Overlook Press

So our last homework assignment was to research a publisher. It was hard deciding which one I wanted to do; I had quite a list even just looking through one bookshelf. So I looked at all of them a little.

I couldn't really find enough info on Tor, Roc, or Harper Torch, had already read about Baen, and Orb turned out to be mainly interested in reprints. Random House and Scholastic were too big to deal with, Sandpiper (which publishes Bill Peet, according to Amazon) had too many cheesy baby books, and Washington Square Press had been bought out by Atria and sued (apparently in that order too, which is odd).

Of course I could still look at Atria, and did, a bit. I like their facebook page. I was still put off by all the news stories about the lawsuit, despite the fact they published my favorite book ever: The Thirteenth Tale.

So I ended up doing my presentation on Overlook Press, publisher of The City of Dreaming Books. Overlook has offices in both Woodstock and NYC, and gets its name from both the mountain it's located on and its mission: to be "a home for distinguished books that had been overlooked by larger houses." Most of the books and authors they listed on their site were ones I didn't recognize, but they still seemed to have sold pretty well. One had been made into a PBS documentary.

Overlook is an independent publisher founded in 1971 that puts out 100 books/year. They are apparently well known for their artistic reprints of P. G. Wodehouse, of which they have an entire line, bigger even than their childrens' books section. I had to look up who P. G. Wodehouse was. Does this mean that I fail as an English major, or is it a generational thing?