Thoughts on 2005 from Overlook's veteran publisher (and old geezer), Peter Mayer

2005, only recently departed, was a remarkable year for the Overlook Press. We published in all our traditional areas, and had some outstanding successes in fiction and history: everything from Robert Littell’s LEGENDS, and the reissues of the earlier works of Charles’s McCarry (OLD BOYS), to major works of history such as Hugh Pope’s SONS OF THE CONQUERORS and the continuation of Edward Albee’s collected plays, and some really odd books as Walter Moers' international bestseller THE 13 1/2 LIVES OF CAPTAIN BLUEBEAR. But what really broke the Overlook mold this year and took us far ahead was the curious phenomenon of Overlook being first out in America—and consequently the industry leader month after month after month—with that tantalizing and addictive Japanese puzzle that has swept the world, SUDOKU.

While Overlook’s SUDOKU book was out first—and now has seven Overlook cousins—unsurprisingly fifteen other publishers quickly rushed out SUDOKU books so that by Christmas there were 70 or 80 competitors with Overlook and Michael Mepham still the best established.

2006 probably will see SUDOKU continue and very possibly KAKURO, a somewhat more difficult Japanese puzzle which will run along side it. I’m told that in Japan KAKURO is bigger than SUDOKU, who knows. From Overlook’s point of view this phenomenon I’ve noted above has performed a small miracle for our small but growing company. Originally launched with independent bookstores and chains like Borders, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million, the SUDOKU craze became so great that sales fanned out to mass merchandisers who had the courage to be first with an unusual mass market product.

What’s important to Overlook in this is that we are basically a very quirky, literary publishing company which takes proportionally more chances on unusual books and authors than do the largest houses—for example our publications of Joseph Roth’s books, Walter Moers CAPTAIN BLUEBEAR, our fantasy classics, and unusual works of history, poetry and plays. It now looks because of SUDOKU, that we will have a larger outlet for our books than the far too conservative bookselling marketplace makes possible.

It’s always been our theory at Overlook, now in its fourth decade, that you can be small and interesting and that publishers should take a chance, or why be a publisher? We’ve always thought that the readers were there in large America for unusual books, but that very often the retailers, running their businesses tightly as businesses, tended to favor the more obvious titles from the larger houses. It is part of the pervasive sameness that affects and infects retailing everywhere in America—every kind of retailing in other words—in which an ever smaller number of products (book titles in our case) are sold to an ever larger number of Americans for a shorter and shorter time span, with an ever larger number of products in which Americans might be interested having trouble finding a place in the sun.

The people (and in our case the readers) are there and that’s a little bit about what Overlook’s about.

--Peter