More than 300 guests in black tie and evening gowns crowded the ballroom of Manhattan's Puck Building September 16 to drink Champagne, dance a bit, dine -- and celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Arcade Publishing and its co-owners, Richard and Jeannette Seaver.
Arcade was launched in 1988 as a separate incorporated subsidiary of Little, Brown, specializing in quality fiction and nonfiction with an emphasis on foreign writers. Originally minority stakeholders, in 1992 the Seavers bought up all the shares after the merger of Time Inc. and Warner, and took over ownership of the company. Arcade publishes about 40 books a year and Little, Brown continues as its distributor.
Looking back over the decade, Jeannette Seaver told PW the press is "a global publisher," having released 450 books by 231 authors (among them Nuruddin Farah, Elie Wiesel, Francois Mitterand and Andrei Makine) from 28 countries. She noted that Arcade's sales have doubled over the six post-buyout years, and its backlist contributes about 25% of total sales. Seaver expects the figure to reach nearly 35% in 2000.
She emphasized a focus on more nonfiction, and mentioned some upcoming fall titles -- a biography of the notorious terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as the Jackal, and Race Manners by Bruce Jacobs, on race relations in the U.S. Also, in November, Arcade will release the Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills, a first novel, shortlisted for the U.K's Booker Prize, that comes with a rare blurb from Thomas Pynchon. Arcade is also releasing Haiku: This Other World, an unusual collection of p ms in the Japanese form by the late African American writer Richard Wright, produced in the last year of his life and made available by his widow.
