Small Press Runs On a Grand Ideal

“We didn’t set out to make a profit, and we have succeeded gloriously,” Norman Tanis, founder of Cal State Northridge’s Santa Susana Press, likes to joke.

Despite its proud non-commercialism, the campus-based small press may have a rampant best seller in its most recent publication, an illustrated edition of “George Silverman’s Explanation.” Of course, Santa Susana’s idea of a best-seller isn’t the same as Knopf’s.

Since the book was published this spring, about 200 copies have been sold. That’s almost two-thirds of the entire printing, limited to 326 copies to enhance its attractiveness to collectors.

Labors for Love

One of an estimated 15,000 small presses in the United States, Santa Susana is a micropublisher that labors for love.

That is not to say it totally eschews profit. “George Silverman” cost $40 a book to produce. It sells for $85, or $110 in a slipcase, and enough copies have already been sold to cover costs. A major reason for the book’s success appears to be its author. Its title may not be famous, but the man who wrote it is. Originally published in Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1868, “George Silverman’s Explanation” was the last work of fiction by Charles Dickens.

The creation of “George Silverman’s Explanation” illustrates how Santa Susana makes beautiful literary objects out of the sometimes obsessive efforts of people who are willing to trade time and talent for a few complimentary copies of the finished product and the satisfaction of at least having tried to do it right.

The Santa Susana “George Silverman,” for example, contains 37 illustrations by Irving Block, a retired Northridge art professor. Block went to Britain at his own expense to research the drawings, seeking to see the things that Dickens saw and that might have come to his mind’s eye when he wrote the story.

Block visited Dickens’ home in London, for instance. “The feeling of Charlie was around,” the artist recalled. “I wanted to talk to him, but I couldn’t find him. He must have been in the bathroom.”

While working on the drawings, Block was in almost daily consultation with the book’s editor, Northridge English professor Harry Stone, as to Dickens’ intent in a particular scene or phrase.

Delighted With Project

“He (Block) gave me a $40,000 treatment, in illustrations, for nothing,” Tanis said. Block, who can’t even write off his trip abroad as a business expense, is delighted with the project. “I’m going to England again just to double-check that I was right,” said Block, who was given 20 copies of the book as a token of Santa Susana’s appreciation.

Unlike such puckishly named small publishing houses as Permanent Press and Full Court Press, Santa Susana simply pays homage to the mountains behind Northridge’s Oviatt Library. Tanis, who is director of libraries for the campus, chose the name when he founded the press in 1973.

The press’s first publication was a fine facsimile edition of an incunabulum, a Latin treatise on geography printed before 1500, that was given to the library that year to mark its opening. But buyers of Latin treatises were few, Tanis recalled. “I think I had to give them all away.”

Tanis has become a wiser publisher since then. Marketability, he said, is the first criterion for publication by Santa Susana, a prudent standard given that it routinely prints on paper that costs $1 a page. Once he is convinced that a particular project will sell, Tanis said, he asks himself: “Second, is it worth doing, and, third, does it lend itself to an aesthetic or pleasing presentation in print?”

Tanis distributed some of his early titles by putting copies in his car and driving around to booksellers. Since then the press has refined its distribution technique and announces each new publication to a mailing list of several hundred libraries and special-interest book dealers. Two-thirds of Santa Susana’s projects break even or better, he said. The press operates on loans from the CSUN Foundation, which administers non-state funds on campus.

Fastidious Printers, Illustrators

Tanis compares publishing a fine book to directing a play, with the added satisfaction of creating something permanent. Dealing with fastidious printers and illustrators who fly to Europe to make sure they get their drawings right is a major part of the payoff. “I have a weakness for people who love what they are doing and do it well and insist on doing it well,” Tanis said. “I guess that meshes with something in me.”

Among Santa Susana’s 38 titles are two by its founder, including an analysis of the implications for libraries of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. Indeed, Tanis can think of only one drawback to heading a small press. “I like everything but fighting with authors,” he said.

The press’s most notorious prima donna was the late William Saroyan. In 1979, Santa Susana published an illustrated edition of two Saroyan plays under the title, “Two Short Paris Summertime Plays of 1974.”

“He was a terrible man to deal with,” Tanis recalled. Saroyan rewrote both plays after the type for the book had been set, the sort of costly self-indulgence that causes publishers to despair.

Tanis said he believes that Saroyan acted imperiously because he knew that his publishers would put up with almost anything to make sure that he would autograph the volumes. “Without his signature, the books were worth about half as much,” Tanis said. Saroyan finally signed the limited edition.

Tanis still wonders if the project was worth the unpleasantness. “I guess I dined out on it a lot so maybe it was worth it in that sense,” he said, recalling the social mileage he got from his tales of a sour Saroyan. For his part, Saroyan was so pleased with the final product that he praised it with a not-so-faint damn. As Tanis recalled: “He said to me afterward, ‘I can’t understand how a crummy little college, with you guys in charge, can put out such a beautiful book.’ ”

The opportunity to create a fine version of a virtually unknown Dickens tale was what prompted Harry Stone to pitch the idea of publishing “George Silverman’s Explanation” to Santa Susana. The Dickens scholar first read the disturbing story as an undergraduate and has been haunted by it ever since. “Only experts have ever heard of this,” said Stone, who wrote the critical essay included in the book. “And yet, it’s Dickens last work of fiction. It’s never been published as a book before and it’s never been illustrated.”

The story, which is really a novel in miniature, deals with Silverman’s emergence from shocking childhood deprivation to an adulthood of respectability and undeserved loss. It was written Gad’s Hill Place, the estate near Rochester where he lived later in life. The story earned its famous author the equivalent of $50,000 or more in today’s dollars.

Santa Susana sometimes prints its books in-house, using one of six hand presses in the library collection. “George Silverman” was printed in Pasadena by Patrick Reagh. Bound in decorated blue cloth over boards, it is printed on acid-free paper, a given at Santa Susana.

Tanis had harsh words for publishers who allow books to be printed on ordinary paper, which ultimately turns brown and crumbles. “That’s the only capital punishment I’m in favor of,” he said. For mass-market publishers, the cost of using acid-free paper is about 11 cents more per volume, he said. A binding that would survive more than a single reader would add another 12 cents to the cost of mass-produced book.

According to Stone, Dickens believed that literature was a human essential. “He felt that reading and literature had saved him as a child, and that they could save others, too,” Stone said. Santa Susana makes books voluptuously, even fussily, as if Dickens was right.