A Farewell to Literary L.A.’s Black Sparrow

Black Sparrow Press, California’s preeminent literary publisher, has sold the rights to its three leading authors and will halt operations July 1, according to its founder and editor, John Martin.

New York-based Ecco, an imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins, has purchased the California publisher’s rights to 49 books by Charles Bukowski, John Fante and Paul Bowles, as well as the rights to five unpublished collections of poetry by Bukowski, who died in 1994. Fante, who died in 1983, wrote fiction and screenplays, including the classic Los Angeles novels “Wait Until Spring, Bandini” and “Ask the Dust.” Bowles, who died in 1999, was a writer, composer and poet, particularly admired for “The Sheltering Sky.” Ecco previously has published seven of his books and now has acquired six more from Black Sparrow.

Neither Martin nor Daniel Halpern, Ecco’s longtime editorial director, would comment on the purchase price, but a source close to the deal said it “involved seven figures.” Halpern and Martin said they are continuing to discuss Ecco’s possible acquisition of other authors from Black Sparrow’s extensive backlist, as well as its contracts with selected contemporary writers, including L.A. poet Wanda Coleman.

Both publishers also stressed that their agreement had been reached with the cooperation of Linda Bukowski and Joyce Fante, the writers’ widows.

“I started Black Sparrow 36 years ago to publish Bukowski, and things just grew from there,” said Martin, whose Santa Rosa-based press helped make the German-born Los Angeles writer one of the 20th century’s bestselling poets. “Then, about six weeks ago, I got a call out of the blue from Dan Halpern, who asked if I would be interested in selling Black Sparrow. We talked on and off for a few weeks, and then it dawned on me that I am 71 years old and my last vacation was in 1974. Since then, I’ve worked seven days a week. So, I thought, what the hell!”

HarperCollins, he said, “came up with a number that astonished me. So, even though they purchased just three authors, they paid as if they were buying the whole press.”

Although Martin is trying to persuade HarperCollins to take a few more of his authors, he said, he has also lined up a third party, whom he declined to name, to take over his backlist, keep it in print and sign contracts with his living authors for their next books. “So, it’s an all-around good deal for everyone,” he said, “including my three employees, who will get pretty generous severance packages.”

Halpern, whose imprint also publishes the literary magazine Antaeus, said he initially approached Martin about Bowles’ books. However, the talks soon expanded to include Bukowski and Fante.

Halpern said Ecco’s “goal is to use these two authors to celebrate Los Angeles and to make contact with all the serious readers there who have been overlooked and neglected as a market by New York publishers. One thing we want to do is to stage an event to celebrate Bukowski, Fante and John Martin, though John hates the idea of including him so much I told him he could attend in disguise.”

Acutely aware that he has acquired the crown jewels of a local cultural icon, Halpern is at pains to point out that he is “from Los Angeles--Van Nuys, actually--so even though I’ve spent half my life on the other coast, I can be trusted. I’m fully aware that there’s nothing else like Black Sparrow in California--or anywhere else in the country, for that matter. It’s one-off from the imagination of John Martin.”

If it were not true, the story of Black Sparrow’s beginnings would be the stuff of literary legend: In 1966, Martin was the 35-year-old manager of a Los Angeles office-supply company, a passionate bibliophile and reader of modern literature. At about that time, he discovered Bukowski’s poems, a handful of which had appeared in barely circulated magazines. Gripped by their impact, Martin drove to the writer’s apartment.

Bukowski, who then was working as a mail sorter, would later recall that he was on his “ninth or 10th beer of the morning,” when he opened the door of his tiny apartment to an earnest stranger, who inquired whether the poet had any other work he might read. Bukowski directed his visitor to a closet stacked with manuscript pages. To the poet’s disgust, Martin declined a proffered beer and sat down to read. After some time, he looked up and made Bukowski an offer: Martin would pay the writer $100 a month for the rest of his life if he would agree to quit the post office and write full time. Stone sober, Martin had decided to become a publisher.

Less than a month later, Martin received a package in the mail containing the manuscript of Bukowski’s first novel, “Post Office.” The would-be publisher raised capital by selling his collection of D.H. Lawrence first editions and began to publish Black Sparrow books, though he kept his job at the office-supply house for another 18 months “because I had a wife and a child.” Since then, the press has gone from strength to strength, consistently profitable without ever accepting a grant or subsidy. Martin’s wife, Barbara, has designed all Black Sparrow’s books in an elegant format.

Now, as part of the deal with Ecco, Martin will return to his first literary love. “I’ve agreed,” he said, “to edit five additional books of poetry containing the bulk of the 800 unpublished Bukowski poems, which he thought of as his best work. From the time we met, he sent me everything he wrote, and when he wrote a poem he really liked, he put a star or a check mark on it, which meant I was supposed to put it aside. His idea was that we would continue to publish a book of his a year, even after he was dead.

“I’ve already edited the first one and sent it off to HarperCollins for January publication. So, come July 1, I’ll be here all by myself, back where I was at the beginning--alone with Bukowski.”

Work in Progress

Philip L. Fradkin is the author, most recently, of “Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West,” a social history of the frontier’s most influential financial institution.

“I’m working on a revisionist look at the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fire which followed. My working title is ‘The City That Nearly Destroyed Itself,’ and it will be published by the University of California Press in 2006. It is revisionist history in the sense that it argues that it wasn’t the earthquake and fire that really destroyed San Francisco, but the foolishness of the people who ignored their region’s history of quakes and fires and built a crowded, major city without adequate water supplies on the end of a long peninsula.

“When the earthquake struck and touched off the fires that did all the real damage, there was no water to use, so the military and the fire department fought the blazes that ultimately consumed three-fourths of the city by dynamiting the buildings in the fire’s path. In fact, that tactic actually spread the blaze. I’ve been working on this project for two years in my role as a consultant to UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, which has a grant from the California State Library to construct an online archive of its 1906 materials.”