Godine at Forty : A Retrospective of Four Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher

by Godine, David R.

• ISBN13: 9781567924091
• ISBN10: 1567924093
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-01
• Publisher: David R Godine Pub

Summary

Forty years ago, a few college graduates set up shop in an abandoned cow barn. They were in their early twenties, had some experience in printing and none in publishing. Over the next four decades, they gradually acquired enough experience to produce a good number of respectable books, all of them grounded in the original and largely intact ambition to publish books that mattered for people who cared. In this overview, the publisher has selected and described two hundred titles that made a difference. It includes the first American editions of such acclaimed authors as John Banville, Richard Rodriguez, Andre Dubus, and Georges Perec. It features lists of the house's specialties: children's books, with authors and illustrators as diverse as Mary Azarian, Barbara McClintock, Andrea Wisnewski, Edward Ardizzone, and Daniel C. Beard. It selects the best books from the various series: the Nonpareil list that reprinted the work of Donald Hall, Will Cuppy, and Ludwig Bemelmans, among others; the Verba Mundi series, which introduced American readers to classics of foreign literature by Dino Buzzati, Robert Musil, Patrick Modiano, José Donoso, and J.M.G.Le Clézio. It highlights the company's strengths: the first photography books of Arnold Newman, Joyce Tenneson, Rosamond Purcell, Sally Mann, Paul Caponigro, and George Tice; and it reconfirms its fascination with authors exploring the shapes of letters and the design and history of the printed word. Here is a panorama of four decades of careful, concentrated, and diverse work by one of this country's last remaining independent publishers.