Among those who read out of love for it, and not simply to pass the time between appointments; and among indie bookstores that showcase literature out of love for it, and not simply because it’s a way to make a buck; Europa Editions stands out as a distinguished publishing enterprise.Recently Three Guys had the honor of having their blurb placed on a Europa Editions book, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Unrequited love is a noble thing. But acknowledged love, friends, is like silk on the wind, something divine.

Michael Reynolds is Editor In Chief of Europa. His guest post in our series, Why I Love What I Do, appears below.

Why I Love What I Do by Michael Reynolds

Somebody recently asked me to describe my route into publishing. I knew the short answer was expected, but for some reason I dwelt longer than I should have on the words ‘route into,’ and decided that any route must begin at the beginning and nowhere else. I gathered courage and replied:

I was the grounds keeper at the biggest outdoor maze in the southern hemisphere, a gold miner, a milkman, a barman, a waiter, a musician, a crooner, a windsurfing instructor, a bookseller, a poetry teacher, a call center operator, the personal assistant to a disabled person, a guinea pig on sleep deprivation experiments, a security guard at a neighborhood jewelers, a gardener, a construction worker, and a day-laborer. I have painted houses for a living, sold package holidays to the South Pacific for Qantas, taught English at community college, written three books, worked in a mailroom, taught English as a second language, edited some issues of a literary magazine, and been the artistic director of a writer’s festival. Eight years ago in Rome, at the age of thirty-six, I started working as a freelance copyeditor for the newly born Europa Editions, a collaboration that quickly led to a full-time job offer and to my being made editor in chief of the press in 2008.

My interlocutor smiled. It was a sympathetic smile. I think. I wondered if I had been moved from one list to another or simply crossed off altogether.

—

Here are a few good things I know about independent publishing:

Though they must make a profit in order to properly serve their authors, independent presses are not beholden to shareholders or large groups, meaning they need not publish lifeless, unnecessary books to ensure continuous growth;

Independent publishers are very attached to their brand and, if pushed, they will defend it ferociously;

While there is little difference in the quality of the best books published by corporate publishers and the best books published by independent presses (despite the difference in the money spent on acquiring them), independent houses are unlikely to dilute their brand by publishing reams of dreck alongside their quality products;

Many independent publishers, not all, only the most courageous, look for what is lacking in the market, they create demand rather than meet demand (or perhaps it’s more a question of meeting a dormant, unacknowledged demand…);

The world of independent publishing is full of people with bizarre and moving and surprising personal histories that make my route into this business look like a pretty straight shot.

This last point is more significant that it might seem.

The great Italian publisher Giulio Einaudi said that a publisher is the sum total of its editors. I would go further and say that a publisher, particularly an independent publisher, is the sum total of all the people who work there and the authors it publishes. The great diversity evident in the publishing programs of indie presses, the risk-taking (and what is a publisher if not a risk-taker?) inherent in their business models, their volatility and versatility and unpredictability, all of these characteristics flow in fits and starts from the people who work there, who are, in turn, diverse, versatile, peculiar, unpredictable, and sometimes completely mad.

The routes into independent publishing are many, and some can hardly be called routes at all; they are great meandering byways on which one bounces from one carriageway to the other, sometimes crossing over into oncoming traffic. In my experience, people in publishing, all kinds of publishing, are rather wonderful. You need only consider the following: they spend their days seeking, wanting, and hoping to play some role in the publication of an extraordinary book. That is why they get up and go to work.

But people in independent publishing are all of that and more.

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A couple of months back, I was talking about Carpenter’s Acts of Fiction with some acquaintances in a pub on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

I do not often sit around in pubs discussing modalities of narrative and aesthetics as applied to social change, but this was following an event with one of our authors and the group I was with included the author himself, a poet or two, a critic, a philosopher, and a painter. We were waxing eloquent about The Novel and, at least as I recall it now, the conversation was high-voltage.

Somebody paraphrased a statement found in that book regarding fiction’s raison d’être: “Fiction exists to challenge bourgeois values and smash ideologies.” A reverent silence followed, but all I could think was, what bollocks! If fiction manages to do one or both of these things all or even some of the time, then bravo! I will join it at the barricades. But its existence, let alone its hold on readers, hardly rests on its ability to do either.

There has never been a better technology than the novel with which to explore human consciousness and to examine what it means to be human. There are times indeed when that exploration and examination may reaffirm bourgeois values and reconstitute ideologies. But this, too, would be a byproduct of its existence. Fiction was born together with the modern sense of what we are as humans—interrogating beings—and it can die only when we lose all interest in others and ourselves.

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I love what I do because it feels like the natural point of arrival at the end of a route that didn’t know it was leading anywhere until it led here. I feel at home here. I feel akin.

I love Europa’s independence. I have always had a fondness for figures like Garibaldi, Ko?ciuszko, Guevara, Strummer, people for whom the point seemed to be independence itself. It feels like freedom here, like spitting in the face of convention and the ordinary, like each day everything is waiting to be invented anew.

I love what I do because of the people I work with, my colleagues in publishing, my clan in independent publishing, and, of course, the writers: I could never have imagined, growing up where I did, that I would have the chance to spend so much of my adult life in the company of writers.

I love what I do because I love the novel. Helping to bring a good one into the world is an unbelievable, indescribable feeling.

I wonder if my route out of publishing may end up being more interesting, or at least more telling, than my route in. There are forces at work in the industry that apparently cannot appreciate the importance of bibliodiversity and seem to want nothing more than to homologize, incorporate, consolidate, iron out any bumps and rough spots. Diversity is as necessary to the book industry as it is to any ecosystem, which is something these mindless forces will not, or cannot understand.

Publishing might one day be an industry that has no need of someone like me, or of a publisher like Europa; or it may become one that I have no need of; an industry entirely conglomerated and amalgamated and flattened out. That might happen, but I don’t think it will. There is too much ingenuity out there, too much creativity. And too much love.

That’s why I love what I do.