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| Black Heron Press by Scott C. Davis |
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I met Jerome Gold in October 1988. Jerry was a novelist who had a pile of unpublished manuscripts, including a Vietnam war novel that he called The Negligence of Death. While the rest of us were slogging our manuscripts around New York and whining the whole time, Jerry had taken action: he founded Black Heron Press. | |
| In 1984 Jerry had been broke and
in graduate school and without any visible means of support. A good time to start a
publishing company, Jerry decided. So he teamed up with Les Galloway, an older writer
whose unpublished novel, Forty Fathom Bank, was a fantastic piece of writing. Jerry
and Les scraped together a few shekels. But what of the technical complexities involved in
book production? That’s where Everett D. Greimann came in. In 1969 Greimann had opened Bozotronics on North 36th in Fremont (in Seattle). Bozotronics specialized in the repair of amps, sound systems, electronic keyboards, and guitars. Its logo, painted ten-feet high in green on the side of the building, featured a big, shaggy, dog-pound dog panting out from beneath a tag that read: "Bozo." In 1979 Greimann bought an Itek quadratek photo typesetter—one of the first computerized typesetting machines—and set up Dataprose as a separate business upstairs from Bozotronics. Greimann supported himself with commercial work and then made his expertise available to local poets and novelists at cut rates. Fremont in those years was a haven for artists, slowly aging hippies, drugsters, and penniless poets who hung out at the Still Life in Fremont coffee house and at Yak’s deli where you could get a pile of teriyaki chicken on rice for a dollar. In 1984 Jerry did not have a desktop publishing system, but he had Everett. And Everett did more than typeset: he guided the young publisher through the shoals of book production, advised him on printers, paper, artwork. Contemporary desktop publishers, looking back, may regard this as a golden era. Now that desktop publishers all have PageMaker, FreeHand, and Photoshop, paradise is lost. (We can do it all—by ourselves, at home, at night. So we never get any sleep.) Four years later Jerry was working for the Census Bureau, counting houses and people. The other sixteen hours of his day were divied up minute by minute, each parcel of time devoted to a publishing task or reserved for those few, inescapable lost hours that human beings must devote to eating, sleeping, and commuting to work. Jerry’s was an incredible regimen which he kept up week after week for years at a time. The results: in seven years Jerry published twelve books, including Infra by Seattle writer Ron Dakron and a historical novel about the English peasant revolt: The Confession of Jack Straw by Simone Zelitch. By 1994 Black Heron Press had achieved one "bestseller": When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man by Robert Gordon. Their latest release is Charlie and the Children a novel by Joanna C. Scott about an American soldier held captive by Viet Cong children. Now that the grassroots publishing movement is exploding, and Jerome Gold is looking more and more like a man who was ahead of his time. |
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Jerome
Gold's own novel, Sergeant
Dickinson, |
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