In the year since Mountain Press in Missoula, Mont., sold the rights to three of its bestselling series—Roadside Geology, Geology Rocks!, and Geology Underfoot—as well as some smaller series and standalone releases to the Geological Society of America (GSA), both publishers told PW that the sale has been, as GSA COO and director of publications Bridgette Moore put it, “transformative,” with one small press passing the baton to a larger organization that can take its list to the next level.

Mountain publisher John Rimel says that he wasn’t looking to sell the press, but after serving as publisher since 1984 and witnessing the consolidations throughout the industry in the past 20 years, “the shine is a bit off—you get to a certain point in your career, and what do you do with a slightly used book publishing company?”

To further illustrate the challenges that small presses face these days, Rimel noted Baker & Taylor’s recent announcement that it was shutting down, and “another one of our big customers announced that they were closing their doors.”

As for GSA, the organization has been looking in recent years to expand beyond publishing scholarly works and enter the field of public science. After more than a year of negotiations, GSA acquired all of Mountain’s geology-related titles, which comprised 75% of its entire list of regional, geology, and natural history titles. The deal was finalized on November 1, 2024. While GSA hired away Mountain’s longtime editor-in-chief, Jennifer Carey, to manage its new acquisitions, the rest of Mountain’s half-dozen employees remain there.

Rimel admits some trepidation at paring down the company that he and his partner, Rob Williams, built up over the past 45 years. Rimel and Williams acquired Mountain from the family of founding publisher David Flaccus, who’d launched it in 1948.

“Do you really want to sell the goose that’s laying the golden egg?” he recalls thinking, adding that “a tremendous amount of work had gone into those series’s development,” beginning in 1972 with the release of the first book in the Roadside Geology series, Roadside Geology of the Northern Rockies, which sold 50,000 copies before that edition went out of print. There are more than a million copies of Roadside Geology titles in print today.

But Rimel, who is 69 years old and launched his career by repping for Mountain as a college student in the mid-70s, said it made the most sense to transfer the geology releases to GSA, a mission-driven nonprofit. He and Williams had to “step back and look at what was best for the series and where it can do the most good,” he said, especially in an era “when there is a bit of a war on science. If we ever needed public science, the time is now.”

Mountain distributes its former list for GSA, and may soon be distributing GSA’s other publications as well. While GSA has its headquarters in Boulder and offices in Washington, D.C., executives are contemplating opening another office in Missoula, where the Mountain warehouse is located.

Honoring a legacy

“I don't know quite what the future holds for the remaining 25% of our list and a couple of clients that we continue to do distribution for,” Rimel said. “But I'm thinking that if GSA has a footprint in western Montana and continues to utilize this facility, and continues to educate folks about geology and practice public science, then that's probably a pretty good legacy. The series is in a safe place: the books will continue to be published and find an audience.”

Moore has ambitious plans for the list, like making it international in scope, as well as producing audiobooks, “or books that people could follow along with while actually on a road trip, because that would be more accessible.”

For now, Moore adds, GSA is simply “focused on honoring Mountain Press’s legacy, shepherding the books into the future, making sure we hold on to all of the things that make these books so popular.”

The former Mountain list is now called GSA Publications; a new logo distinguishes GSA’s scholarly publications from its new trade line. Moore says that the organization “wants people to understand that the books were published by Mountain Press, but we want to get them starting to think of GSA as part of this world. We also don’t want to confuse people, so we haven't changed a lot.”

There are approximately 65 GSA Publications titles in print; three of them have been released so far this year, and another is at the printer’s. GSA is already in the process of acquiring new titles and has received 26 submissions to date this year.

Although GSA will continue to tweak covers and content as it reprints books and issues new editions, Moore emphasized that Mountain's legacy is as important to GSA as it is to Rimel.

“We want these books to remain recognizable to customers,” she said. “We want them to know that it's still the same great content. We just want to bring a new flavor to it, to reach the widest audience as possible, because geology is exciting and geologists are really fun scientists. We're really looking at this as an opportunity to make the public more excited about geology and just broaden John's reach.”

This story has been updated for clarification and an error regarding GSA's Boulder headquarters has been corrected.