Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers

John Martin

John Martin Black Sparrow Press began in 1966, when John Martin, an office supply executive in Los Angeles, sold his collection ofmodern first editions to finance the enterprise and began publishing works by Charles Bukowski. Operating presently from his Santa Barbara house, garage, and what was formerly the pool house, Martin continues , stubbornly independent of commercial literary trends. Black Sparrow's list includes not only Bukowski, but Paul Bowles, Robert Creeley, Clayton Eshleman, John Fante, Paul Goodman, Robert Kelly, and Diane Wakoski. And the press has recently acquired rights to all ofthe work ofBritish iconoclast Wyndham Lewis. It was a brilliant California summer day in 1981 when I met the publisherfor the first time at his house in the Santa Barbarafoothills. Red-haired, energetic, voluble, he was generous in clearing his calendarfor our conversation. I left 114 AGAINST THE GRAIN two and a halfhours later, under the shadow ofhis hundredyear -old dragon's blood tree, carrying an armload ofBlack Sparrow books. MARTIN: I want to get one idea across. If endeavors like Black Sparrow are going to go on from year to year, there's got to be more than just the energy of the publisher behind it. You need people like Barbara Martin, who designs all our books, and my assistant, Julie Curtiss, and my printer, Graham Mackintosh, to supply their creative expertise. You need kindred spirits. Graham has done the typesetting on all but half a dozen of the four hundred Black Sparrow books. And when you're dealing with somebody like that, there is a kind of give and take that keeps you going and alive as much as it keeps him going and alive. DANA: Are you saying that he chooses the types? Faces? Sizes? MARTIN: He designs the pages. But that's the least part of it. You're taking the manuscript to somebody who knows what he's looking at. DANA: As a piece of literature. MARTIN: Yes. And even if he's not interested in the author, he respects him. You never fear any kind of snide or hostile reaction. I mean he'll print anything that you respect and bring in. You don't run into any kind of moral censorship. I'm not talking about censorable material or anything like that. But there is a resistance to new ideas that you can run into in another ambience-a very conservative printer, for examplethat you don't run into when you're with somebody like Graham. I'm talking now about format and the use of color as well as content. While Graham does design the text pages, the covers and title pages of Black Sparrow books are designed by my wife, Barbara. She had a modest art education before she moved to the West Coast. And because of her art skills, working for the May Company, she got into their graphics department and then into laying out newspaper ads. That's what she was doing John Martin 115 at the time I met her and long before I considered publishing, or even knew what publishing was exactly. When I began to publish, she felt she could do a better job of designing the books than a printer. And she could, and has kept doing it. She has turned out over four hundred designs. Each one is unique, beautiful. She is the famous one. It's like owning a ball club and getting a right fielder out of the family. DANA: Well, her taste must be close to yours. MARTIN: We're interested in the same kinds of art. If you go through the Black Sparrow covers, you see everything from vorticism to the Bauhaus to pop art to art deco. I think every major twentieth-century art movement is reflected somewhere in the designs of the books, but in a subtle way. DANA: And that's her doing? MARTIN: Yes. But her style, on the other hand, is her own. DANA: My questions today really fall into two categories. The press itself and how you started it, and your book collecting and its relationship to the press. MARTIN: Well, the book collecting came first and started before I was even a teenager. I was born in San Francisco. I moved to Los Angeles in 1942 and went to school and lived in Los Angeles until 1975, when I moved to Santa Barbara. My father was an attorney in San...