The Independent Publisher Book Awards just announced the 2010 Outstanding Books of the Year. These are special awards recognizing the daring spirit of independent authors and publishers. This year we at my publishing company, Welcome Books, are again included.
Give It All, Give It Now (Welcome Books, $19.95) by Annie Dillard, Illustrated by Sam Fink, with an introduction by Susan Cheever, has taken the GOLD for Outstanding Design.
Every great outcome begins somewhere and, in this case, it began with Sam's trip to his local library in Great Neck the summer of 2008 where he borrowed a copy of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life (Harper Perennial, 1990, pb, $11.99) to read. The life force and eloquence resonated so deeply that he also found his next project in one hundred and nineteen of her words. He wanted to do something original, something special... and he wanted to do it for her. He wanted to pay homage to Dillard's passion and her truth and so he began painting and planning the calligraphy, how they would sequence, how he would call attention to them. He placed those 119 words so that they simply ran across the middle of each painting and continued, in a straight line, to the next. Almost thirty-five feet in length, six months later they lay across our floor. Never mind that he had his ninetieth birthday in 2006, he had kept this work to himself for almost seven months and when he arrived, he was overflowing. He couldn't talk fast enough. "Annie Dillard's words are a song for everybody," he said, "no matter what work one does. As long as you love your work, 'shoot it, play it, lose it,' applies."
We knew immediately that we wanted to publish but also knew that Annie was published by HarperCollins and we were distributed by Random House, a significant competitor. We had to find Annie before trying to clear rights. When we found her, it didn't take two minutes for her to say yes. HarperCollins was neither cheap nor quick but we got our clearances. Now, the biggest hurdle was figuring out how to format it. How were we to physically publish? We couldn't cram those running sentences into a gutter--the part of the page that gets lost in the binding. Clark Wakabayashi, my partner (and designer) and I were at a loss until Katrina Fried, our Associate Publisher, walked by, looked and said "accordion book." Obviously, this was the answer. It eliminated the problem. We had done it before, for Richard Avedon's book for his Met show. We knew who could print it and who could bind it. We knew it would require a slipcase. We knew that when you folded out the pages, it could occupy a wall in a corridor or a bulletin board in an English teacher's classroom. We loved the idea that it was a book and a work of art and a "call to action" that could be as at home in a bookcase or on a wall.
Annie's energy had fueled Sam. Sam's energy had fueled us and that energy then moved out to our vice president Paige Peterson who sent it to Susan Cheever and she delivered our introduction. How I love the creative process. How I love the collaboration. How I love Sam's desire to reach out to Annie and Annie's to reach back. And, how I love it when it all comes together with a resounding GIVE IT ALL and GIVE IT NOW, not because there won't be any later but because if you give it now, there will always be more later! Our second award was for Slow: Life In a Tuscan Town. It brought us SILVER for Best Gift Book of the Year. I wrote about it on HuffPost last November.
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I'm off to give it now, and later. Thanks.
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