West Seeks East

Stone Bridge Press is a small Berkeley, Calif., publisher primed to have a really big fall season. Founded in 1989 by publisher Peter Goodman, Stone Bridge specializes in books on Japanese culture. The house has just published The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan by the acclaimed critic and Japan expert. And in September the house will publish the Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917 by Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, a comprehensive 500-page compendium on a very popular Japanese medium. Goodman told PW that Stone Bridge has about five employees and publishes five or six books a year. It has about 50 books in print, and its titles are distributed by Consortium. Goodman lived in Japan for 10 years and, after working for Asian specialist Charles Tuttle and later for Japanese publisher Kodansha, he launched his own house. Stone Bridge focuses on Japanese pop culture, particularly manga (Japanese comics) and anime; Japanese literature in translation; aesthetics and spirituality. "We've got six or seven anime books. We've seen the market grow," said Goodman. In fact, Consortium has upped the first printing of the Anime Encyclopedia from 6,000 copies to 10,000. Stone Bridege's bestselling titles are Kanji Pict-O-Graphix (1992) by Michael Rowley, a book on Japanese letter characters that has sold more than 50,000 copies, and Wabi-Sabi by Leonard Koren, a title on Japanese aesthetics that has sold 35,000 copies since 1994. And the house is also excited about Holly Thompson's Ash, a novel due this fall about a Westerner returning to the Japanese city where she was reared. The company's Web site is at www.stonebridge.com.