Franklin Fetes
by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 5/29/2006
Fifty-four different books won Ben Franklin Awards, sponsored by PMA, an independent publishers association and announced at the BEA last week. If that seems like a lot of indiscriminate praise, Jan Nathan, PMA director, begs to differ. "It's Ben Franklin's 300th birthday," she points out, "and the independent press community that he helped found has never been healthier." Or more diverse. Certainly, the winning titles represent a maturing community of presses that one can still call independent, but no longer necessarily small. Sourcebooks, for example, with 800 titles in print, won two awards—in Poetry/Literary Criticism for Voices & Poetry of Ireland, and in Children's Book and Audiobook, again for a poetry title, Poetry Speaks to Children. By contrast, the tiny My Grandma and Me Press copped the Children's Picture Book Award for Grandpa's Fishin' Friend. One winning book that makes a significant case for how far small, independent and in this case decidedly non–New York publishing has come is Biró: European-Inspired Cuisine, a lush, four-color $35 coffee-table book by star chef Marcel Biró. Biró is published by Gibbs Smith, a Utah house founded 35 years ago by an idealistic history professor and Joe Hill scholar, Gibbs M. Smith. Now the company has 69 employees and does 100 titles a year, with both a trade and a textbook division. In Marcel Biró it has what all publishers cherish: an author with a platform, in this case a national cooking show on PBS. PMA's Nathan praised the quality of this year's nominated titles: "When we first started the awards, 80% of the book entries were hardly professional. Now 90% are equal in professionalism to anything you see anywhere in the market. We've come a long way."
