A Grower’s Saga of Roots Bears Fruit

And now, for the encouragement of wannabe novelists facing the harsh reality of New York publishing, the story of 73-year-old prune grower Bruno Buti.

After suffering a wake-up call heart attack in 1988, Buti (pronounced “booty”) decided that what he really wanted to do was write a novel. And he had an idea, the escapades of his father and cousin, Italian bootleggers who operated secret stills in the 1920s in Crow Canyon northeast of San Francisco.

Buti wrote the 90,000-word book in longhand, using the hood of his Jeep for a desk, in between stints of pruning his orchard. With “Rumbling Barrels” finally completed, Buti felt that he had a winner. The novel had adventure and drama, and treated a heretofore neglected segment of U.S. history, Prohibition in the West.

Then he came up against the hard reality of the publishing world. “Nobody would even look at my manuscript,” Buti said. “Editors told me it was a waste of time even to submit a query letter. They told me publishers never read the slush pile submissions.”

One editor whom Buti managed to reach spelled out the cold truth: “We don’t publish novels,” the editor said. “We publish authors.” And publishing houses were already flooded with manuscripts from established writers.

The editor’s advice: “Print 100 copies on your own dime for your friends and forget it.”

“But he didn’t know Bruno Buti,” Buti said. In September, Buti had 2,500 copies printed at his own expense. By December, he had sold all of them. And now he’s selling out a second printing.

His secret? He sells his hard-bound novel of Prohibition antics, for $20 a copy, at area wineries.

“I started with a couple of local Italian wineries,” Buti said. “There’s lots of traffic, and people are drinking wine, having a good time. I got the managers to put the book in the gift shops.”

Buti had other inventive marketing ploys. Cloverdale, 60 miles north of San Francisco, has no bookstore. Buti sells his book at Ace Hardware, where the manager agreed to set up a display along the front aisle. According to store employees, the first two shipments have sold out.

Buti also made a deal with a major fruit grower to distribute a new, orange-flavored prune. “I give out samples of the prune at shopping malls and push my book at the same time,” Buti said.

Although “Rumbling Barrels” is fiction, Buti said, it is based on the real adventures of his bootlegging father and particularly his cousin, who not only operated moonshine stills but hijacked trucks. “They were a tough bunch,” Buti said, “and so were a lot of the crooked federal officers.”

Buti said that his father was frequently shaken down by revenue agents and that once the 12-year-old Bruno was told to hold a shotgun on two agents while his father made a getaway. Buti said the hooch that his father distilled in remote canyons was an Italian variation of corn moonshine.

But it came to be called “Jackass Brandy” because of the mules and donkeys that the bootleggers used to haul sugar and mash to the hidden stills.

Buti is working on a sequel to “Rumbling Barrels,” titled “Jackass Brandy.” The novel-writing game, which looked so bleak at the beginning, has turned out to be fun, Buti said.

“They did everything they could to discourage me, but I’m not some starving artist in a garret. I’ve got the wherewithal to print my own book. And I figured, if they can do it, I can do it.”