Throughout the office of New Directions Publishing — which occupies a modest space on the 19th floor of a Modernist building at 14th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City — there are clues to the small publisher’s big history: An original painting by Henry Miller hangs on the wall next to a prescription written by Dr. William Carlos Williams; a library in the back has a first-edition copy of the first book Vladimir Nabokov published in English — a thin blue pamphlet with “Nine Stories” scrawled across the cover — and old paperbacks with covers by Andy Warhol, who painted for New Directions during his early advertising days. One image stands out, though: a shadowy photograph of the publisher’s founder, the late James Laughlin (“JL” to his staff), smoking a pipe. That picture rests in the office of Barbara Epler, New Directions’ current editor-in-chief, publisher and president.
“He would always come up to my desk and say, ‘It’s time for your pop quiz,’ ” Epler said. “Which I always failed. He’d say something like: ‘The owl for all his feathers has a cold’ and I’d say, ‘Shelley?’ And he’d shout ‘Keats!’ and then leave.”
New Directions began in Laughlin’s dorm room at Harvard in 1936. Two years before, as an aspiring poet, he had traveled to Paris, where he met Ezra Pound. Famously, Pound told him to “do something useful,” and Laughlin began his humble publishing press. For three-quarters of a century, it has been at the forefront of the literary avant-garde, publishing the books that larger houses would never touch. When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack Up” failed to find a home anywhere else, New Directions published it. When Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locusts” fell out of print, Laughlin’s house brought them back. It has been the home of Tennessee Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Carson and Jorge Luis Borges and more recently produced the first English translations of Roberto Bolaño, a pet project of Epler’s. She started working for New Directions after college in 1984 and, with only meager resources, has carried out what Laughlin began. On its 75th anniversary, New Directions continues to publish difficult, often anti-commercial literature at a time when imprints are closing and fiction publishers are struggling to find an audience.
“JL used to quote Gertrude Stein,” recalled Epler. “Saying, there’s this thing that happens when you read something new: A bell rings. Or like you feel the top of your head lift off. So when you feel that, that’s probably a sign that it’s a New Directions book.”
The publishing house began with the compendium “New Directions in Prose and Poetry,” the first in what would become an annual anthology that collected work by the authors in the house’s early stable: Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Henry Miller, among others. Reflective of its young publisher’s naiveté, the volume had no page numbers.
New Directions quickly became less scrappy, but still remains far outside the model of mainstream publishing. In 2001, when Epler received a galley of Roberto Bolaño’s “By Night in Chile,” which had been quietly circulating among editors in New York but had yet to find a publisher, she read the book in a single night, went into the office the next day and suggested to the staff that they buy it immediately. The agent told Epler she could only buy the book if she bought three more titles by Bolaño, and she did. Shortly after the deal was made, Bolaño passed away. As the translations appeared and the author’s stateside stature grew, his widow decided to go with a larger publisher for her husband’s major works, “The Savage Detectives” and “2666.” Epler made what she calls the single largest offer of her career to publish the two novels: $30,000.
“Which is more than I’ve paid for a book in my life by like a zillion miles,” she said. “There’s this problem of smaller pockets.”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux released the books to great acclaim and even better sales.
Today, New Directions is perhaps the most high-profile of small publishers. In 2010, it published Anne Carson’s acclaimed “Nox,” a collection of poems, letters and photographs about the poet’s dead brother, all collected in a small box, the kind of luxurious physical object that, more and more, the publishing industry shies away from. This fall, the house released Helen Dewitt’s “Lightning Rods,” a brilliant satire about American commerce in which the protagonist, Joe, starts a business installing glory holes in the bathroom stalls of major corporations. It is wild and pornographic and hilarious, but even Bill Clegg, one of the most powerful agents in New York, could not get it published. It went through 17 editors (and, finally, a different agent) before landing on the desk of Jeffrey Yang at New Directions.
Like her predecessor, Epler cites Ezra Pound as a major influence, and a continuing reminder of New Directions’ purpose.
“You have your English teacher,” she said, “giving you Sophocles in an English translation. Pound was a genius because he’d demand you’d read Sophocles in Greek. That’s really what New Directions stands for: They bring you these lunatics.”
And, most importantly, it finds these “lunatics” before anyone else. Since 1987, it has put out the collected works of Tomas Tranströmer, recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. (The book’s original print run was only 2,000 copies. When the award was announced in October, Epler and her staff had to scramble to make more available.)
It’s that sort of adaptability that leads Epler to believe New Directions will live to see its 100th anniversary, and beyond.
“Years ago, I thought the big publishers were like dinosaurs and the smaller publishers like mammals,“ said Epler. “Even though we look less impressive, we might be what survives.”
“He would always come up to my desk and say, ‘It’s time for your pop quiz,’ ” Epler said. “Which I always failed. He’d say something like: ‘The owl for all his feathers has a cold’ and I’d say, ‘Shelley?’ And he’d shout ‘Keats!’ and then leave.”
New Directions began in Laughlin’s dorm room at Harvard in 1936. Two years before, as an aspiring poet, he had traveled to Paris, where he met Ezra Pound. Famously, Pound told him to “do something useful,” and Laughlin began his humble publishing press. For three-quarters of a century, it has been at the forefront of the literary avant-garde, publishing the books that larger houses would never touch. When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack Up” failed to find a home anywhere else, New Directions published it. When Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locusts” fell out of print, Laughlin’s house brought them back. It has been the home of Tennessee Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Carson and Jorge Luis Borges and more recently produced the first English translations of Roberto Bolaño, a pet project of Epler’s. She started working for New Directions after college in 1984 and, with only meager resources, has carried out what Laughlin began. On its 75th anniversary, New Directions continues to publish difficult, often anti-commercial literature at a time when imprints are closing and fiction publishers are struggling to find an audience.
“JL used to quote Gertrude Stein,” recalled Epler. “Saying, there’s this thing that happens when you read something new: A bell rings. Or like you feel the top of your head lift off. So when you feel that, that’s probably a sign that it’s a New Directions book.”
The publishing house began with the compendium “New Directions in Prose and Poetry,” the first in what would become an annual anthology that collected work by the authors in the house’s early stable: Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Henry Miller, among others. Reflective of its young publisher’s naiveté, the volume had no page numbers.
New Directions quickly became less scrappy, but still remains far outside the model of mainstream publishing. In 2001, when Epler received a galley of Roberto Bolaño’s “By Night in Chile,” which had been quietly circulating among editors in New York but had yet to find a publisher, she read the book in a single night, went into the office the next day and suggested to the staff that they buy it immediately. The agent told Epler she could only buy the book if she bought three more titles by Bolaño, and she did. Shortly after the deal was made, Bolaño passed away. As the translations appeared and the author’s stateside stature grew, his widow decided to go with a larger publisher for her husband’s major works, “The Savage Detectives” and “2666.” Epler made what she calls the single largest offer of her career to publish the two novels: $30,000.
“Which is more than I’ve paid for a book in my life by like a zillion miles,” she said. “There’s this problem of smaller pockets.”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux released the books to great acclaim and even better sales.
Today, New Directions is perhaps the most high-profile of small publishers. In 2010, it published Anne Carson’s acclaimed “Nox,” a collection of poems, letters and photographs about the poet’s dead brother, all collected in a small box, the kind of luxurious physical object that, more and more, the publishing industry shies away from. This fall, the house released Helen Dewitt’s “Lightning Rods,” a brilliant satire about American commerce in which the protagonist, Joe, starts a business installing glory holes in the bathroom stalls of major corporations. It is wild and pornographic and hilarious, but even Bill Clegg, one of the most powerful agents in New York, could not get it published. It went through 17 editors (and, finally, a different agent) before landing on the desk of Jeffrey Yang at New Directions.
Like her predecessor, Epler cites Ezra Pound as a major influence, and a continuing reminder of New Directions’ purpose.
“You have your English teacher,” she said, “giving you Sophocles in an English translation. Pound was a genius because he’d demand you’d read Sophocles in Greek. That’s really what New Directions stands for: They bring you these lunatics.”
And, most importantly, it finds these “lunatics” before anyone else. Since 1987, it has put out the collected works of Tomas Tranströmer, recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. (The book’s original print run was only 2,000 copies. When the award was announced in October, Epler and her staff had to scramble to make more available.)
It’s that sort of adaptability that leads Epler to believe New Directions will live to see its 100th anniversary, and beyond.
“Years ago, I thought the big publishers were like dinosaurs and the smaller publishers like mammals,“ said Epler. “Even though we look less impressive, we might be what survives.”
PHOTO: Bryan Bedder/The Daily
New Directions publisher Barbara Epler.
PHOTO: Bryan Bedder/The Daily
Shelves display some of the titles published by New Directions.
