Publisher’s ‘Act of Rebellion’ Became a Thriving Business in Fine-Art Books

The small, 1930s-era turquoise building, with red hibiscus and orange poppies adorning its entrance, seems out of place along this otherwise bleak city block in Altadena.

But, then again, it would be even more out of place amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan, a city where one is more likely to find the kind of business that is done by this bustling San Gabriel Valley enterprise.

Welcome to Twelvetrees Press, publisher of fine-art and photography books, which has managed to thrive at a time when many small, independent book publishers have either gone belly up or been swallowed by big, East Coast houses.

Twelvetrees owner Jack Woody relishes his West Coast digs. In fact, it’s all part of a rebellious image carefully cultivated by Woody, who founded the company a decade ago after putting together a collection of photos of nude males with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

“When I published the book, it was an act of rebellion because the photos had sexual overtones,” said Woody, a 35-year-old Pasadena resident. “Even my parents kept it hidden away.”

But the work, by George Platt Lynes, went into a second printing after the New York Times Book Review named it as one of the year’s best selections. The proceeds from the project were used to publish a second book and soon after Woody established Twelvetrees as a nonprofit company.

Now, about 60 titles later, Twelvetrees and its sister company, Twin Palms, have emerged as two of the nation’s leading imprints for art and photography books.

“Twelvetrees sets the standard,” said Michael Gray, the top buyer for New York-based Rizzoli, one of the largest art, architecture and photography bookstores in the nation. With a trademark style of elegant black-and-white pictures and austere design and layout, Twelvetrees’ books have become known, in Gray’s words, as the “Mercedes of the photography world.”

Woody’s success has brought him offers by Knopf and Simon & Schuster, which promised to turn Twelvetrees into a “$2-million-dollar company,” he said. Woody turned them both down.

“Everyone told me that I’d have to move to New York,” he said with a wry smile, as his bare feet rested on the flower-strewn garden patio at Twelvetrees. “But working outside the system is my personality.”

Indeed, the publisher comes to work clad in ripped blue jeans and T-shirts--when he bothers to show up at all. Although shipping and business matters are now handled by a staff of three from the Altadena office, Woody does all the creative work out of his home at the Castle Green, a co-op in the former Green Hotel in Pasadena’s Old Town.

He chooses what to publish. He selects the photographs and determines the size and sequence in which they’ll appear. He does the design and layout, paying attention to every detail, including the type of paper and printing process to be used.

Among the books that Woody has produced over the years is a photographic record of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life documented by Todd Webb. He also put out a book of Herb Ritts’ photos long before Ritts became known for snapping celebrities’ pictures.

In 1985, Twelvetrees published photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s first book, “Certain People,” which featured portraits. “Photographs” was from the private collection of beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who through his camera lens documented the counterculture world of 1950s artists, writers and intellectuals.

But many of Twelvetrees’ titles are even farther out of the mainstream. Joel-Peter Witkin’s “Gods of Earth and Heaven” is filled with color photographs of cadavers, animals and transsexuals. “Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photographs in America” is a collection of photos of deceased people from the 19th Century. There is also a bevy of homoerotic works.

“I consider this an old-fashioned publishing house in that it is a reflection of my taste and my vision,” Woody said. “The whole thing is a little funky.”

So is Woody’s own background. He doesn’t have a fancy fine-arts education or a degree in literature or business. In fact, he doesn’t have a college education at all. What Woody does have, though, is a lifelong appreciation for beautiful books.

“I didn’t come to publishing from an academic point of view, but from a more natural place,” he said. “From just looking at books, holding them, reading them and loving them.”

Woody came to California in 1975, hitchhiking from his home in New Mexico. He landed a job at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in West Hollywood, where he met writers and artists, including Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy and David Hockney.

His first book, “October,” was a collection of writings and drawings by Isherwood and Bachardy. Woody launched the press with a $700 tax-return check and named it after his grandmother, actress Helen Twelvetrees.

By the time “October” was released, Woody was already at work on the Lynes’ photographs. He had received a $12,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (through the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art) and a loan from the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, which was planning an exhibition of the photographers’ works.

“There wasn’t enough money for anything but the printing,” Woody recalled. “I did everything myself. I even wrote the introduction.”

For the next five years, Woody continued to do everything himself, running the press from his Pasadena home. “Each project was sort of patched together,” he said. “The artists would put up some of the money, and we’d put up some of the money. We just did one book at a time.”

By 1985, after Bruce Webber’s photographs were published and with the mainstream success of Todd Webb’s photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, Twelvetrees grew into a three-person operation with revenues of about $350,000. The next year, with the publication of photographs by Ritts (known for his Gap advertising campaign), Twin Palms was established as a commercial venture.

“It dawned on us that it was silly to do all these books as nonprofit because a lot of them had commercial value,” Woody said. “We decided that the nonprofit would publish more esoteric books.”

Although Woody concedes his fantasy is to receive one of the MacArthur Foundation’s prestigious awards, he’s adamant about not compromising his aesthetic values to get it.

After that first NEA grant, Woody said Twelvetrees never received another grant because its work was too controversial.

“One of the reasons I started publishing these books is because no one else was doing it,” he said. “There just wasn’t an outlet for people like Mapplethorpe, Witkin or Lynes because they dealt with issues like religion and homosexuality. I never thought of the ramifications; I just knew I was doing something that was the right thing to do.”

“He is courageous,” said photographer Witkin from his home in Albuquerque, N.M. “He takes on projects that other publishers would not. He has an exquisite sense of design. You look at his books and you know it’s his work. Jack’s art is that of the beautiful book.”

Meantime, he’s doing his best to keep the Establishment from getting him.

“I never imagined that 10 years after I started I’d be running a real business,” Woody said. “I have an accountant, a lawyer and people working in an office. It’s a little scary.”