Two book companies that I for many years owned and managed, Chicago Review Press (CRP) and Independent Publishers Group (IPG), have both recently celebrated their 50th year in business. CRP is the small press that I started from scratch. In its first year, it published three books. When I acquired IPG, it was a collection of six small publishers gathered for the purpose of selling, warehousing, shipping, marketing, and accounting the books they published. IPG is now the parent company of all the various publishing programs we have initiated or acquired over the years. 

To my astonishment, the total sales of all the divisions of IPG are now over $100 million a year. This made me a pretty big fish in the small pond of small press books. I was also for a few years the president of IBPA (then called PMA) and hugely benefited from my association with Jan Nathan, the legendary founder of that association. I am now retired, but people in the book business still sometimes ask me how a company with such small beginnings could grow to such a size in the stodgy, slow-moving industry of book publishing. Did I have a “secret sauce” or know some “tricks of the trade”? What follows is an attempt to answer that question. 

Denison University

I have to start by telling some stories about how my formal education influenced my publishing career. After an uneventful time at a prep school near Detroit, I attended Denison University, a small liberal arts college in Ohio. Most of the professors there were quite good, but in my junior year, a very second-rate sociology professor, who was also a national officer of the fraternity to which I belonged, made the following argument in a newsletter that was sent to our fraternity house. Fraternities, he argued, must have the ability to choose who they want to have as members. Any right that is not frequently exercised will soon be lost. Therefore, our fraternity must continue to exclude Black men as it had from its inception. 

At Denison, there was a sort of unofficial newspaper written and passed around by students. For this publication, I composed a rebuttal to the professor’s argument: “This professor,” I said, “is either a racist or a fool, or probably both. He therefore has no business being a member of the Denison faculty and must be terminated immediately.” My little essay caused a very satisfying bruhaha among the Denison students and faculty. On one side were some students and professors outraged that a mere student like me could dare to suggest that a professor should be fired; or else that it was just bad manners to pick on this old guy. The other camp agreed with me that the professor had to be canned. 

I went to the head of student/faculty relations with my essay and a copy of the fraternity bylaws, which flatly stated that it must never admit any Black person as a member. “Oh dear,” he said. “I will have to bring this matter to the attention of the president of the university.” The president looked at my documents and immediately sent a letter to the national head of my fraternity with an unequivocal message: If the fraternity did not immediately strike out of its bylaws that racist provision, it would be summarily booted off the campus. 

The fraternity did remove the racist provision for Denison and also for all of the rest of its college and university chapters nationwide. The racist sociology professor, however, was not terminated. He had tenure. But a few years later, Denison got rid of all its fraternities and began a steady progress toward becoming a far better school. I like to think I had something to do with that transition. My little essay was my first publication. Its outsized effect demonstrated to me the power of the printed word. 

At Denison I had a mentor who encouraged me to become a professor of English literature. Instead of taking the regular English major classes, I met with him once a week to discuss papers I wrote for him. He was a very tough critic of my work, but by my junior year he also began discussing with me articles that he was working on, and getting published, in major literary journals. Often our discussions had to do with how to write with a particular audience in mind, and how to induce the editors of literary journals to publish your work.

In retrospect, these conversations seem to me to have been crucial to my future success in book publishing. To get a bookstore to stock one of your titles, you have to grasp how booksellers match the various literary genres with what they know about the preconceptions and tastes of their customers. You should only publish books by authors who really understand the mentality of the audience they are writing for.

Here is an example of how that process can work. Many decades ago, Chicago Review Press received a proposal for a book titled Outwitting Squirrels. I instantly decided to publish that book without even glancing at the rest of the proposal. How could I do that?

I grew up in the suburbs and knew there were really only two subjects that neighbors discussed over the back fence: the deficiencies of the local schools and how to keep squirrels out of your bird feeder. The tone of the discussion about the schools was very serious. The tone of the squirrel discussion, however, was wry, bemused, humorous. I could tell at a glance from the author’s proposed title that he knew his audience: The word “Outwitting” was just right. I suggested to the author the addition of a ridiculous subtitle to make the tone of the book utterly clear to its prospective readers: 101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Bird Feeder by Squirrels. This book has sold millions of copies and is still a bestseller for Chicago Review Press.

University of Chicago

With my Denison mentor’s help, I was admitted to the PhD program at the University of Chicago. My father, who owned and operated a Chevrolet dealership, hated the idea of my becoming a college professor; that is, an egghead. However, when he found out I had somehow wangled a full scholarship, including the cost of all my courses and books, and all my living expenses, for the entire PhD program—funded by, of all places, the Ford Foundation—he decided that perhaps I was onto something.

The University of Chicago is a very high-powered intellectual place. The graduate literature courses I took there were often taught by scholars at the top of their various fields. I wrote many long and complicated essays about great literary works and then a dissertation on Emily Dickinson. I finally passed my orals and defended my dissertation.

All this hard intellectual work must have done me some good, but by far the part of my experience at U of C that was most essential to my career in publishing was my involvement with the Chicago Review Magazine. This was a small circulation, but in its day a very influential literary publication. It was supported financially by the University of Chicago but run entirely by graduate students. The Chicago Review was the first place the Beat poets turned up, and it also published, to the horror of the literary establishment, wild and crazy books like Naked Lunch.

After working with the magazine for about a year, I was appointed poetry editor and gathered around me 10 students who met at my place each week to decide which of the hundreds of submitted poems we should accept for publication. This process turned the usual graduate school approach to literature on its head. Instead of learning how to praise and explicate the great works in the literary canon, we had to decide on our own what was good writing and what was not. 

In the two years that I edited the Chicago Review, we published many poets who subsequently became very well known. I am sure my experience as the editor of this magazine had more to do with my success in book publishing than did all my PhD training. But then again, I don’t want to underestimate the power of my exposure to Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Here is a terrific little poem by her that may have planted a seed:

A word is dead           

When it is said,

Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

That day.

In the next part of this article, I will delve into my time at Northwestern University teaching in the English department, my first published book, the early years of Chicago Review Press, and my sidestep into real estate.

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