Two years after progressive publisher South End Press left its long-time Cambridge, Mass., home for Brooklyn in collaboration with the Medgar Evers College campus of the City University of New York, the 35-year-old nonprofit publisher is facing many of the same problems it had before the move: too little money and difficulty finding staff. In the past few months it has moved part of its operations back to Cambridge and continues to have a Brooklyn office, but with even fewer collective members than before it left.
Days before Christmas, South End send out an e-mail blast headlined, “Can you imagine the world without South End Press?” It compared its situation to Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which also had its roots in Boston and closed its doors in 1996, a decade and a half after its founding.
Over the past month PW has tried to contact South End several times by phone and e-mail to get a clearer picture of how the press is faring. Although none of the collective members responded and its distributor, Consortium, declined to comment on South End’s financial situation, a second e-mail blast indicates that things are still dicey.
In the notice, South End said that it has raised more than $25,000 since the end of December. But that its slim financial resources make it hard to reprint even its most bestselling titles and pay upfront printing and shipping fees. As an indication of its straightened circumstances, South End said that it had to turn down requests for donations to Occupy libraries. And because of their scarcity, some South End titles are now selling for $75 up to more than $1,000 on Amazon.
The press, which was one of the first to rely on community supported funding, similar to CSA baskets with monthly payments in exchange for books, is now trying another fundraising tack. It is asking readers to make donations of $15 to $2,000 for a PDF of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and will add links to its Web site for additional titles soon. For those who prefer a print copy, South End says that when the book comes back from the printer they’ll be in touch and make it available to donors for the cost of shipping.
Whether these fundraising efforts will be enough to attract new members to the collective and keep the publisher of bell hooks, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, and Howard Zinn afloat is anyone’s guess.
