Remembering My Dad, Earl I. Turner, on Father’s Day 2022

/0 Comments/in , /by

My father, Earl I. Turner (Feb 7, 1918-July 8, 1992), was a dear man who showed me so much about being a kind and decent person. Here’s a letter he wrote for his three children on May 8, 1978, four days after we’d opened Undercover Books, our bookstore in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Jewish tradition embraces the idea that a parent may offer to their children what’s termed an “ethical will,” which is pretty much what he gave us here, with its discussion of ethics in business, while standing up for one’s self. The photograph was taken on a visit he made to the Canadian Rockies in 1982, a sightseeing journey that he gloried in. My own enjoyment of gorgeous scenic views was no doubt inspired by him. His handwriting and signature were very distinctive, and I’m always comforted when I see his script on something, as here. Thank you, Dad, gone thirty years, love for you always.

Read more

“Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005,” the Latest Addition to My CANRock Library

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Really excited to have my hands on a copy of HEARTS ON FIRE: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005 by Michael Barclay, the latest book in an ongoing series of in-depth histories of independent Canadian rock and folk music. It examines the rise of a couple dozen Canadian bands who broke lots of new artistic and sonic ground—and while sharing few commonalities apart from the fact they largely or partly hailed from Canada—put the Canadian music scene on the global map in a new way in the first decade of this millennium.

The bands and solo artists in the new book represent wide swathes of indie music from Canada: anthemic, quasi-orchestral rock, with Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Metric, Owen Pallett, and  The New Pornographers; country rock roots-folk sounds with The Sadies and Blue Rodeo, and singer-songwriters Sarah Harmer, Kathleen Edwards, Hawksley Workman, Feist, and Joel Plaskett; headbangers are not overlooked with Constantines, Danko Jones, Black Mountain, and Fucked Up. And The Hidden Cameras, God Speed You Black Emperor, Hot Hot Heat, Peaches, Sam Roberts Band, Royal City, Wolf Parade, The Dears, Tegan and Sara, and AlexisonFire, also appear. A lot of artists whose music I knew already, and a number of others I’m glad to discover.

It’s the latest installment in what amounts to a publishing rarity—a nonfiction trilogy*, though I’m pretty sure the three authors involved, Barclay, Ian A.D. Jack, and Jason Schneider, didn’t envision it as such when they published HAVE NOT BEEN THE SAME: The CANROCK Renaissance 1985-1995 (HNBTS) in 2001; it was very well received by fans and musicians alike, which led to an expanded version in 2011. That’s when I first became aware of the book.

A prefatory note in the second edition explained they’d begun working on the first version in the late 1990s, so collectively this enterprise has been going on now for parts of four decades. They’ve had the same publisher throughout, ECW Press. As an editor and literary agent myself I want add, to ECW’s credit, they have consistently put out well-designed and edited books, very readable volumes that do justice to the authors’ vision for their books.

I got my copy of the sturdily-bound 750-page trade paperback of HNBTS soon after my discovery, in 2009, of the dynamic Internet radio station CBCRadio 3, then a vibrant outpost for independent Canadian rock on the digital airwaves. It offered a passionate tribe of music lovers and fans dozens of hours of music every week. A cadre of talented hosts helmed the live programming with information, patter, contests, a new Track of the Day every weekday, brief interviews with musicians, and each day, a highly interactive blog featuring a Topic-of-the-Day with the hosts reading comments by contributors who minted memorable blog names for themselves. My handle was PSTNYC. According to the wiki on Radio 3, it “had its genesis [within CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster] in a late-1990s proposal to launch a radio network devoted to youth culture, comparable to BBC Radio 1 and Australia’s Triple J.” The station was supported by CBC for more than a decade, but poobahs there seemed to never quite understand the potential of it, even though the hosts—a lively group that included Craig Norris, Lana Gay, Vish Khanna, Amanda Putz, Lisa Christiansen, and Grant Lawrence, and musicians Tariq Hussain (a member of Brasstronaut) Graham Wright (of Tokyo Police Club), Jay Ferguson (from Sloan)—had loyal listeners for whom each host’s daily three-four hour show could be “appointment listening.” Sadly, live hosting was scuttled in 2015, and the station became little more than an algorithmic-driven entity. At its peak, the number of artists who created band profiles on the Radio 3 website and uploaded music to it numbered greater than 30,000. That’s a snapshot of just how active the music scene across Canada was, and is, a country whose population at the time hovered between 30-35 million. I attribute this, at least in part, to the prevalence of music education in Canadian schools. Radio 3 was a potent force for community-building which I still miss, as do the many dozens of friends in Canada and around the world I made in the course of the decade or so I was on the platform. Unfortunately, the website doesn’t even exist anymore as an archive of any sort.

I discovered HNBTS thanks to an album of songs by then-current bands covering songs by artists from the 1985-95 period which appeared in the first version of the book. It was organized, smartly, to promote the 2011 reissue. I heard those new version of older songs played on CBC Radio 3, and bought a digital download of it from Zunior.com, a digital musical seller that’s been a reliable source and supplier to me for many years. It’s operated by Dave Ulrich, a member of Inbreds, a band he played in with Mike O’Neill, included in HNBTS.

Around 2013, I started a companion to this blog called Honourary Canadian: Seeing Canada from Away, and have often written about Canadian indie music for both sites, attending shows by Canadian groups when their tours brought them into NYC. During this period, I also began attending the annual NXNE music festival in Toronto as press, and wrote many posts about the gathering for both of my sites. During the week of NXNE over five consecutive nights, I would hear upwards of four dozen groups at venues all across Toronto—the Horseshoe Tavern, Rivoli, Paddock, Danforth Hall, Dakota Tavern—hanging at the shows with friends from the CBC Radio 3 fan community. We would meet up for a picnic on the Saturday during the festival week, for which musicians would come to play under the trees—and in 2012, even in the trees—when Adrian Glynn and Zach Gray climbed this big beauty with their guitars to play for us.

With three authors to cover the musical waterfront, HNBTS discussed dozens of artists and groups. Here’s a partial list: Stompin’ Tom Connors, Barenaked Ladies, NoMeansNo, the Nils, Rheostatics, Skydiggers, Bruce Cockburn, Hayden, Cowboy Junkies, k.d. lang, Jr. Gone Wild, Sloan, Eric’s Trip, Thrush Hermit, Sarah McLachlan, Blue Rodeo, Tragically Hip, Ron Sexsmith, New Pornographers, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and the Weakerthans.

The second installment in this troika of titles to be published was WHISPERING PINES: The Northern Roots of American Music…from Hank Snow to The Band, in 2009, by Jason Schneider writing on his own. The narrative in this book actually begins earlier than the other two, in the 1950s with Canadian country music, by looking at the careers of Wilf Carter and Hank Snow. Radio played a key role in spreading their music, especially when American country singer Conway Twitty encouraged them to bring their music to the US. Later chapters cover Ronnie Hawkins (who just died yesterday) & the Hawks, Ian & Sylvia, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Anne Murray, Bruce Cockburn, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Murray McLauchlan, Neil Young, and The Band. Lest you think this all wouldn’t interest you, or would only cover unfamiliar bands, consider that the book’s meaty chapter on Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly pioneer,  covers his hiring of the outfit comprised of Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manual. He dubbed them The Hawks, and of course, later they would be known as The Band. This is pure gold for people who like to read about Bob Dylan and The Band. Simply said, the book offers a superb narrative chronicling the influence of Canadian musicians on the growth of country-rock in North America.

Each of the three books employs a modified oral history approach, with lengthy interviews with musicians, and analysis of social factors, including consideration of what distinguishes Canada from the USA in the cultural realm. For a taste of the writing, see this paragraph from pg 58 of HNBTS of the instrumental trio the aforementioned Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet:

“Formed in 1984, Shadowy Men became one of Canada’s most beloved bands, known for their musicianship, eventful live shows, absurdist wit, and innovative visuals. They are best known around the world for providing music on the Kids in the Hall TV show, including its theme, “Having an Average Weekend.” Featuring Brian Connelly on guitar, Reid Diamond on bass, and Don Pyle on drums, the surf-influenced Shadowy sound was decidedly retro, but considerably more advanced than their peers. The Shadowy Men were extremely talented musicians and boasted underrated compositional skills as well, set to creative and extremely danceable grooves. They also attracted attention via their series of 7″ single between 1985 and 1988, featuring gimmicky packaging such as a game board or a Jiffy Pop container.”

A number of factors have combined to reduce my ardent involvement in Canadian indie music in recent years, beginning with the disappearance of CBC Radio 3, though my appreciation of the music continues unabated, and I still purchase and download music from Zunior.com, especially on their annual Boxing Day sale. During the pandemic I really enjoyed listening to the acoustic Mantle Concerts by my fave Canadian rocker, Matt Mays, still posted on youtube. Other factors in that diminishment included 1) the arrival of the Trump administration, whose border policies made it hard for Canadian musicians to enter the US, especially with their CDs and other merchandise that were always a key money-maker for them; 2) the advent of COVID-19, of course, with venues closed for much of the past three years; 3) and NXNE was downsized for a few years, but I’m happy to see it looks like it will be back at full strength this June, so perhaps I’ll make it up to Toronto for it in 2023. I would love to visit there again, and go back to such venues as The Cameron House, a homey spot where I’ve heard many great shows over the years.

As a closing note, here’s a picture of a shelf of music books in my home library, including a number of titles from my CANRock library. Reading from left to right: Special Deluxe and Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young; The History of Rock N’ Roll in Canada by Bob Mersereau; Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Modern Music by Ray Robertson; I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons; The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern by David McPherson; Whispering Pines by Jason Schneider, Have Not Been the Same by Barclay, Jack, and Schneider, and Hearts on Fire by Barclay; Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, and the Spaghetti Bandit, The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie, Adventures in Solitude: What to Wear to a Nude Potluck, and Dirty Windshields: The Best and the Worst of the Smugglers’ Tour Diaries (the latter four are all by former CBC Radio 3 host and friend Grant Lawrence); Kick it Till Breaks, and The Trouser Press Record Guide, 4th (which I helped escort to publication as editor at Collier Macmillan Publishers back in 1989) and 5th editions by Ira Robbins; Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band and the Basement Tapes by Sid Griffin; Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz; Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Joe Jones, as told to Albert Murray, edited by Paul Devlin with an Afterword by Phil Schaap; and Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh.

*Some weeks after Hearts on Fire was published, and after I wrote this post, Win Butler of Arcade Fire was credibly accused in a number of news outlets including Pitchfork, of a history of behaving predatorily toward women. He claimed all the conduct was consensual, but the preponderance of public revelations weighed against him. When and if a paperback edition of Michael Barclay’s book is published I will be watching for any new prefatory material the author includes by way of reporting on this issue.

**While nonfiction trilogies are scarce, there are many in fiction, such as Canadian novelist Robertson Davies‘ Deptford Trilogy, comprised of Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders.

Read more

Manhattan’s Metro Theater, Reopening at Last

/0 Comments/in , /by

In 2012, I was excited I could report this on my blog, some good news for denizens of my Manhattan neighborhood, and other New Yorkers.

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Coming to NYC!

Following Sept 11, 2001, which hit NY’s infrastructure and economy so hard, and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which added to the damage, it would have been a real shot in the arm for the city to have the renovated movie theater open just four blocks from my apartment, but alas, in 2015, this was the outcome to Alamo’s interest.

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Abandons Renovation of Metro Theater in NYC

Last week with my wife—artist Kyle Gallup, who made a collage of the Metro marquee seen below—we were walking up Broadway at 98th Street in front of the old Metro, where we were surprised to see the building’s omnipresent steel doors had been raised and people were working inside. Kyle took a picture:

Now this week comes the welcome news, first in via Westside Rag, and then today in Gothamist that the Metro will finally be reopening. Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine told Gothamist reporter Ben Yakas that though he himself had been skeptical himself—due to the past abandonment by Alamo—he’d spoken to the CEO of the as-yet unnamed exhibitor, who told him that the company has actually signed a lease. Renovations will begin soon to turn it into a cinema complex with multiple screens and an event space, to reopen in 2023.

Read more

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Pioneer and Childhood Hero, Guest Post by M. G. Turner

/0 Comments/in , /by

When I was eight years old I had the privilege of meeting one of the greats—in fact the greatest cinema special effects pioneer of the 20th Century. That man’s name was Ray Harryhausen, and to movie fans worldwide he represents the start of a great age in filmmaking, where the previously unthinkable could be projected on screen, using two primary techniques, known as Stop-Motion Animation, and Dynamation, which each pushed the boundaries of what had previously been possible in the fantasy, adventure, and sci-fi realms. But to me, Ray Harryhausen, for all his cinematic splendor and cultural renown, represented something else: magic. For me, this took the form of an idea, that art was not only impressive and important, that it could also be fun.

I can’t recall which Harryhausen movie I saw first, but it was probably Jason and the Argonauts, which remains my favorite of his films, though Mysterious Island is a close second. In those days—the early 2000s—I used to watch films on our bulbous, analog TV set. This included VHS tapes and eventually DVDs that we rented from our neighborhood video store and some of the first films I watched were Harryhausen’s. Something I used to do, in lieu of being in a real theater, was use chairs, pillows, and then a large bed-sheet to create a kind of makeshift fort, inside of which I could watch films. This had a curious cave-like effect and helped pull my focus to the images on screen, which were dazzling, especially to my young, uncritical mind. This was long before IMAX, and 48 frames per second, and on the fly CGI; this was an only child discovering one of his first artistic heroes, a man I would go on to meet, whom I would initially correspond with over a series of letters, first sent in the fall of 2003.

At that time I was starting second grade, and for my first two years in school had faced a great deal of bullying and harassment from other kids. I was always shy and quiet, preferring to read Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings instead of running wild with my classmates on the playground. As many people are subjects of bullying and intimidation early in their school years, I don’t suggest I was unique in this, but do think it intensified my wish to escape into other worlds, to lose myself in some grand swashbuckling action. I was looking for something to fill the void, and though the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Star Wars space opera did some of the work, it was really Harryhausen who made me feel complete, Harryhausen who opened my mind and showed me that movies could be both entertaining and meaningful. In short, that they could be art.

With my mother herself being a visual artist, I already knew that art was an important element of one’s emotional and intellectual life, but I didn’t know it could also be fun. Seeing Harryhausen’s creatures come to life not only felt like the most special sort of magic trick, but an experience akin to walking through the halls of a wondrous and thought-provoking museum, which in those difficult days of 1st Grade helped me see that there was something outside of the difficult, tedious, and at times Kafkaesque experience of New York public school with its inane standardized tests, its lack of discipline, and myriad bureaucratic cruelties.

Thus I escaped into Harryhausen’s movies, watching them on the weekends, and sometimes on school nights. I even watched all the Sinbad films in succession when recovering from a traumatic ear operation. Because I was so moved by them, and because they meant so much to me, and because they had granted me my first glimpse into seeing film as an art-form, and not just a mode of entertainment, I decided to write him a letter.

I was luckier than most kids in this endeavor, because my father was and still is an influential book editor and was able to obtain Harryhausen’s address through his publishing house. In the letters, which I wrote the summer before first grade began, I told him how much I liked his films, that I wanted to be an animator when I grew up, and even included some drawings depicting his monsters. I simply wanted to connect with the man who’d brought wonder into my life, to convey to him, in no uncertain terms, my appreciation, childlike as it might have been. Of course, in our overly critical culture some might look back and say the Harryhausen icons such as the skeletons in Jason, or his Emir from 20,000,000 Miles to Earth, or any of the other colossal creatures which graced his films, didn’t look real per se, it didn’t matter and still doesn’t. There is a suspension of disbelief necessary for appreciating a Harryhausen film, a suspension that modern audiences have become poorly practiced at, but remains important to one’s overall aesthetic health. For a child it was easy to deploy this ability, and to derive enjoyment from the visions he conjured, and so I felt a letter was the best way to express my, well, gratitude.

We waited a month or two, and in that time worried that the letter might have gone astray or hadn’t reached him, until finally from England, where the great man lived, a reply came, a photo of which is depicted below. I remember holding the letter in my hands in disbelief, a similar disbelief to the kind I felt when I watched his movies: utter amazement, combined with sheer joy. Reading the letter over and over, I felt I had finally made contact with someone who understood me, and who, in a sense, had freed me from the fear and worry that pervaded so much of my existence. We exchanged another letter or two over the course of the next few months, and after a time our correspondence faltered.

But it did not falter for long, as roughly a year later, my parents received word that a special “Harryhausen Night” was being held at Lincoln Center. Our eventual meeting occurred on a rainy evening in the autumn of 2004, after I had turned eight years old. My mother had discovered that for the release of his heavily illustrated book Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (co-authored with Tony Dalton, Watson-Guptill, 2004), the man himself would be speaking and signing copies at Lincoln Center. And like a great New Yorker who knows what she wants and how to get it, she took me to meet him, and managed to get us to the front of the line.

There he was: a handsome, distinguished older gentleman with fraying white hair and a round, inviting face, who in some ways reminded me of my own grandfather, a civil engineer who had his own meticulous pursuits. I remember being nervous but Harryhausen being welcoming in a way that went beyond simple politeness; he seemed genuinely touched that we’d come out to see his classic films, and touched by the nervousness we both showed. And luckily Ray and I were not complete strangers! My mother and I were sure to remind Ray—he was now Ray in my mind—that we’d had a brief correspondence. To this, he said he remembered us and that he was happy to finally meet me in person. It didn’t matter if this was true or not—for all I know he could have received hundreds of fan letters a year from kids like me—but this was all I needed to feel like I had been seen and heard and accepted.

While we stood there, with a legion of people behind us, each waiting anxiously for their own moment with him, I repeated how much I loved Jason and the Argonauts, and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and him smiling and saying how he appreciated my interest. He was also extremely patient as my mother attempted to take a photo of us. After several failed tries—in the picture below you can see in my eyes the fear that this moment would be lost—she managed to snap a few good ones. Ray smiled at us and signed our book and the line continued moving.

There was a screening happening in tandem with the in-person event, and soon we found our seats in the Walter Reade Cinema at Lincoln Center, settling in for a night of his classic films. Previously I had only been to the theater to see The Lord of the Rings, so this was a special night for me—perhaps one of the most special nights of my young life, and something I consider to be a personal success, though it occurred when age was still in single digits. I was having an experience that most people had not had since the sixties and seventies when his films first hit theaters and later the small screen. In fact, I don’t believe I had had such a unique experience until then, unique because I not only got to see his films in a more enjoyable setting—a great improvement over my unwieldy TV set, over which I had thrown a literal tarp—but meeting my hero in person and being touched by his genuine warmth.

Later, during a break between movies, we met the actress Kathy Crosby (listed in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad as Kathryn Grant) who starred in that film alongside Kerwin Mathews; she was lovely and down to earth and I think this was the first time I realized that actors and artists and performers were heroes, not only because they achieved the astounding feats of slaying dragons, and fencing with skeletons, and battling evil sorcerers, but because they were, just like Ray, real people. Real people, with the ability to practice a kind of cinematic magic, a shamanistic talent at making the impossible possible. The fact that Harryhausen had not forfeit the interests of his own childhood lent me hope I could participate someday in a great creative enterprise, or even make a career out of it, just as he and his lifelong friend, the renowned sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury had, whose work I was also beginning to discover.

I did not meet Ray Harryhausen again that night; nor did I meet him ever again. He passed away in 2013, long after I had garnered new heroes and new experiences. I changed schools; took up acting; picked up the guitar. My interests waxed and waned. I was drawn more to writing. But even with all the changes I went through, both mental and physical, I never forgot the person who had first made me believe in the unbelievable, who had altered my perception of the movies and made them a place where art happened and not just entertainment. He’d taught me that art, whether it be the manipulation of molded figures, or the manipulation of words on a page, or some other equally valid creative endeavor, is worthwhile and can be meaningful. Sure, you can become discouraged by the elements of creativity; you can be stymied by the logistics of plot and character; you can be interrupted in your painstaking work by a ringing phone or a director calling “Cut!”; you can be disheartened and lose interest altogether in the projects you’d previously been bound to—all that being true, Harryhausen’s lesson is one we can all learn from and take to heart. And it was that magic matters. Stories matter; they make our lives richer. To an only child who had faced some difficulty early in his life, I can honestly say that Harryhausen saved me, not only by his technical prowess, and controlled mayhem, and the delight of sharp teeth and clashing swords, but by the kindness he showed, in replying to a seven-year-old’s hopeful letter. Sometimes the best magic is the kind exchanged from person to person. Or to put it another, clearer, more perfect way: sometimes kindness is the real magic.

M. G. Turner
February 2022

Read more

Looking Back on 2021, Our Year in Editing and Agenting

/2 Comments/in , , , , /by

Yesterday I began totaling up the volume of our business in 2021, to prepare for writing an annual year-end blog post, and I’m pleased to confirm it was by far the best year Philip Turner Book Productions has had since I began operating outside the staff job/corporate publishing world in 2009. My son Ewan, 25, has been working with me for the past two years; it’s good to have a colleague and partner. As Executive Editor and Literary Agent, he heads up our New Stories division, devoted to cultivating new work in fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir.

Looking back on the year that ends today, I see that in 2021,

  • We edited manuscripts and book proposals from twenty-five different authors;
  • We sold ten new titles to book publishers, books that will be published in 2022 and beyond. and one title to an audiobook company which came out in 2021. We dispersed advances and royalties to fifteen authors and rights holders. Our sales this year were:
  1. THE BARRENS: A Novel of Love & Death in the Canadian Arctic by father-daughter duo Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson, sold to Arcade Publishing, who will publish it on May 3, 2022. This is the first title we’ve sold under our New Stories rubric.
  2. PICTURE SHOW PLAYLIST: Pop Music in Film from the Crystals to Rihanna by Nate Patrin, sold to University of Minnesota Press, whose first book Bring that Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, we also sold to UMP, which they published in 2020.
  3. LURKING UNDER THE SURFACE: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us by Brandon Grafius, sold to Broadleaf Books, which will be published around Halloween 2022.
  4. YOURS, FOR PROBABLY ALWAYS: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War, 1930-1949 by Janet Somerville, sold to Penguin Random House Audio with actress Ellen Barkin as the narrator of the audiobook, published in May 2021.
  5. CINEMA OF SWORDS: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers) by Lawrence Ellsworth, translator of Alexandre Dumas, sold to Applause Theater and Cinema Books

    6. .

  6. THE ULTIMATE PROTEST: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World by Ray E. Boomhower, sold to University of New Mexico Press, which in November 2021 published Boomhower’s Richard Tregasksis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam
  7. ROOSEVELT SWEEPS NATION: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal by David Pietrusza, sold to Diversion Books, to be published August 2022.
  8. LAST CIRCLE OF LOVE, a novel by Lorna Landvik, acquired by the Lake Union imprint, Amazon Publishing
  9. HEROES ARE HUMAN: Lessons in Resiliency, Courage and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines by Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber, co-authors of the bestselling Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob, placed with City Point Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster, to be published Fall 2022.
  10. THE KREMLIN’S NOOSE: Vladimir Putin’s Blood Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia by Amy Knight, sold to Northern Illinois University Press distributed by Cornell University Press; we earlier sold Knight’s Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017).

In 2021, books that we had sold in earlier years were published:

1) Ten Garments Every Man Should Own: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe by Pedro Mendes, published by Dundurn Press.
2) Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater by Alexis Greene, published by Applause Theater and Cinema Books
3) Between Two Kings: A Sequel to The Three Musketeers (Musketeers Cycle, Book 5) by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Lawrence Ellsworth, published by Pegasus Books
4) Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam by Ray E. Boomhower, published by University of New Mexico Press, and as an audiobook by Blackstone Publishing.
5) The Pot Thief Who Studied the Woman at Otowi Crossing (The Pot Thief Mysteries Book 9) by J. Michael Orenduff, published by Open Road Media.
6) In addition, a manuscript I edited in 2021, THE MOST PRECIOUS GIFT: Memories of the Holocaust, A Legacy of Lisette Lamon, was self-published by David Mendels, the late author’s son.

Also, coming in 2022 will be an anthology about the book business, Among Friends: An Illustrated Oral History of 20th Century Publishing and Bookselling edited by Buz Teacher, co-founder of Running Press. It will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and I have contributed a personal essay entitled, “The Education of a Bookselling Editor.”

Ewan continues to write his own fiction, having completed a story collection in the realm of anthology horror, and is working on a novel. As he likes to say, his touchstones fall somewhere between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rod Serling. His work may be read upon request.

After 2022, we eagerly anticipate publication of DEVOURING TIME: Jim Harrison, a Life by Todd Goddard, the first biography of the acclaimed fiction writer, master of the novella, gourmand, ardent friend, hunter and fisher, which we sold to Blackstone Publishing.

Entering what will be my thirteenth year working as an independent editor and literary agent—a longer tenure than any of my in-house positions—I am more energized than ever by the opportunities to work closely with authors, more than closely than I was able to do during my latter years in corporate publishing. Even with the many challenges the book industry is facing, such as many bookstores open for only limited, distanced hours due to the lingering pandemic, I am optimistic about the book business, as readers are eager to have the companionship of books, and writers are driven to tell their singular stories.

We work on a wide range of material with special affinity for imperative books that really matter in people’s lives. I’m always interested in first-person work from authors who’ve passed through some crucible of experience that leaves them uniquely equipped to write their book. If you have a project you’re developing, or a personal essay, and want to discuss your work, or a project you think may be ready to offer to publishers, please don’t hesitate to contact one or both of us. We already have a number of terrific projects lined up to edit and represent in the new year, and we’re hopeful 2022 will be a strong year in publishing and the book business, , and a better year for us all. 

As always, please get in touch if you or someone you know is seeking guidance about publishing. Ewan can be reached at ewanmturner [@] gmail [.] com, while my contact info is philipsturner [@] gmail [.] com.

Read more

William Blake and My Close Friend Rob Adams

/0 Comments/in , /by

When I woke up this last morning of the long Thanksgiving weekend, I looked at Twitter on my iPhone and saw that this date November 28 is the birthday of the timeless artist William Blake (1757-1843). Immediately, I thought I would share an image of the precious work I have by him, an engraving from his hand, given to me years ago by my close friend, Robert Henry Adams (1955-2001).

After I shared a social media post seen here, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, I realized I could also do a fuller post that links to earlier blog essays I’ve shared on this website (here, here, and here) about Rob, our meaningful friendship, and a third Franconia College friend pal with whom we constituted a troika, Karl Petrovich.

The Blake gift doesn’t exhaust the fine art that Rob gave me, or occasionally, that I bought from him. There are no less than a dozen such pieces in my Manhattan apartment, such as a print I bought of a circus aerialist by British artist Dame Laura Knight. Another is the framed Lincoln portrait by Civil War-era photographer Alexander Gardner shown here. Sometime in the late 1980s Rob spotted it at an auction, and bought it relatively cheaply due to the unfortunate crease in the middle. Always one to see the bright side, despite the defect, Rob had also spotted the signature, “Your Obt Servt A. Lincoln“, seeming to him in pencil or faded ink, and not a mechanical or mass-reproduced autograph. This made it all but certain it was from Lincoln and Gardner’s time, done in the sixteenth president’s own hand. FYI, the printing near the bottom of the picture reads, from left to right,

A. Gardner, Photographer.         Published by Philip & Solomons, Washington D.C.               Washington

Rob didn’t want to try re-selling it because of the imperfection, and so gave it to me, a (probably) autographed Lincoln photograph. Pretty amazing, right?!

There was some sweet symmetry to the Lincoln gift, because earlier, in the 1970s, for Rob’s wedding to Chicago fashion historian Sandra Adams, I had given him the oversized photography book The Face of Lincoln (Viking, 1979, 15″ x 11 1/2 inches), collecting every known photograph of Lincoln, which at my family’s bookstore in Cleveland, Undercover Books, we were then stocking and selling.  

 

Read more

Q&A with Paulette Myers Rich—Photographer, Printer, and Curator of No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works

/0 Comments/in , /by

I’m handing over the blog today to my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, for a guest post in the first of what will be a series of interviews by her with artists and writers. Kyle last wrote for The Great Gray Bridge with a post on the painter J.M.W. Turner. I am really excited to publish this post, because it draws on the rich literary tradition of Minnesota, such a vital place in America for book arts and fine printing. —PT
—-

Paulette Myers Rich. Photo credit: Donna Turner

Paulette Myers Rich is a photographer, artist, fine art printer, maker and collector of artists’ books. She is also the curator of the exhibition space, No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works in Beacon, New York. With Covid restrictions she has reoriented her space to show art in the front windows of her gallery. It seemed to me like a good time to check in with her and see how her own work’s going and what she sees for the future of her gallery space.

You moved from Minnesota to New York City and now upstate, to Beacon, New York. Can you tell me a little bit about what led you from the Midwest to the East Coast, and how this has influenced your work as a photographer and artist?

I was teaching and working in Minneapolis/St. Paul for many years, but major life changes prompted us to take time off to decide what would come next. My husband David Rich is a painter and educator who has deep roots in NYC and in 2012 we decided to spend a year there to immerse ourselves in our work and consider our next steps. The year turned into five before we completely relocated from Minnesota.

We had a live/work loft in lower Manhattan that gave us each a small studio space, but I was going back and forth from NYC to my letterpress studio in St. Paul for months at a time. Finding the right kind of space for my equipment in NYC was tough because so many larger studios have been chopped up into tiny spaces with high rent. I began looking north for a place on the train line and in 2015, finally found a derelict commercial building for sale on Beacon’s Main Street where we could live and work, although I wasn’t looking forward to yet another gut renovation. This became our fourth such project. We sold our St. Paul building, moved everything into storage until the renovation was done a year later, then moved from our loft in the city up to Beacon. I got very good at logistics.

The move to Beacon allowed me to open No.3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works in the storefront adjoining my letterpress studio. It’s an extension of my studio practice, designed for viewing artists’ books, photobooks and small press poetry from my collection along with work on paper and photography by guest artists. Exhibitions of artists’ books tend to show the work in a vitrine out of reach with only a page spread on view, which was frustrating for me as an artist as my work is intended to be interactive. I decided to make a space where readers’ copies of my artists’ books are accessible to viewers. Books are meant to be handled and read and the experience is incomplete without this. No.3 offers visitors access to experience the entire book at their own pace in a context with related work. I also make myself available for conversation or questions as viewing books tends to generate a response and many times, looking at one book leads to another. It’s a form of engagement that’s rare in viewing art.

I also invite exhibiting artists to include personal copies of books that informed their practice, or alternatively, a reading list. The artists I show are readers and they’re generous in their sharing. Some of these books have traveled with them or were gifts from loved ones, many have marginalia and tabs that reveal what’s important to them. But if the artist needs to hold onto their books, I’ll acquire a reader’s copy to share. This hybrid approach to showing artwork opens up conversations in a meaningful way that doesn’t often happen in a commercial gallery.

I read that your photographs are about landscape, place, and time. How does your locale influence what you photograph?

My current locale in Beacon and the Hudson Valley is new to me and I’m still exploring it. I’m surrounded by wilderness and mountains, which is very different from the urban post-industrial landscapes I’ve been living in and photographing for the past forty years. However, it’s the remove from familiarity that’s been most influential in my current practice. I returned to the studio about ten years ago, spending more time in what I see as a necessary and compelling phase of my landscape work, which means delving into my photo archives, revisiting these sites and reconfiguring them through collage and new juxtapositions. I’m also photographing constructed spaces that explore the metaphysical, mathematical and spiritual dimensions of place once again. There’s a quietude here that I’ve never had elsewhere that I find I need in this time.

Are there particular subjects and themes that you most gravitate or return to?

Most sites I photographed were once active industries on acres of land that were abandoned and left vacant in the midst of working class neighborhoods or along the Mississippi River, and there were many of them. It was hard for me to fathom how a company could just shut down, throw so many people out of work and walk away from such a massive property, usually very polluted, that we as residents had to deal with in the aftermath before gentrification. However, aside from the social indifference and environmental impacts that I contended with as a citizen at City Hall, as an artist, it was the mysteries of the site that I sought out; the lingering energies, the aftereffects of abandonment, evidence of the former life of the place, the encroachment of nature, and the momentary landscapes that emerged from the demolition process that combined to make strange, poetic juxtapositions and layers. I’m striving for that kind of mystery and energy in my current work in the studio through combinations of ephemeral installations and constructions set up for the camera, as well as in the reworking and reconfiguring of my Work Sites series photographs.

Your artistic practice is wide ranging, from photography, to fine art printing, to handmade book-making, to being a collector of artists’ books, and director of No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works. How have these different aspects come about and how have they evolved?

I came to my photo-based artist book practice through experimental films I was making in the early 1970’s as a youth, at a media arts center called Film in the Cities, where I was immersed in contemporary alternative and experimental media projects. I was especially interested in film-as-film, where the material qualities of light, emulsion, grain and surface are a part of the content. But to continue making this work as a working-class mother of two required resources I didn’t have, so I scaled back to still photography, working experimentally, abstractly and sequentially to simulate the pacing of film. I exhibited this work as sequential stills but wasn’t satisfied with this form of presentation. It felt static to me.

When the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) opened in Minneapolis in 1985, I became an intern in the papermaking studio to study sculptural techniques using handmade paper for still-life constructions, my primary photography subject at the time. Initially, I had no notion of making books, but when I was exposed to contemporary book art practice in MCBA’s studios and gallery, I realized I could reintroduce a sequential and temporal element back into my work, along with the tactility of materials and forms designed to activate the narrative. Eventually though, my industrial landscapes became my primary subject as it came to dominate my life in many ways.

I’ve always been a reader and novice writer and wanted to integrate poetry and text into my work, so I enrolled in the College of St. Catherine’s weekend program to study creative writing and library science, then returned to MCBA in 1990 to intern with Gaylord Schanilec in letterpress printing, entering the world of fine press books. I continued on as a studio assistant on various projects, mentored by master practitioners while taking workshops to acquire the skills I needed, learning a trade in the working-class tradition as an apprentice, which felt comfortable to me. I did this all as a working mother; I wish I still had that kind of stamina.

Eventually I became a master printer-in-residence with assistants of my own, overseeing projects and teaching at MCBA and local art colleges. I acquired my own letterpress equipment and set up Traffic Street Press, named for the street adjoining my studio in the North Warehouse District of Minneapolis. Along with my personal work, I collaborated with poets I admired publishing fine press books in my Trafficking in Poetry series, and also produced a series of contemporary Irish poetry books and broadsides with the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul.

In 1990, I also became a news librarian at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where I did research for reporters, helped manage the photography collection and cataloged books. It was my dream day job, but soon after, newspaper publishing was hit hard as a business and in time, most of the library staff was eliminated. I then picked up extra teaching in book arts, mentored grad students, and produced and sold my books.

Even before my time at MCBA, I had collected small press poetry chapbooks from a used bookstore in my neighborhood near Macalester College that carried a range of them. St. Paul is a city with a cluster of liberal arts colleges and the used bookstores were goldmines for me. When Allan Kornblum became the first printer-in-residence at MCBA and moved Toothpaste Press from Iowa City to Minneapolis to start Coffee House Press, you could buy his chaps at the Hungry Mind bookstore, so I have a box full of them. There were a variety of small presses, writers, editors and book distributors in the neighborhood. I was in a rich literary environment and took advantage of this.

With Covid-19 restrictions affecting artists around the world, how have you dealt with the quarantine and in what ways has this affected your work, artistic process, and thinking?

I’m trying to remain disciplined, reminding myself that I’ve endured deadly and frightening times in other periods of my life. I looked to women artists who went through difficult times, reading biographies and journals as a guide. As a former Minnesotan, I’m accustomed to hunkering down for long, extreme winters so my home and studio have always been set up for that. I’ve been revisiting photographs from my archives, experimenting with new forms and spending time in No.3 doing research, writing and cataloging new books. I value the quietude and concentrated thought that books provide, but I miss my engagement with artists and the community, so in warmer months I use the display windows of No.3 to install exhibits which works well, and I’ll continue to do that.

But I must say there were times I couldn’t concentrate enough to read or work and instead watched a lot of news keeping up with what was happening back home in Minneapolis/St. Paul after George Floyd was murdered in a neighborhood dear to me, because this could happen to any number of people there that I love. And of course, the 2020 election was stressful. I avoided social media and instead, called friends to talk, which made each of us feel much less isolated. One night during the riots in Minneapolis, while talking to a friend who lives a few blocks from Lake Street, smoke from the fires came into her windows. I had friends on neighborhood watch with their guns and dogs because white extremists had infiltrated the cities, instigating a lot of the destruction. Friends documented cars with Boogaloo Boys logos and out-of-state plates, and they found incendiary devices hidden in their alleys and backyards. People had their garden hoses pulled to the front door and turned on in case they needed to put out a fire. It was traumatizing to see all this unfold on national media and hear even worse news from our friends and family living through it. I’m hoping that Chauvin’s guilty verdict will secure much needed, long overdue police reform and that justice will be served in the ongoing violent episodes that have happened since.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to emerging from this strange, isolating time. Initially, No.3 Reading Room will reopen by appointment or invitation, so I can keep it safe for those who visit. I’m going to stay hopeful about reopening more fully as a walk-in space. I really miss that part of my life and I know people need a place to go have some peace and spend time sorting out the last year as well as to plan for the future. Books and the reading room offer that space.

On your blog, you have a new exhibit, Walking the Watershed, Photographs by Ronnie Farley, that is part of a larger project and exhibition, Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. Can you talk about this project and how it relates to your own work and interests?

Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, was initiated by Peter Koch, a fine press book artist, writer, educator and co-founder of the CODEX Foundation, a non-profit devoted to fine press and artist book practice. Peter is from Montana and experienced the impact mining has made on the environment and people there. In 2015 he produced a book called Liber Ignis; “…a collaborative project of appropriations, inventions, and constructs documenting the ongoing war against nature in the American West…”

When Peter encountered the book Black Diamond Dust in the Dia Beacon museum bookstore about a year later, he was inspired by this multi-site arts action about the impact of the extractive industries in Vancouver Island, B.C., and decided to initiate something similar in Montana about the mining industry there, but it expanded to a much larger scale and became what he calls a “global Art Ruckus.” I was supportive of this project early on, having photographed, lived near and worked in industrial landscapes set in big nature for many years, so I’m well aware of the impact these industries have on our environment. I’m honored that No.3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works is included as a site for exhibiting artists who focus on these environmental issues in their work as a part of the Extraction project.

Ronnie Farley is a photographer and writer I admire very much. Her work is deeply concerned with the environment and the Indigenous women who have been fighting polluters for decades. Her recent Walking the Watershed project features photographs from her 150-mile trek from the Schoharie Reservoir, following the path of the aqueduct that delivers water to NYC. She made it in stages, carrying a bucket of water from the reservoir and giving talks in each community she passed through. When she arrived in NYC at the end of her journey, she poured the water into the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, “returning the water to itself.” Ronnie lived in NYC for many years but is from upstate and wants New Yorkers to know what a long distance their drinking water travels and how fragile and precious it is. She has a companion book and film that will be completed soon that I’ll also feature.

Throughout 2021, I’ll be showing the work of painters, sculptors, printmakers and filmmakers, alongside books relating to their specific topics, including Black Diamond Dust. The Extraction project has produced a comprehensive catalog called the Megazine (pictured above), featuring writing and images by participants. I’ll be giving away 100 copies throughout the summer to visitors.

 What have you been reading over the last year?

I’ve been reading across disciplines, but the books that stand out for me are the biography and poems of Paul Celan, essays by Audre Lourde, and the new anthology Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959-1979. I’m also reading Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel; Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade, and Frantumaglia: A Writers’ Journey by Elena Ferrante. I’m always looking at new photography books, but Alessandra Sanguinetti’s The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer is a favorite, but there are too many more to mention; my research covers everything from industrial handbooks of the late 19th century to theory. One thing leads to another when you read.

No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works, Beacon, NY

Ghost Poems for the Living, Traffic St Press, Paulette Myers Rich

Ghost Poems, interior, Paulette Myers Rich

Ghost Poems, interior, Paulette Myers Rich

Work Site Series, Paulette Myers Rich

No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works

No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works

Read more

From Philip Turner Book Productions—Looking Back on 2020 and Ahead for 2021

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Readers of this blog may recall that last summer I announced here that my adult son Ewan Turner had joined Philip Turner Book Productions as Managing Editor, heading up a new division called New Stories, devoted to cultivating new work, including fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir. A BFA graduate of The New School, Ewan is a fiction writer himself, and earlier was the editor of KGB Bar Lit Mag and frequently led readings and open mics at that heralded literary venue. As an editorial assistant, he worked with such writers as playwright Mart Crowley; photojournalist Ruth Gruber; literary scholar Michael Patrick Hearn; and illustrator of the Eloise books, Hilary Knight. He’s also the author of Sotapanna, a poetry chapbook that was featured at KGB Bar and PhotoBookWorks Gallery, Beacon, New York.

Looking back on the year that ended last weekend, I see that in 2020 we:

  • Edited manuscripts and book proposals from seventeen different authors;
  • Sold six new books to publishers and four to audio companies, books that will be published this year and next.

Some of those sales have been noted on this site, such as:

  • Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life , forthcoming by Todd Goddard, on the acclaimed fiction writer, master of the novella, gourmand, and fisherman;
  • Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam by Ray E. Boomhower, coming in 2021 on the author of Guadalcanal Diary, the first bestselling book to emerge from the Pacific theater in WWII;
  • Sparkling new translations of four of the novels in Alexandre Dumas’s timeless Musketeers Cycle by the polymathic Lawrence Ellsworth, game designer and founding member of the team that created Dungeons & Dragons;
  • Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater, by Alexis Greene, longtime theater writer, examining the life and career of the prominent woman playwright who’s excelled in a theater world long ruled by a patriarchal structure.
  • And Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by music writer Nate Patrin, published last May by University of Minnesota Press, and named to many best-of-2020 lists, which will be an audio book in 2021. 

Also in 2020, five books we had earlier sold to publishers were issued. These were:

The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving A Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra by Alex Messenger (Blackstone Publishing, trade paperback edition 2020, following 2019 hardcover edition)
The Investigator: Justice and Demons of the Balkan Wars by Vladimir Dzuro (Potomac Books)
The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson (University Press of Mississippi, hardcover; Blackstone, audiobook)
Blood Royal: A Sequel to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Lawrence Ellsworth (Pegasus Books)
Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by Nate Patrin (University of Minnesota Press, also named above)

This month marks my eleventh year as an independent editor and literary agent, and I am more energized than ever by the opportunities to work more closely with authors than I did during my latter years in corporate publishing. Even with the many challenges the book industry is facing, such as bookstores now open for only limited, distanced hours due to the lingering pandemic. I am optimistic about the book business, as readers are eager to have the companionship of books, and writers are driven to tell their singular stories.

We work on a wide range of material, with special affinity for imperative books that really matter in people’s lives. I’m always interested in first-person work from authors who’ve passed through some crucible of experience that leaves them uniquely equipped to write their book. If you have a project you’re developing, or a personal essay, and want to discuss your work, or a project you think may be ready to offer to publishers, please don’t hesitate to contact one or both of us.

Ewan can be reached at ewanmturner [@] gmail [.] com, while my contact info is philipsturner [@] gmail [.] com.

Read more