January 2024 – The Great Gray Bridge

Bookcase in my home office

I established my company, Philip Turner Book Productions, in January 2009, fifteen years ago this month. It was the nadir of the Great Recession, only weeks after I’d been laid off in a big publisher’s downsizing; it turned out to be the last corporate house I would work for, an experience I wrote about in 2012. With that founding period in mind, I like to use the first month of each new year to take stock of the annum just ended, and try to set a course for the new one. In 2020, my adult son Ewan Turner began working in the business with me, and we had lots of new activity, so I had occasion to write full-length summaries of 2021 and 2022 which I published on this website and shared in my social networks.

This year, however, I’ve reached the end of January without having prepared a similar summary. I just haven’t been inclined to go through the strenuous effort of a full-form look-back at 2023, not with the future rushing in. And the new year in business has gotten off a flying start, so I’ve had little time to blog. In addition to new work quickly cropping up, I’ve undertaken an interesting assignment. I’m serving as a juror for the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, sponsored by the Columbia Graduate Journalism School. Our shortlists will be announced in late February, and a public event for finalists and awardees will be held later, in the spring. At the moment, I’m reading intensively back and forth among approximately 100 projects that are candidates for recognition. The Lukas Prize has three categories, all in nonfiction, as you can see on their website. It’s a very rewarding experience so far, and I’m enjoying working with some new colleagues.

I’ll close this post by sharing the covers of current books by authors we represent in the literary agency portion of our business, either recently published, or soon
to be out in 2024. Ewan and I are hoping to do more good work this year.

: Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater, Gail Merrifield Papp, Applause Theater and Cinema Books, October 2023

: The Needle and the Lens, Nate Patrin, Univ. of MN Press, Oct 2023, nominated for the Minnesota Book Award

: Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, John Webb, Potomac Books, Oct 2023

: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World, Ray Boomhower, Univ. of New Mexico Press, March 2024

: How Midsummer Night: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss, Janet Somerville, OPen Road, April 2024

: The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia, Amy Knight, Northern Illinois/Cornell Univ. Press, May 15, 2024

As readers of this blog may recall, I’ve been a fan of blues music since my teens in Cleveland, when I began listening to the local legend Mr Stress, whose eponymous band played at area venues for many years. I contributed an essay about him to the Cleveland Anthology from Belt Publishing in 2011, “Remembering Mr Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern.” I was excited recently to hear about the new book, Deep Inside the Blues: Photographs and Interviews by Margo Cooper, a historian and photographer who’s contributed to the NY Times Lens blog, and to receive a copy of her new book from the University Press of Mississippi.

In a lengthy Foreword, William Ferris, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, writes “These interviews deftly unlock and reveal the soul of a people and their music. These voices have hypnotic powers as they speak. Cooper focused on their rich language in her interviews and tried to capture “not only the exact content of what the musicians had to say, but the way they said it, their emotions, the rhythm of their speech, which was its own music. I began to see the possibilities of a deeper kind of blues story.”

I’ve only just begun to dig into this exceptional book, and know I’ll get a lot of enjoyment it in the weeks and months to come. Below is a gallery of some more shots of the book, the back cover, and interior shots of Earnest Roy, Jr. and Anthony Sherrod; Billy Boy Arnold; Bo Diddley, Arnold’s mentor; and Pinetop Perkins, who played with Muddy Waters; and the author/photographer, Margo Cooper.