Lerner Celebrates 50 Years with Big Bash
By Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 5/14/2009 12:15:00 PM
Claire Kirch, PW’s midwest correspondent, attended Lerner’s 50th anniversary celebration last Wednesday.
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Adam Lerner, Harry Lerner and former |
Approximately 600 guests from all over the world, including U.S. and U.K. publishers, authors, industry professionals, politicians, the extended Lerner family, and assorted family friends, joined the 150 LPG employees in celebrating the family-owned company’s half-century of publishing children’s books for both the trade and school/library markets. Music wafted through this sparkling shrine to Minneapolitans’s commitment to literacy, as the crowd mingled, many nibbling on hors d’oeuvres while sipping wine or locally brewed beer.
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Author Chris Monroe, LPG creative director Zach Marell, author Nancy Carlson and Carolrhoda editorial director Andrew Karre. Photo: Todd Strand/Interface Graphics. |
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Harry Lerner (center), with Amy and Bob Raczka, author of The Vermeer Interviews. |
LPG had evolved over the past five decades “from an idea, to a few books written by relatives, in a small building in the cheap rent district” of downtown Minneapolis, to a “national, then international presence, printing in different languages and distributed around the world,” declared the evening’s celebrity speaker, Walter Mondale, the 42nd vice president of the United States. But, he added, his old friend Harry Lerner had a great impact on Mondale’s own life and career, and perhaps, on American history as well. He related a story of how Lerner had encouraged his wife, Joan, to write a book about the arts, Politics in Art, which LPG subsequently published as part of its Fine Art Books for Young People series.
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LPG editor-in-chief Mary Rodgers, Adam Lerner, and Klaus Flugge of London’s Andersen Press. |
“It’s a special personal thrill,” Mondale concluded, “to be with Harry, and with all of you, as we rejoice in [LPG’s] marvelous success, underpinned with the good purpose of enhancing literacy, knowledge, enlightenment, and the joy of learning.”
Following Mondale to the podium was Harry Lerner, the man of the hour, whose official title is now LPG founder/chairman. He recalled his “horse-and-buggy” early days as a publisher, spending his days working from a small, one-room office with an orange crate for a desk, promoting books, and his evenings editing, packing books, and typing carbon copies of customer invoices on a Smith-Corona typewriter. “I just hated it when a school would require an invoice in quadruplicate,” he said, only half-joking.
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A packed house listened |
But, Lerner added, as the company marks this milestone, he’s confident the publishing house he founded so long ago would continue to grow and thrive, especially since his son, Adam, has taken over the business in the past decade, and, with a technologically savvy young staff, is moving it forward into the 21st century by making books available in new formats.
“The good news is,” Lerner pointed out, to applause, “We’re financially healthy enough to take on new projects, and to aggressively pursue them—and we’re doing well enough to pop for a party like this tonight.”
“Fifty years in publishing,” he concluded. “And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.”
