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Catalogue #: 411
ISBN: 0-930773-41-1  paper $22.95

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Author's Bio
Jerome gold is a novelist and essayist based in Seattle. His novels include The Negligence of Death and The Prisoner's Son. He serves as publisher of Black Heron Press.

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Bookseller's Note
A profile of Jerome Gold (taken from An Ear to the Ground):

I met Jerome Gold in October 1988. I had gotten a call from Stephanie (a woman who, several years later, would emerge as the dramatist S.P. Miskowski). Stephanie was editing an issue of Seattle's Literary Center Quarterly (later called Upstream) and wanted me to write a profile of Jerry Gold. What had Jerry done that was so special? Jerry was a novelist who had a pile of unpublished manuscripts, including a Vietnam war novel that he called The Negligence of Death.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 flogging 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 So he teamed up with Les Galloway, an older writer whose unpublished novel, Forty Fathom Bank, was a fantastic piece of writing.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. 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. And we have to keep pouring out thousands of dollars for upgrades each year. And we get edu-stress from forcing ourselves to learn printing presses, dot gain, screen angles, paper, ink, type, page design, Wlm, Iris prints, press match proofs, comps, separations, and all other manner of interesting, exhausting arcana.

Four years later Jerry was working for the Census Bureau, counting houses and people. The other sixteen hours of his day were divvied 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.

In March 1994 I got back in touch with Jerry. I had questions, he had answers: Cune Press was the result. By now Black Heron Press had achieved one "bestseller": When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man by Robert Gordon. Jerry was doing final edits on Publishing Lives-interviews with Northwest publishers, a hymnal for grassroots publishing. Jerry was working with children in an institution for juvenile felons. More satisfying work than his earlier gig, but one which left him exhausted. Hence the contradiction that is Jerry Gold: he'll talk to you for hours, giving all kinds of helpful advice, an Everett Griemann for our times. On another day Jerry will be clipped, inaccessible, rude: parceling out his time, facing hours of work with only minutes at his command, worried, probably a little panicked, definitely unavailable.

Since 1994 our nation's major presses have collapsed. By that I mean they largely have lost their ability to discern good writing that will appeal to the public and to edit it into shape - they have degenerated into distribution and marketing machines. Now large presses cruise regional bookfairs looking for self - published titles to snatch up. The grassroots publishing movement is exploding. And Jerome Gold is looking more and more like a man who was ahead of his time.

- Scott C. Davis

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