Invisible Cities Comes into View

The announcement of the NBCC nominations has drawn attention to Invisible Cities, a little-known Vermont house that earned a nomination for the poetry collection Animal Soul by Bob Hicok. Considering that the publisher issued its first list (which consisted of only two titles) in fall 2000, Invisible Cities has done well. Considering that it is a virtual house—everyone except the publisher works from home, and the staff meets at his office in Montpelier once a month—the results have been even more remarkable.

Animal Soul was one of four hardcover volumes in Invisible Cities' Contemporary Classics Poetry Series, edited by Roger Weingarten and launched last April. "The idea," explained editorial director Rowan Jacobsen, "was that they would have a design that goes together, so people would want to buy them together." Not that Invisible Cities is having any trouble breaking up the matched set. "We're thrilled to have this level of recognition for our poetry series in its first year," said Jacobsen. "The response has been tremendous. We've gotten more orders for the book in the last two days than since it came out."

Even before the nomination, the press was doing well with several of its nine fall 2001 releases, which range from a cookbook on Vermont's The Mist Grill by Stephen Schimoler to Renzo and Royler Gracie's $30 hardcover on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which has gone back to press three times, for 30,000 copies in print. The house, which plans to do about 20 titles per year, has also generated steady sales for Chuck Zerby's The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes, a 150-page book—with 331 notes—that's based on an op-ed piece that Zerby wrote for the New York Times back in 1981. At a recent event at the Jeffrey Amherst Book Shop in Amherst, Mass., Zerby charmed his audience by reading from the book standing up, then sitting down whenever he came to a footnote. "We completely sold out at the event, and we've had to reorder and we've sold those out," said manager and book buyer Marie Dunoford.

The company, which takes its name from an Italo Calvino collection, is distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group. "We're definitely all over the place," acknowledged Jacobsen. "My friends say you have to have a niche if you're small. But we want to keep it eclectic."

Correction: The Dana Press, mentioned in "Small Screen Writ Large" (Book News, Jan. 21), is an independent press with copublishing agreements with several publishing houses.