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 somew
hat 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
'Tis the season for moviestars to get early-morning affirming wake-up calls telling them how nice it is to be nominated. And although I'm completely beside myself that The 40 Year Old Virgin was shut out of *all* categories, I tip the Mets' cap to a few that made it through. And that were profiled in John Lahr's Honky Tonk Parade. See the Overlook connection now? Ha ha.
