Celebrating the Black Experience

In a fall publishing season unusually crowded with books by celebrity authors, the media attention given to Marlon Brando, Robert Evans, Paul Reiser, Tim Allen, Barbara Bush and others can easily eclipse the merits of quieter titles.

However, one unheralded area of publishing--historical reference books and literary anthologies about the African American experience--continues to burgeon with little fanfare.

Among the latest notable releases are two with a common search: “In Search of Color Everywhere,” a handsome collection of African American poetry edited by E. Ethelbert Miller, and “Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for People of Africa,” a coffee-table volume of striking images taken by photographer Chester Higgins Jr. in his decades of travel around the globe.

“In Search of Color Everywhere” gathers 210 signature poems and lesser-known efforts in thematic categories. The section of healing verses includes staples such as Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Among the poems celebrating blackness are the words to James Brown’s seminal hit recording, “Say It Loud--I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

The publisher, Stewart Tabori & Chang, which is better known for producing coffee-table books, had put out the word that it wished to anthologize black poetry in an elegantly designed edition. Terrance Cummings got the nod to illustrate the text with woodcut-style drawings. Miller, a poet and director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, was chosen to assemble the collection after proposing that the book be accessible even to readers who did not like poetry.

The hardest part, Miller said, was making his final selections, particularly when he had several poems about one topic. “For example, I had eight different ones about getting hair cut in a barber shop,” he said, choosing “Barbershop Ritual” by Sharan Strange:

Head-bowed, church-solemn/he sheds hair like motherlove & virginity.

To spread the word, Miller is being joined in public readings by other poets represented in the anthology, including Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, who were with him at Monday’s launch party at the Rizzoli bookstore in Soho in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, just as Stewart Tabori & Chang does not come swiftly to mind for poetry, Bantam Books, publisher of Reiser’s comic bestseller, “Couplehood,” would not make a short list of houses known for doing coffee-table volumes. But Bantam’s six-figure bid two years ago won a spirited auction among publishers for Higgins’ “Feeling the Spirit,” which shows the people of Africa in settings around the world.

Here are dramatic portraits from back roads Alabama, exotic Haiti (far from the CNN cameras), the Sahara sands and other far-flung locales, interspersed with essays by Higgins, who is also a staff photographer with the New York Times.

Bantam, which markets its releases aggressively, has enlisted the Terrie Williams Agency, a well-connected public relations firm that represents a variety of black-oriented projects, to help introduce “Feeling the Spirit.” The publisher also has been targeting black media and displaying blown-up images from the book in stores. Like Miller, Higgins also will head out on tour to tell his story.

On the Racks: Food & Wine has thinned its logo and shaved about three-quarters of an inch off its width, starting with October’s issue showcasing dishes and vintages of Italy. The aim is to make the magazine more user-friendly.

Meanwhile, the menu of high-tone culinary mags has grown to include Saveur, which aims to “dive deep into the world of food” by dwelling not only on completed recipes but also on the origins of ingredients.

The September/October premiere (not to be confused with a spring preview issue designed to gauge reader and advertiser interest) represents the second start-up this year by the new Meigher Communications, based in New York. Garden Design was its first.