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HOW I CAME TO BE A PUBLISHER OF TEXAS FOLKLORE SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS by Frances Brannen Vick  E-Heart Press, named after our father’s old family cattle brand, was founded by my brother, J. P. Brannen, and myself when our father died and we ended up with a little cash from the sale of his cattle. We had also rediscovered his memoirs from World War I, written many years before, and decided they should be published. That was the original thought about starting E-Heart Press. It seemed the logical and right thing to do—publish our father’s memoirs with the proceeds from the sale of those cattle he loved and petted, and even named on occasion. It had been very painful for me to sell Sophia Loren, whom he had raised by hand since her mother had died at her birth. Sophia was more like a pet dog than a cow. She knew who her parent was and followed him lovingly whenever he was around. But back to E-Heart. I was teaching English at Baylor University at the time and got involved with students working for the Baylor student newspaper . They came to me with a scheme to buy some old typesetting equipment, which I foolishly thought we could use to typeset the World War I memoirs. I am foggy about where that typesetting equipment came from—Baylor or an ad the kids saw somewhere and knew where a sucker was that would help finance their grand schemes. The plans for publishing the memoirs got put on hold when Bill Wittliff quit publishing the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society and Ab Abernethy could not find another publisher to take his place. Thus, in my ignorance of publishing (and almost everything else I sometimes think), Roger Lindstrom and I decided we could take on the job and got in touch with Ab with our plan. Ab and I met at the Red Lantern Cafe in Buffalo during one of those Texas northers that blow through sometimes, freezing Texans’ bones, and we struck a deal. 131 As far as I am concerned, I started publishing very close to the top with the Texas Folklore Society publication Built in Texas, edited by F. E. Abernethy, published in 1979. Ab became my mentor in publishing, as J. Frank Dobie had been to Bill Wittliff. However , unlike Wittliff, I was learning from the bottom up since I knew absolutely nothing about publishing. I had been teaching English all those years before, so it was a fast learning curve. Of course, I would start out with a coffee table book, full of Ab’s photographs and Reese Kennedy’s sketches. Just to make it more difficult to design, print, and bind, it was in an 8 1 ⁄2 × 11 format, bound on the short side. Furthermore, we would run Ab’s photographs in duo-tones, not quite as expensive as 4-color, but almost. No point in starting out with something simple. Built in Texas was designed and typeset by Roger, who was also one of those students who had talked me into buying that typesetting equipment. If my memory serves me right, that was the only book typeset on that equipment. We found a printer, Motheral in Fort Worth, to print the book, and I took out a loan at the bank to pay for all of this foolishness. Daddy’s cow money 132 Books, Papers, and Presentations: Texas Folklore Scholarship Built in Texas, PTFS XLII, 1979 wasn’t enough. Today, I occasionally see the banker who made the loan and he still teases me about it. At the time, he acted as if he didn’t want me to take out the loan because it was not a good deal for me but I talked him into it. He laughs at that since he was ecstatic to get the loan. He finally had something to show the feds when they showed up for examinations. He could show that he was fulfilling his obligation to help out minorities with his loan to a woman. We’ve come a long way, Baby—at least I think we have. Bill Shearer was part of the marketing arm of Texas A&M University Press, and when he went to the different stores selling books for that press he would mention a new press that was publishing the Texas Folklore Society books, so some marketing was going on in spite of my still-naïve knowledge of...

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