Word: sparrows
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Black Sparrow's first book was by a hard-drinking roustabout, Charles Bukowski. Says Martin: "He was the kind of guy that drank in sailors' bars, got into fights with everyone in the room and wound up drinking alone with everyone stretched out on the floor." Between bouts Bukowski wrote terse, explicit poetry and fiction in the self-advertising style of Henry Miller ("The young coeds came up with their hot young bodies and their pilot- light eyes . . ."). Martin offered to pay the author $100 a month if he would quit his postal worker's job and work full time...
...called At Terror Street and Agony Way, and the account of a disorderly life in Los Angeles launched two careers: Bukowski's and Black Sparrow's. Since then Bukowski has produced 15 books. None have been American hits, but many have been best sellers in Europe. More than a million copies of his works are in print in at least a dozen languages; they account for about 40% of Black Sparrow's $750,000 sales volume...
Bukowski is typical of the outsider author Martin tends to favor. John Fante, a neglected proletarian novelist and screenwriter, was rescued from obscurity by Black Sparrow in the last years of his life. His reissued novels, Ask the Dust and Dreams from Bunker Hill, sold more than 10,000 copies each. Martin's current favorite is the late Wyndham Lewis, a novelist and critic whose work, & said T.S. Eliot, combined "the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave man." Lewis also dabbled in art. To Poet Edith Sitwell, his pictures seemed "to have been painted...
...Black Sparrow's reprints of Lewis' iconoclastic works, like the magazine Blast (1914 and 1915) and the autobiographical Rude Assignment, were illustrated with Lewis' adrenal scrawls and became another profitable venture. Deliberately bold typefaces that varied wildly in size to emphasize certain words, according to the author's wishes, as well as surreal pronouncements ("A picture of a man either is or is not") exerted an appeal on college audiences: more than 50,000 copies of Lewisiana have been sold, and other volumes are on the way. "Lewis wrote 45 books," proclaims Martin. "And Black Sparrow has reprint rights...
...that are successful and remainder everything else." And along the Pacific? "Out here we put out our lists and stick with them. We don't like to see anything go out of print." Like a practiced surveyor, he knows exactly where to draw the line: "What we and Black Sparrow and North Point offer has perhaps less to do with geography than philosophy. Ten years ago, the East published the book, but we live it: Small Is Beautiful...