum and senior editor Chris Fischbach to assume new responsibilities at the press. Fischbach, 35, who began as an editorial intern in 1994, will be named publisher in 2012, while Kornblum scales back his workload. Kornblum, 59, broke into publishing by producing a mimeographed poetry magazine in Iowa City in 1970. Over the next decade, he intends to get back into acquisitions and development before retiring in 2020.
“My original plan was to go until I was ready to drop,” Kornblum admits, “but I want to make sure that the authors who have turned over their entire careers to Coffee House don't wake up one day and find I've keeled over, there's no succession plan in place, and their work is in danger of going out of print.”
Kornblum says that 90% of the poetry books published in the U.S. each year are from independent publishers. “If any of those presses were to go under, a substantial portion of our literary heritage would become unavailable. I want to turn Coffee House into a financially stable organization that'll be able to give assurances that the books we're producing will endure.”
