Scenes: Warbler Press an interview with Mary Bahr

Could you briefly describe your press's history?

Mary Bahr founded Warbler Press in January of 2019. Drawing on her experience in the publicity, publishing, and editorial departments at the University of California Press, Simon & Schuster, and Random House, she envisioned a new publishing model that avoids some common pitfalls of traditional publishing: author exploitation, cumbersome production processes, disproportionate overhead, outdated marketing and publicity models, and a lack of cooperation between publisher and author.

At the same time, she saw an opportunity for a small yet agile press to maximize new and existing technologies to publish high quality paperback and ebook editions of classic and original titles for instant global distribution across all platforms, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores, and other outlets.

Warbler Press officially launched with the publication of The Prophet with The Forerunner and The Madman, a new edition of Kahlil Gibran's classic with a new, specially commissioned introduction by Ulrich Baer and Glenn Wallis, paired with the editor's podcast on the book's enduring relevance. Since its founding, Warbler Press has published more than fifty high-quality books across a wide variety of genres.

In April of 2020, after collaborating on a dozen classic editions with Bahr, Ulrich Baer joined Warbler Press as Editorial Director. Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography. A graduate of Harvard and Yale and the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships, he has published with leading academic and commercial publishers on poetry, fiction, photography, and general topics. He is also the creator and host of the popular podcast Think About It. His expertise and use of new media dovetail seamlessly with the spirit and aims of Warbler Press.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Warbler Press publishes an unpredictable mix of classics, rediscovered masterpieces, and meaningful and sometimes audacious original work. Classic Warbler Press titles have new introductions for twenty-first century readers that draw on the most up-to-date scholarship, and often include original reviews or relevant yet lesser known texts by the author.

Classics like Mary Austin's bestselling The Land of Little Rain with exquisitely reproduced original illustrations, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with a new afterword geared to today's readers, Jerome K. Jerome's hilarious Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) with original illustrations, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man with an introduction reflecting on America's race relations today, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year with an afterword addressing modern pandemics, and new books like Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts and An Anarchist's Manifesto express an editorial through-line that might be described as eclectic, sophisticated, entertaining, and socially relevant.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

We publish for a global audience of general readers, book enthusiasts, academics, teachers, and students. We rely on word-of-mouth, carefully curated social media campaigns and engagement, our authors, and strategic outreach to traditional media to find our readers. We are focused on providing new books for readers who thirst for meaningful content but are not inclined to purchase expensive academic editions as an introductory text. The Warbler Press Contemplations series, for example, includes five slender, accessible, yet expertly edited texts on love with selections from Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare.

With the anthology of first texts published by a range of writers deliberately excluded from or overlooked in the American canon, Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts (2020), we have added a usable, affordable, and expertly researched and produced textbook for high school and college students. By engaging directly with teachers and readers on our social media channels and producing accompanying podcasts with the world's leading experts on these overlooked texts, we are appealing to a new generation of readers that may not encounter new books via traditional channels.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

Warbler Press seeks to provide a publishing partnership with established and emerging authors. As mega-houses consolidate...