Old School Books Find a New Audience

“There is a generation of black America that waits for someone to speak to them,” says Marc Gerald, publisher of Old School Books in Los Angeles. A subsidiary of W.W. Norton, Old School is reissuing the works of black pulp-fiction writers from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Gerald thinks the time has come for a “new” black fiction, recognizing the parallels between vintage pulp and rap, both of which are story driven and reflective of street life.

In the tradition of Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler, these writers’ stories center around lowlife--drugs and barrooms, women and prison. Actually, the subject matter is a natural extension of the writers’ lifestyles, many of whom were drug addicts.

Think Bukowski, but black, and thus unknown and/or dismissed by the mainstream.

“The[se] men were too artful to be street writers and too street to be considered serious novelists. That was one problem,” Gerald explains. “The second problem was they were black. When their books were coming out, they weren’t the stories that black America wanted told about itself, and white America didn’t care.”

A former editor of True Detective magazine and a former producer of “America’s Most Wanted,” Gerald’s “Old School” is a double pun. These books are old in the sense that they were forgotten, and “old school” in the sense that they are hip-hop’s progenitors. Rap artists Ice-T and Ice Cube both took their names from Iceberg Slim, a pimp and a prolific novelist whose books have been reissued by Old School.

Still, there is a problem getting these books into the hands of those who most likely would read them: hip-hop fans.

“My market really doesn’t shop at bookstores, which, unfortunately, is where [W.W. Norton] tends to sell,” Gerald says.

In the future, Gerald hopes to use street-promotion strategies, like putting up posters, and attaching cassette singles to book jackets. For now, Old School Books are selling better overseas than in America. But some people are paying attention. Samuel L. Jackson is presently shooting a film based on the Old School reissue “Daddy Cool.”