Posts Tagged ‘Steve Wasserman’

The story of small publishing houses in today’s world often aren’t happy ones. Here’s the story of one that is.

I know Malcolm Margolin, the legendary founder of the valiant publishing house, Heyday Books in Berkeley. I know his successor, Steve Wasserman, even better. I wrote for Steve when he was the editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books when it was the best newspaper in the nation. And now I’ve published with Heyday – well, I wrote about that here and here. Czesław Miłosz: A California LIfe is now a reality, and about to appear with Kraków’s Znak, the Polish poet’s favored publisher. I’ll be writing from Kraków as that event happens next month.

This, however, is the story of Heyday. Here’s an excerpt from Joanne Furio‘s article in Berkeleyside. Read the whole thing here:

In November 2016, four months after becoming the publisher of Heyday books, the independent, alternative press Malcolm Margolin founded in Berkeley in 1974, Steve Wasserman faced what he described as “a major hiccup.” The nonprofit imprint was  $250,000 in the red and couldn’t pay salaries. There were few options, including the possibility of closing up shop. 

“We had to really look at each other and say, maybe we could throw a 40th anniversary wake and celebrate the achievements that were made during the first four decades of Heyday,” he said. “On the other hand, if you look at the sweat equity that was put into the place over those 40 years, maybe there was something worth nurturing and a path forward.”

The staff chose a path forward. As Wasserman put it, everyone — himself included — cinched their belts and took a temporary pay cut. The 15-member staff was also reduced by a third. 

“Fortunately, the business rebounded,” he said. “We put our house in order, and now we are thriving. We’re in the best fiscal position we’ve ever enjoyed in 50 years.”

***

Heyday’s occupied a few rented offices around Berkeley over the years and is now in a ground-floor suite of a newish apartment building at 1808 San Pablo Avenue in Northwest Berkeley. Some 20,000 books belonging to Wasserman line the walls, practically from floor to ceiling. Storing the books in the Heyday offices, where employees had access to them, was a condition of his hiring and seen as a win-win for both. Wasserman’s been hauling them around the country for years. 

For Wasserman, returning to Berkeley closed a circle. He went to Berkeley High and UC Berkeley and has returned to the North Shattuck neighborhood he grew up in. He joked that his hometown has become “the La Brea Tar Pits of the counterculture,” which he also played a role in. 

At Garfield Junior High (now King Middle School), he organized the first demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965. In 1968, he co-led a successful student strike there that founded the first Black history and studies department at an American high school. In 1969, he organized a sleep-in to protest the military occupation of Berkeley, a.k.a. People’s Park. 

***

Wasserman had known Margolin for years when he learned of the opening and called him. “‘Why would you want to leave the New York big-time to work at Heyday, this farshtunken publisher in Berkeley?’” Wasserman recounted, providing the translation for the Yiddish word farshtunken, which means “stinking.” 

“‘After all,’ he said, both flattering me and slightly insulting me, ‘you’re a big-time New York publisher. Why would you want to waste your time?’” Wasserman said. “I said, “What do you think big-time New York publishers do? They do the same thing you do. They look for good ideas and for fresh, original voices. The scale is different, the work is the same.” 

Wasserman sees his role as a steward to safeguard Heyday’s editorial and publishing program in a fiscally responsible way that honors the DNA of its founder as he helps write its second chapter — in his own way. 

“While Malcolm’s shoes are singular,” he said, “I walk in my own shoes.”

Since taking the helm, Wasserman has stabilized Heyday’s balance sheet and expanded its stable of writers to include the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley. “We’re expanding in every realm,” he said. 

Under Wassermann’s stewardship, Heyday’s no longer in the red and has managed to break even every year. Each year, the imprint has raised about $1 million, with sales revenue at just over $2 million. Sixty-five percent of its revenue comes from book sales, according to Heyday’s 2023 Annual Report. 

***

Recent books Wasserman has shepherded include Linda Rondstadt’s Feels Like Home (with Laurence Downes), Tony Platt’s The Scandal of Cal and Don Cox’s Making Revolution: My Life in the Black Panther Party.

In addition, Wasserman has recently tried on the hat of “author.” At the suggestion of staffers, he has collected his essays in a memoir titled Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if It’s a Lie, due out Oct. 8. The book is being blurbed by such literary heavyweights as Joyce Carol Oates and Vivian Gornick. 

He has also written, with Gayle Wattawa, Heyday’s general manager, the intro to the book Heyday at Fifty: Selected Writings from Five Decades of Independent California Publishing, coming out Aug. 13 to celebrate Heyday’s 50th anniversary. Gary Snyder, Jane Smiley, Ursula Pike, Greg Sarris and Susan Straight are among the contributors. 

Looking ahead, Wasserman is encouraged by Heyday’s prospects in an industry that appears to be rebounding from the gloom-and-doom predictions of a decade ago. He noted that more independent bookstores have opened up in the last five years, and e-book sales have declined. He admits that attention spans are shortening, and that remains a challenge, but books as we know them are not disappearing anytime soon. 

“Ultimately, I want to no longer be the best-kept literary secret in the state of California. I want us to be the principal independent publisher that would-be authors think about when they want to publish their books,” he said. “My ambition is that we become a magnetic pole that attracts to our side like iron filings writers of ambition and talent who yearn to be published by us. And I want to do that by continuing the bespoke tradition that has been so well established, which is part of our identity.” 

Again, read the whole thing at Berkeleyside here.

Another Look was launched in November 2012, with William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow. Now we celebrate our tenth anniversary with another wonderful and too-little-known book, Glenway Wescott‘s 1940 novella The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (NYRB Classics). The event will take place at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 5, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street, on the Stanford campus. The event will also be livestreamed. Come celebrate our tenth with us! 

Registration is encouraged, but walk-ins are always welcome. Register here – or on the QR code on the poster below.

The Book

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story traces a single afternoon in a French country house during the 1920s. Alwyn Tower, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside Paris when a well-heeled Irish couple drops in — with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence. Lunch is prepared, drink flows, and the story that unfolds is both harrowing and farcical.

Novelist Michael Cunningham in his introduction calls the book “murderously precise and succinct.” Critic and author Susan Sontag said, “The ever-astonishing Pilgrim Hawk belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view.”

The Panelists

The panelists will include a special guest, Steve Wasserman, former book editor at the Los Angeles Times Book Review and editor at large for the Yale University Press, and now publisher of Heyday Books in Berkeley. Other panelists will include: Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books; Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers, a founding director of Another Look, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Author Cynthia L. Haven, a National Endowment for the Humanities public scholar, will round out the panel.

The Venue

Some of you may remember that Levinthal Hall is where Another Look began a decade ago. You’re right! Our audience attendance outgrew that venue in 2015, and we moved to a larger space. However, now we are offering virtual as well as in-person attendance, which allows us to return to our former home. We will announce how to register for the virtual event in our next email, as we are still finalizing arrangements.

Parking

Metered parking spaces are available along Santa Teresa Street. Parking is free after 4 p.m. Free parking is also available on the lot adjacent to the Stanford Humanities Center after 4 p.m.

How to get the book

Books are available at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park (650-324-4321) and Books Inc. at Town & Country in Palo Alto (650-321-0600). We’d recommend calling first to make sure a book is waiting for you. Books are also available at Amazon and at Abebooks. If all else fails, you can order directly from the publisher here.

Our October 5 event is sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

When Steve Wasserman, who now heads Heyday Books in Berkeley, left New York City to head the Los Angeles Times Book Review, author Joan Didion gave him some advice. Over a dinner at Elio’s on the Upper East Side, he recalls, “Joan gripped my forearm with steel in her fingers, and said: ‘Just review the good books.’ I laughed, and she said, ‘No, I mean something quite specific: Just because a writer lives in zip code 90210 doesn’t mean you have to pay attention. If the work is good, of course, but if it’s second-rate, or worse, don’t give it the time of day. To do otherwise is a formula for mediocrity, for the provincialization of the Review.‘”

Joan Didion died today of Parkinson’s Disease. She was the author of a score of books, including Slouching Towards Bethelehem in 1968. She won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking. Steve wrote an appreciation of her at the San Francisco Examiner here. An excerpt:

“Joan’s death at age 87 leaves a gaping hole in the landscape of California letters. There really was no one like her. She was, in a way, the least Californian of our state’s writers, if by ‘Californian’ we mean ever-sunny, full of optimism, wed to the conceit that history is weightless. Didion cast an unsparing eye on everything she examined. Her aesthetic, perhaps shaped as much by her early stint as a writer for William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative National Review as it was by the dessiccated temperament of her Yankee forebears, was chilly, unforgiving, hard. She reminded one nothing so much as Chauncey Gardiner, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There, who liked ‘to watch.’”

“She was always the consummate spectator, refusing to taint her stories with any personal intervention,” he wrote. “And yet, and yet. For all her enviable craftsmanship and her gimlet eye, Joan’s work often risked ethical failure. She was so good that often her readers didn’t tumble to the sleight-of-hand that was baked into the DNA of her peerless sentences. The pixie dust she cast on the subjects she covered was dazzling, so much so that you often found yourself succumbing to the spell of her style, much as a genius cinematographer stacks the deck by shooting wonderfully and compellingly composed pictures. When the movie ends, you find yourself unable to look at the world — at least for a time — in any other way. Joan’s style was pitch-perfect. The framing was always impeccable and her skill so good that you tended not even to notice that she’d had her thumb on the scale. She often mistook her own sensibility for a general condition. The Wall Street Journal got it right when a review of her book on the atrocities of El Salvador was headlined: ‘A Migraine in Search of a Revolution.”

“Joan was something of a forensic writer, looking askance at the foibles of people, unrivaled in her understanding of the use and abuse of the English language. No one was better at deconstructing the syntax of power inherent in bureaucratic idiom. She understood with exemplary acuity how entire ideologies are concealed in the warp and woof of everyday language. She knew the devil was in the details. Almost every piece she wrote is an autopsy of the mentalities that have shaped American culture. Unusual for a writer who started out as a supporter of Barry Goldwater, Didion drifted leftward, always wanting, as she once remarked admiringly of former Ramparts editor Robert Scheer’s journalism, to know who does the screwing and who gets screwed.”

Read the rest here.

Corinne Segal profiles Heyday Books in the current LitHub, in a look at California’s independent publishing scene. I have reason to be grateful. Berkeley’s Heyday is now my publisher, too. Czesław Miłosz: A California Life will be out in a week or so. It’s a Q&A not only with Steve, but several of his staffers, too – Emmerich Anklam, Kalie Caetano, Marthine Satris, Gayle Wattawa. And all of them have a lot to say.

Segal writes: “When Heyday Books, an independent press founded in Berkeley in 1974, approached publisher Steve Wasserman with a job offer, ‘I still had the scent of night jasmine and a wee bit of the old Berkeley tear gas in my nostrils,’ as he recounted to UC Berkeley’s Linda Kinstler in an interview last year. It led him back to the city where he had grown up and taken part in some of the most important civic demonstrations of its past, including, notably, the movement to build People’s Park in 1969—and to an important addition to the independent publishing scene of the Bay Area.

Why did Steve, then editor at large for Yale University Press, make the move? We’ve already written about that here. Steve, of course, can speak for himself (we’ve written about his words about the current publishing scene here), but here’s what he says on this occasion:

“A lack of bureaucracy and freedom from corporate pressures are chief among the pleasures to be derived from independent status. Still, all of us—no matter where we find ourselves in the ecology of publishing—must endeavor to cultivate the means and nimbleness to cut through the noise of the culture and gain attention for deserving work. Curiously, though independent presses are often resource-poor, we are rich in imagination and this is a huge benefit and, indeed, an advantage.”

Asked what particular projects he’s jazzed about, he was kind enough to mention my own humble labors: “We have a few soon-to-debut fall titles that we’re excited to launch in the coming weeks, including Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, a book that explores the times and outlook of the Nobel Prize-winning poet who survived the bombing of Warsaw in World War II before embarking on a four-decade long exile as a California ex-pat. Author Cynthia Haven, who knew the poet personally, offers an account of his work and worldview that reveals how eerily prescient his insights continue to be, especially in light of the catastrophism of our times—from politics to climate breakdown.”

Read the whole thing over at LitHub here.

It’s a pleasure, always, to have a guest piece from my former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor … whoops! now he’s head of Heyday Books and my very own publisher … Steve Wasserman. Here’s what he wrote remembering the occasion of the 1979 death of the eminent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author Jean Renoir.

Here’s the story of how the Los Angeles Times finagled an obituary from Orson Welles.

My old friend Peter Biskind, Hollywood historian extraordinaire, has rescued from Henry Jaglom‘s jumbled closet the hours upon hours of table-talk Jaglom recorded during his years of lunches with Orson Welles. As I hoovered up these edited transcripts of the higher gossip, I thought fondly of my own encounter with Welles – an encounter that would lead to irregular meals (and something of a friendship) with the great man at his favored table at “Ma Maison.”

The story begins with the death of Jean Renoir in Beverly Hills in early 1979. I was then deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion section. The Times, in its infinite wisdom, had consigned news of Renoir’s demise to an AP wire story buried on page nineteen of the Sunday paper. I was beside myself with unhappiness. Here was one of the great directors of the twentieth century, dying in our backyard, as it were, banished to an ignominious squib on the paper’s inside pages instead of being ballyhooed prominently on the front page.

The honor of the paper was at stake, I felt. We needed to act immediately to commission a proper piece, honoring Renoir’s life and legacy, to publish in the next Sunday’s paper. Only Orson Welles, I felt, could do right by Renoir. But how to contact him? I knew only that Welles made a habit of eating lunch every Wednesday at “Ma Maison,” but I would need his piece, should he agree to write it, by Wednesday, or Thursday at latest, in order to make the Sunday paper. I remembered that Welles had some years before been the voice of the Paul Masson Winery, intoning “no wine before its time.” I called the winery and was referred to an ad agency in New York and was, in turn, given the name of Welles’s Manhattan agent. I rang and explained my purpose.

“So you want to reach Orson Welles, do you? Well, a lot of people want to reach him. Listen, kid, here’s what I’ll do. I’m gonna give you his office number. It’s a local number. Area code two-one-three. You’re unlikely to reach him, but if you do, will you do me a favor? Will you tell him to call his agent, for cryin’ out loud?”

I dialed the number. It rang and rang and rang. Finally, the receiver was slowly lifted off its cradle and what can only be described as an extraordinarily fey voice drawled hello. It was Welles’s assistant. I asked to speak to Welles. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Welles isn’t in.” “Do you expect him back soon?” “I do not know when he’ll be back. You see, Mr. Welles almost never comes in.” “Might I leave a message?” “Yes, if you must,” the voice said in tones of great exasperation. “But do understand that when Mr. Welles deigns to come into this office, he very often sees the stack of messages piled high on the desk and he sweeps them to the floor.”

The next morning, I got to work early. Already at my desk was my boss, Anthony Day, editor of the paper’s editorial pages. He was clutching my phone. “Yes, yes. I see him now, just coming in.” Cupping the receiver, he looked at me and stammered, “Steve, it’s. . .it’s Orson Welles. For you!”

I got on the horn and heard, in his inimitable voice, “Mr. Wasserman, this is Orson Welles. I did not know until I received your kind message that my great and good friend, Jean Renoir, had passed away. What, pray tell, would you have me do?”

I told him of the embarrassing and all but invisible notice that Renoir’s death had occasioned in the paper and that we had an obligation to do what we could to remove the stain of shame. Would he write a piece?

“How long? How about two-hundred-fifty words?” he offered. Given the length of Renoir’s life and his considerable achievement, I said a thousand might be better.

“Let’s split the difference and agree to five hundred.”

As for deadline. . .he boomed, “I know, I know: You needed it yesterday.”

“For you, Mr. Welles, the day after tomorrow would be fine.”

As for compensation … he cut me off: “Let us not sully art with talk of money. I count on you to do the right thing. You will do that, won’t you?”

I said I’d do my level best.

Wednesday came and went. No piece. We were keeping space open on the front page of the Opinion section. By noon on Thursday, we began to sweat. My phone rang. It was Gus, the paper’s receptionist-cum-security guard who manned the front desk in the paper’s art deco lobby, worthy of The Daily Planet, at the center of which slowly revolved a globe boasting national boundaries not redrawn since the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A man saying he was from Mr. Welles’s office was waiting for me.

I hurried down. And there, greeting me, was an apparition straight out of Sunset Boulevard. A man, kitted out in livery, replete with leather driving gloves, handed me a manila envelope, bearing Welles’s piece.

As I walked slowly up the stairs to my second-floor office, I read what Welles had written. It wasn’t five hundred words; it was nine pages, 2,000 words, typed double-spaced on an Underwood Five typewriter, and edited in Welles’ hand with a blue felt tip pen, the last page of which bore his signature. Every sentence had oxygen in it. The lede was unforgettable: “For the high and mighty of the movies a Renoir on the wall is the equivalent of a Rolls Royce in the garage. Nothing like the same status was accorded the other Renoir who lived in Hollywood and who died here last week.”

The essay was perfect, all about the uneasy intersection of art and commerce and, as I read it, I realized it was, of course, as much about Welles himself as it was about Renoir. It was about the trials and tribulations of neglected genius. It was, in a way, a kind of manifesto, a credo of artistic aspiration and principle.

The ending, too, was a doozy: “I have not spoken here of the man who I was proud to count as a friend. His friends were without number and we all loved him as Shakespeare was loved, ‘this side idolatry.’ Let’s give him the last word: ‘To the question “Is the cinema an art?” my answer is “What does it matter?. . .You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix. . .Art is ‘making.’ The art of love is the art of making love. . .My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.'”

There was nothing to edit. Only to publish it as written. It was the last piece Welles ever wrote. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 18, 1979. I kept the signed original manuscript. It is among my most treasured possessions. That and the memory of the meals we later shared in the years before his death in 1985.

Six years ago we wrote about Berkeley publisher Steve Wasserman of Heyday Books and his suggestions for the Eros of Difficulty. Here is an addendum, in his own words:

When I ran the Los Angeles Times Book Review (1996-2005) I was temperamentally allergic to the notion, widespread in the newsroom, that the paper must reflect the alleged interests of its readers.

That notion, in the digital age, has now achieved a kind of hegemony. It’s the metric that rules. The underlying presumption is that the paper (or now website) must act as a “mirror” reflecting readers’ “interests,” otherwise the paper risked being “out of touch.” Only in this way, it was argued, could the bond between readers and the paper be strengthened. I thought then – and think now – this was exactly wrong. Rather, a better analogy would be the telescope, which when looked through one end makes near things appear distant, thus throwing them into sharp relief and providing a useful and unsuspected perspective. Or, alternatively, turned around and looked through at the other end makes faraway things appear closer, thus giving us an opportunity to see afresh things that otherwise might escape our attention. I felt it was important to spurn the faux populism of the marketplace. I sought to honor what Mary Lou Williams, the jazz pianist and composer, said about her obligation to her audience and her art: “I … keep a little ahead of them, like a mirror that shows what will happen next.”

I wanted to give readers the news that stays news. Of course, ideally I wanted what Otis Chandler in his heyday had wanted: mass and class. But if it came down to a choice between the two, I knew I’d go for class every time. In literary affairs, I was always a closet Leninist: Better fewer, but better. Today, my friend, the brilliant and resourceful Rochelle Gurstein, sent me a lovely quote from Ernst Gombrich (writing in his 1969 essay “Art and Self-Transcendence”), which had I known it, I would have emblazoned it on the door to my office: “This parrot cry of relevance seems to me total nonsense. … The egocentric provincialism of people who so lack the capacity for self-transcendence that they can only listen to what touches their own individual problems threatens us with such intellectual impoverishment that we must resist at all costs.”

Some weeks ago, Rochelle had plucked from Joshua Reynolds‘s farewell discourses on art, this gem. Reynolds, taking his leave from the Academy of Art he’d founded, surprised his audience (and later readers, as Rochelle wrote to me) by offering Michelangelo as the greatest artist and the one students ought to take as their exemplar over Raphael whose virtues he had been at pains to praise in the preceding fourteen lectures. Now, Reynolds tells his audience, “We are on no account to expect that fine things should descend to us; our taste, if possible, must be made to ascend to them.” Against those who believe they can trust their first impressions, Reynolds insists, “As [Michelangelo’s] great style itself is artificial in the highest degree, it presupposes in the spectator, a cultivated and prepared artificial state of mind. It is an absurdity therefore to suppose that we are born with this taste, though we are with the seeds of it, which, by the heat and kindly influence of his genius, may be ripened in us.”