Bridge of Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemalan Companeros and Companeras.

• Author: Rocawich, Linda
• Position: Brief Article

Sometime in the spring of each year, the fall catalogs from the book publishers of the English-speaking world begin to arrive. Announcements appear in Publisher's Weekly. Roughly bound, poorly printed, typo-laden galleys come in the mail, followed by finished books for advance reading. Publicists call - ostensibly to ask if the books have arrived but really to persuade The Progressive to review, or even excerpt, their new books. If I'm away from the office for a few days, my chair is stacked almost to the ceiling with galleys and books and press releases and phone messages.

It's a semiannual flood - fall books being followed by spring books - and I've managed this flood for this magazine and two others off and on for fifteen years. But the feel of it has changed in recent seasons. I go through the offerings of the big commercial publishing houses, most still based in New York City, and find less and less I want to read or review. It's possible to turn the pages of a half-inch-thick catalog, complete with a checklist of dozens of new titles for me to return, without finding a single one - or maybe just one or two - I believe to be worth space in the book section of The Progressive and thus the attention of our readers.

Not so the small presses, which used to be known more for publishing experimental fiction and poetry than for political nonfiction. Several now break that stereotype. They may or may not be formally structured as profit-making enterprises, but all are decidedly not "commercial," and the people behind them would probably insist that I enclose that word "profit" in quotation marks. Two among them come to mind.

Greg Bates cut his publishing teeth at South End Press in Boston, which has managed to establish itself well in this field. But Bates wanted to go off on his own. He spent the summer of 1990 drawing up a business plan to raise enough capital to start another left-wing press - Common Courage - to be based in Maine and run by Bates and his partner Flic Shooter.

How many presses does the Left need? "If you want the ecology of a forest," he told me, "you gotta plant more than one tree."

By the time the winter of 1991 rolled around, the United States was engulfed in war and Bates hadn't raised a penny for his press. He decided to publish his first book anyway: Mobilizing Democracy, a timely reader on the war in the Persian Gulf and, more generally, on how to change the U.S. role in the Middle East. It did well.

That started a trend. Bates had decided to print enough copies to keep a title in stock for at least a year. In the beginning, that meant an edition of 2,000; two-and-a-half years later, the figure, depending on the book, is up to the range of 5,000 to 8,000, and the books keep running out long before the year is up. He wants to keep his titles in print and goes back to press when he can.

Books available now from Common Courage Press (P.O. Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951; (800)497-3207) include:

[paragraph] Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times and Prophetic Reflections: Notes...