Membreblacksparrow

Over four years have passed since John Martin, the founder and for thirty-six years the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, closed down his shop in Santa Rosa, California and entrusted David R. Godine with keeping Black Sparrow’s offerings available to the trade and to the public.

In the fall of 2002, Black Sparrow Press became Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, under the direction of Christopher Carduff, consummate editor and publisher. Chris Carduff’s steady hand at the helm and keen vision kept Black Sparrow’s best-selling titles in print and the house's spirit alive through judicious acquisitions.

The first Black Sparrow Books title—Mirage, a novel by Bandula Chandraratna—was published in September 2003, followed by a reissue of The Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester and new collections by Wanda Coleman, Clayton Eshleman, Robert Kelly, and Ed Sanders—all five writers long associated with the Black Sparrow name.

Over the next three years, Carduff acquired and edited new titles that complemented and expanded upon the literary aesthetic of Black Sparrow Press. He published Isobel English’s exquisite novel Every Eye; he collected for the first time in one volume the fiction of Kenneth Burke, better known for his criticism as the “American Coleridge”; he made available once more the complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975; and he revived and republished the work of veteran Hollywood screenwriter and novelist Daniel Fuchs in The Golden West: Hollywood Stories and The Brooklyn Novels.

While Chris has set sail for new horizons, thanks to his efforts we are looking forward now to the publication of more Reznikoff—one of the great long poems of the late 20th century—Holocaust, to another Alfred Chester novel, Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire, and to a reprint of D.H. Lawrence classic Birds, Beasts, and Flowers! in an edition that re-sets the text in the format of the first edition (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923) and restores several "indecent" lines suppressed by the original publisher.

You will find these books announced on the “new and noteworthy” page of our website. You will also find the covers and detailed descriptions of all titles, new and old, by clicking on authors’ names in blue in the left-hand column of the website or by searching by title or author.

The original Black Sparrow Press was named after “the most common trash bird,” according to John Martin, “which people try to eradicate, poison, frighten away,” but which survives. Not only did this tenacious bird survive its flight across the country, it seems to be flourishing, even in this harsher New England clime.

—Susan Barba, editor and publisher

John Martin, the great collector of avant-garde books, visionary patron of Charles Bukowski, and founder, publisher, and for thirty-six years sole proprietor of Black Sparrow Press, once said:

"There have always been two streams in American literature. First, the 'insiders,' the ones who conform to accepted standards. Some of these insiders are very good writers . . . but their work is of interest only up to a point, [because] they completely satisfy readers' expectations of what literature should be. On the other hand, there has also been this second, parallel stream of 'outsiders'––mavericks, beginning with Walt Whitman. To my way of thinking, Leaves of Grass is the first great modern literary statement . . . and to this day, perhaps the greatest and most astounding."

From 1966 through 2002, Martin sought out the great and astounding statements of America's literary outsiders, writers whose kinship is with the red blood of Whitman not the blue blood of Longfellow, with the dirty hands of Dreiser not the kid gloves of Edith Wharton. Writers who, on the whole, have looked west, toward the frontier and its promise of wildness, and away from the east, away from "civilization" and its received ideas of excellence and form. And Martin found them––in little magazines, in collectors' libraries, and among that band of bards and truth-tellers who emerged from the jazz cellars of the 1950s into the Day-Glo orange sunshine of the 1960s and '70s.

The poet Robert Kelly has said that without Black Sparrow, much of the literature of the '60s would today exist only in memories––memories of the monologues of the post-Beat poets and the sweet smell of mimeographed chapbooks. The critic Neil Gordon, riffing on the same theme, said that Martin did nothing less than give permanence to the ephemeral, "providing the published texts of a generation of vital work that would otherwise have been lost"––lost to talk, lost to the browning of newsprint, lost to the crushing forces of the cultural mainstream.

John Martin retired from publishing on July 1, 2002, but his outsider literary legacy will endure. Bukowski lives––indeed he and a handful of his old Black Sparrow stablemates (Paul Bowles, John Fante, and Joyce Carol Oates especially) not only live but now thrive on the "inside": times change, and tastes change, and small presses like Martin's are powerful compact agents of change. Best of all, the published books themselves still live––and are now available from David R. Godine, Publisher.

On this Web site you will find, and be able to purchase, John Martin's Black Sparrow backlist, of which Godine is the exclusive licensed distributor. These are not reprints: they are the original publisher's editions, trucked direct from John Martin's former Santa Rosa warehouse to ours. Most of the books are hand-sewn, on creamy, heavy, acid-free paper, with distinctive cover and text designs by Barbara Martin. Most of the books, once they are sold out, will not be reprinted. Only a select few will be—and they will be joined by judiciously selected new titles published under Godine's Black Sparrow Books imprint.

The Black Sparrow backlist is an American literary treasure that we intend to keep intact, available, and alive for many years to come. Here, for newcomers and long-term admirers alike, are the real goods, a flashing heaven of good books. Welcome to the Great Outside.