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My late father Earl I. Turner (1918-92) on a trip he made to the Canadian Rockies, 1982. He went by himself and had a great adventure. On the back of the photo is written in his familiar printing, “10 Peaks, Moraigne Lake, July 1982”. Dad loved dramatic scenery, maybe one of the reasons I’ve always been partial to landscapes like this one in Canada, as well as Scotland, the Southwest, and New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where I went to Franconia College.
Please note–more photos will be posted on this page as I find them and have time to scan them. In 1973, I met my friend Rob Adams at Franconia College in New Hampshire. He’d gone to high school in Michigan, along Lake Michigan, not far from Chicago. In later years, after college, we spent a […]
Some of the things I am: blogger; curator; writer; reader; editor; Internet & and print publisher; music lover; phonograph player; radio collector, honourary Canadian; product of experimental education in high school and college; progressive; bicyclist; husband; father; friend; dog-lover; sports enthusiast; breakfast cook; film noir fan. — Early Days I was born in Cleveland, Sept. […]
Saturday was a perfect day for me and Kyle to go to Bushwick Open Studios (BOS) in Brooklyn. Our plan was to meet up with Kyle’s friend, painter Louisa Waber, and see as much as we could over the course of the afternoon. Before leaving we checked the BOS online catalog and jotted down several art venues that we knew we to wanted to hit, while still leaving opportunity for serendipitous discoveries. This year, the sixth annual BOS, there were more than 525 studios and galleries open to the public—so much to see and not enough time to see it all. What struck us immediately, and held true throughout the day, was the fresh, open, and unselfconscious quality of the artists and the work they were showing.
Our first stop was Norte Maar on Wyckoff St., where we’d read that we could pick up a printed catalog including helpful maps of the six zones where BOS was happening. After viewing the show of paper and film collages by Oliver Ralli and a video by his music group PassKontrol, we headed over to the exhibition AllTogetherNow organized by Julie Torres at The Coin Locker on Starr Street. The group of eleven artists in this show came from Australia, Europe, and across North America, having first been drawn to each other’s work on Facebook. Torres organized the exhibit and invited them to Brooklyn to show their paintings and spend time working together on collaborative pieces. All of them had met in person only for the first time in the past week. Hanging the show, she gave the artist the opportunity to step back from their work while she made connections among individual pieces that might not otherwise have emerged. The artists told us that Julie instructed them to place their works on the floor in front of the wall it would hang on and then “go get a cup of coffee.” Julie then translated the art on to the walls.
A sentiment expressed by several of the artists we spoke with, including Brian Cypher, Peter Shear, Vincent Hawkins, Inga Dalrymple, and Ian White Williams, was how they appreciated the chance to better understand each other’s creative process by collaborating on small works on paper. An artist would begin a piece and then another artist would choose to respond to the last artist’s drawn marks, shapes or color. The piece would be passed around and worked on until they felt that it was ready to put on the “finished pile.” The exhibition included works by the individual artists and the collaborative pieces they’d completed together.
Back out on Jefferson Street, we stopped for a free hot dog and iced tea outside the newly opening Cobra Club. A word to culinary carnivores: the hot dogs were from the cool Brooklyn butcher Meathook.
The next stop we made had not been on our list but the door was open and so we walked in, meeting two young female artists sharing a space on industrial Johnson Street, Alison Kizu-Blair and Sophie Stone. They told us that they’d been working in their apartments on very small-scale pieces until they decided to rent this space together. Close friends—Alison a painter and Sophie working more sculpturally—both are finding a new kind of freedom sharing the Bushwick studio. Alison said that earlier she’d only been able to work on small collages, while the studio space now allowed her to work larger and in oil paint, while her friend Sophie is able to create free-standing sculptural tiles and works in paper pulp and corrugated cardboard which she could not do in her apartment.
Next we continued on foot down desolate Johnson Street which was lined with idling trucks emitting odors and parked cement-mixing trucks until we reached The Active Space on Stewart Street to view Deborah Brown’s exhibition “Freewheeling.” The large space showed off Brown’s vibrantly painted canvases in hot saturated color that contrasted the junk cars and derelict junkyard landscapes.
Later, at The Active Space we walked in and out of studios where artists were working and meeting people. We met painter and fiber artist Emily Auchincloss who draws inspiration from weavers in Morocco who make boucherouite rugs. Another studio we visited was that of Jen Hitchings, who makes paintings related to her emotional connection with photography.
On 117 Grattan Street we were welcomed by artist Sharon Butler of the blog Two Coats of Paint where we viewed a group show curated by Austin Thomas, mounted in Sharon’s studio. This was a selection of four artists’ work that quietly related to one another. We noticed an old Royal portable typewriter that Sharon said she uses when she’s working in her studio. She does not have a computer in the studio and prefers staying offline while there. She uses the typewriter to make lists of different ideas and thoughts that come into her mind. Her views of Brooklyn rooftops and buildings provide an inspiration for her own paintings.
As the afternoon waned and we began to tire, we just had time for a visit to StorefrontBushwick on Wilson Street to see another group show. This was a collection of pieces by artists Abdolreza Aminari, Drew Shiflett, Paula Overbay, Lauren Seiden. Matthew Mahler, and Nancy Bowen. Aminari, from Iran, had delicate gold thread sewn through paper pieces, a nice contrast to Shiflett’s “Easel Sculpture #2” made from paper, fabric, glue, cardboard, wood polyester stuffing, Styrofoam and wire. In Seiden’s work, the layering of graphite on paper had a dense materiality.
Though there was much more we wanted to see, we stopped for a cold drink and a Mexican snack and the three of us shared our impressions of our afternoon’s long ramble through what amounted to only a mere sliver of BOS. We hope this report and the photos below give our readers a sense of how working artists have come together to forge a strong creative community in Bushwick, while it continues to evolve in new ways. / / more. . . click through to see all 50 + photos
On this anniversary of what would have been my late brother Joel’s 61st birthday, my sister Pamela and I remember him with all the force of memory and familial affection, as well as our departed parents, Earl and Sylvia. On May 4, 1978, the five us founded Undercover Books, the bookstore that would give all three of us siblings our adult careers. For those who didn’t know Joel–or who did and want to be reminded of his personality and accomplishments, which included a run for Congress in 2000 and earlier being among the very first online booksellers, several years before Amazon.com–you may read an obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the remembrance I wrote that was excerpted in Shelf Awareness and Bookweb. The entire piece is pasted in below, set in the Comic Sans font to which Joel was partial (for readers able to view it that way) along with photos of him.
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December 9, 2009
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
It was with great regret and sadness that we write to inform you of the recent, sudden passing of our dear brother, Joel C. Turner, 58 years old.
Many of you will recall that we three siblings together opened Undercover Books, in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1978, on May 4 of that year, with the hard-working assistance of our parents, Earl (deceased, 1992) and Sylvia (deceased, 2006). From the original location at Van Aken Shopping Center, our family-run independent chain grew to occupy a location in the historic Old Arcade of downtown Cleveland, and a shop that also featured the sale of record albums and the then-new format of CD-ROMs, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Joel’s role in the bookstores’ success and the good reputation we enjoyed in the book world was vital and indispensable. He was always generating exciting new ideas that drove our growth. Joel was a constant reader, a passionate believer in books and the power of the printed word. He derived tremendous satisfaction from selling books to the devoted readers whose trade we cultivated in our bookstores.
We were fortunate to open our business at a moment when throughout the country and particularly the midwest, much book retailing was migrating from older downtowns to suburban locales, as the book departments of long-established department stores and old-line independents gave way to new indies like us. Soon, we were being regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps from all parts of the industry, as Undercover Books became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at our stores included Mark Helprin (“Winter’s Tale”), Richard North Patterson (“The Lasko Tangent”), and Walter Tevis (“Queen’s Gambit”).
The stores, indeed the Turner family home, helmed by Sylvia’s extraordinary cooking and hospitality and Earl’s gregarious nature, and Joel’s energetic raconteurship, also became a favorite stop for sales reps and authors.
By the early 1990s, competitive and economic pressures had mounted, and Joel had the vision to reduce the brick & mortar concentration of our enterprise and transform it into an operation that served businesses, corporate libraries, schools, and public institutions. As this shift occurred, the name of the business became Undercover Book Service, which soon also had an online presence, surely one of the first online booksellers. He also developed a sideline in the antiquarian and second-hand side of the trade. Joel was a true bookseller, and also served the book industry through active participation as an officer and board member of the American Booksellers Association.
In this decade, he and Sylvia moved to a lovely part of North Carolina, where he helped her live very comfortably for the remaining years of her life. After Sylvia’s death, he built for himself a beautiful home on a scenic mountaintop in the town of Bostic, Rutherford County, North Carolina, where he died in his sleep this past weekend. In addition to the two of us–his younger brother and older sister–Joel is survived by nephew and niece Benjamin and Emma Taylor; nephew Ewan Gallup Turner; brother-in law Ev Taylor; sister-in-law Kyle Gallup; cousins Stephanie Shiff Cooper and Brian Shiff; and Uncle Myer Shiff and Aunt Linda Shiff.
Plans for memorializing Joel are being considered as we write this to you. For those wishing to mark Joel’s life with a charitable donation we urge you to make contributions to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE, http://www.abffe.com/) or for medical research in search of a cure for diabetes.
We write in sadness, but with fondness and appreciation for all the years that we three Turner siblings and our parents were recipients of your generous affection, respect, and consideration. The bookstores gave all of us, and especially Joel, great enjoyment and satisfaction, along with so many wonderful friends. Feel free to send this message on to any of your contacts in the book world.
Sincerely,
Philip Turner (philipsturner@gmail.com) and Pamela Turner (pturnertaylor@roadrunner.com)
// more. . . Please click through to the full post to see all photos.
Finding a Foothold in New York City This page of personal recollections of my path into publishing picks up where Philip Turner–Personal History ended, a web page complimentary to this one, about my years running Undercover Books with my family in Cleveland; from age sixteen attending two experimental educational institutions, the School on Magnolia, for […]
Philip Turner Book Productions is an editorial consultancy joined to a literary agency. Our company is comprised of my son Ewan Turner, Executive Editor, who came on-board in 2020, and me, Philip Turner, a publishing veteran with more than four decades of experience in all parts of the book business. Ewan is heading up New […]
When I was an editorial executive for Carroll & Graf Publishers from 2000-2007, among the most consequential narrative nonfiction books I edited and published was journalist Barbara Bisantz Raymond’s revelatory investigation The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption.” Publishers Weekly named it a Notable Book of the Year, in 2007.
The basic story—first chronicled by Raymond in an exposé for Good Housekeeping magazine, which inspired a “60 Minutes” segment and then a 1993 TV movie, “Stolen Babies,” with Mary Tyler Moore in an Emmy-winning performance as the titular figure Georgia Tann—was shocking. Tann (1891-1950), nationally lauded for supposedly arranging legal adoptions out of her Tennessee Children’s Home Society, was in reality a baby thief who stole, bartered, and brokered more than 5,000 children from unwed mothers and poor families throughout Appalachia and the South, selling them to wealthy clients around the country, including in Hollywood, where actors Dick Powell, Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford were among her clients, prominent names she would use with future customers. Protected by Memphis political boss Ed Crump, it is estimated that Tann sold more than 5,000 children, making about $5 million in mid-twentieth century dollars (equivalent to more than $100 million today).
Beginning in 1924, and ending only with Tann’s death in 1950, she virtually invented modern American adoption, popularizing it, commercializing it, and corrupting it with secrecy. To cover her crimes, Tann falsified adoptees’ birth certificates, sealing their original documents and issuing new ones that falsely claimed adoptive parents were birth parents. This secrecy was enshrined in law by legislators in the entire United States who claimed it was necessary to spare adoptees what they believed was the stain of illegitimacy.
As the years passed following the original explosion of interest in the story, Barbara Raymond continued to hear from Georgia Tann’s adult adoptees. She kept gathering string, and in 2006, Barbara’s then-agent Lynn Franklin submitted the manuscript of what would become The Baby Thief to me. I quickly made an offer to acquire the rights.
Reading the manuscript for the first time—in those days still a printout on paper—conjured up a cascade of emotions as Raymond’s reporting included many accounts of anguished parents and adult adoptees who’d been separated against their will. She revealed dozens of instances where Tann schemed to separate newly born babies from poor parents, with fictions customized for each situation; a common one was to imply that the babies would be taken from destitute parents only while they got themselves on their feet. Editing the manuscript with Barbara, I also encountered the rich trove of documentation and sources on which she based her narrative. Reading it today, as I have been this week, I see its themes continue to reverberate, with many states still denying adult adoptees their original birth certificates, though other states are now operating under reformed practices. Arguably, the book has done a lot to create more open information-sharing with families by the states.
In a contemporary sense, it strikes me now, more than fifteen years after I edited the manuscript, that the baby trafficking Georgia Tann undertook, and the national baby sales network she developed, could be said to have been a sort of proto-version of QAnon—the mythology of this decade which purports that members of the Democrat party are engaged in stealing children from their parents—only Georgia Tann really did it.
When published in hardcover, the reviews were exceptional:
“An episode in American adoption history little remembered by the public at large, the crimes of nationally-lauded Memphis orphanage director Georgia Tann are skillfully and passionately recounted by freelance writer Raymond, herself an adoptive mom. The portrait of Tann that emerges is a domineering, indefatigable figure with an insane commitment to ends-justify-the-means logic, who oversaw three decades of baby-stealing, baby-selling and unprecedented neglect. Meanwhile, she did more to popularize, commercialize and influence adoption in America than anyone before her. Tann operated carte blanche under corrupt Mayor Edward Hull Crump from the 1920s to the ’50s, employing a nefarious network of judges, attorneys, social workers and politicos, whom she sometimes bribed with “free” babies; her clients included the rich, the famous and the entirely unfit (who more than occasionally returned their disappointing children for a refund). “Spotters” located babies and young children ripe for abduction-from women too uneducated or exhausted to fight back—and Tann made standard practice of altering birth certificates and secreting away adoption records to attract buyers and cover her tracks—self-serving moves that have become standard practice in modern adoption. A riveting array of interviews with Tann’s former charges reveals adults still struggling with their adoption ordeal, childhood memories stacked with sexual abuse, torture and confusion. Raymond’s dogged investigation makes a strong case for “ridding adoptions of lies and secrets,” warning that “until we do, Tann and her imitators will continue to corrupt adoption.” A rigorous, fascinating, page-turning tale, this important book is not for the timorous.—Publishers Weekly, a starred review
“A fascinating dark tale of Ms. Tann’s influence [that] gives voice to the brokenhearted children and their birth parents damaged by her actions. [R]iveting.’”—Dallas Morning News
“Raymond recounts this astonishing and horrifying true story with tremendous self-awareness and intrepid research into Tann’s ongoing legacy.”—The Tampa Tribune
“Fascinating, insightful, chilling and compelling. A very important book and a terrific read.”—Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of Adoption Nation
I thought so highly of the book that when I moved to a new editorial position early in 2008—to run Sterling Publishing’s Union Square Press imprint—I quickly acquired the reprint rights to the book, and published it in trade paperback later that year. In the years that followed the book attained elevated status among adult adoptees and their families. As one measure of its impact, web pages for the book on Amazon and Goodreads total more than 2000 comments from grateful readers, with remarks like this one:
“Thank you for lending your voice to those still seeking their families lost. I recommend this book. In memory of my precious father in law, Fred Crumley, who was an amazing dad, paw, I am still seeking truth for our family. His birth mother was Carrie Cates. He was adopted from The Tennessee Children’s Home Society, along with a sister.”
Sadly, agent Lynn Franklin, who’d represented many important authors along with Barbara Bisantz Raymond, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, died in 2021 at age 74. Barbara, who lives in my old hometown of Cleveland, and I have stayed in touch over the years. Recently, she contacted me when a documentary producer got in touch with her about the book and my company Philip Turner Book Productions is now her literary agent. In addition to possible adaptations for a documentary or a feature, and possibly a new paperback edition, I also hope to make a deal on the author’s behalf for an audiobook, as there has never been one.
In the meantime, if you have an interest in adoption, and want to know how our practices surrounding it developed in the last century, or if you just want to read a superbly paced narrative nonfiction book, a true crime thriller with a powerful social message, I suggest you pick up a copy of The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption. 