Some of the published titles are already well-known works, such as Natsume Soseki’s Botchan and Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. The selected works cover a number of genres, including mysteries, poetry, short stories, and novels. Upcoming titles (for which, I believe, the publishing rights are still available), include an introduction to contemporary Japanese poetry, fantasy novel The Mandala Way by Masako Bando, historical novel Tokyo Seven Roses by Hisashi Inoue, and literary biography A Thousand Strands of Black Hair by Seiko Tanabe.

Thanks to the very informative Three Percent blog, which focuses on international literature, for clueing me in about JLPP! I’m definitely going to check out some of these books.

Many things about Melville House are inspiring:

• It’s run by artists (Johnson is a short-story writer, Merians a sculptor) who proudly position themselves outside the so-called “Bermuda Triangle of American intellectualism.”

• The editors maintain a slush pile (”something the big houses don’t even have anymore“), read these submissions, and sometimes even publish them.

• They work out of offices behind revolving bookshelves (!) in this glass-walled storefront at 145 Plymouth St.

Melville House is republishing the novels of Hans Fallada (pen name of Rudolph Ditzen), one of the most popular writers of the Weimar Republic, who declined the opportunity to flee Nazi Germany, was incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane, and died of a morphine overdose in 1946—only to fall into deep obscurity. (See Nathan Ihara’s LA Weekly profile for some of the amazing details.)

Upon discovering Fallada’s novels (on a tip from fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg), Johnson felt compelled to get them back into print and also to “right a literary injustice” where the author’s reputation was concerned. (See the recent interview on Charlie Rose).

This year Melville House has published three Fallada novels: Little Man, What Now?; The Drinker; and Every Man Dies Alone. The first two titles were both previously translated and published in the United States in 1933 and 1952, respectively.  It is Every Man Dies Alone—for which Melville House has provided the first English-language translation, by Michael Hoffman—that has created a literary sensation.

Based on an actual Gestapo file, it is the true story of a German couple’s doomed underground postcard campaign against the Nazis. Fallada wrote it in just 24 days and died before it was published. A thriller and a love story about regular people speaking truth to power: we need more stories—and publishers—like this.

But the most distinguishing thing about Europa is the books themselves—which is to say that you can spot one from a mile away. All of their titles are released in trade paperback (common among many European publishers) with handsome French flaps, which give the books a sleek and elegant feel. And every cover bears Europa’s signature stork logo. Many of their covers feature bold images that are cut out against brightly colored backgrounds.

A recent discussion on The Book Design Review suggests that there is little consensus about the cover designs themselves. While some who commented appreciated the spareness and eyecatching images on many of the covers, others found them boring and somehow dated looking. In spite of people’s aesthetic differences on this point, however, there seems to be no dispute about the fact that Europa’s books are immediately recognizable.

“They attract me because I know they’re Europa titles,” one commenter confessed. That pretty much says it all.

But before we can appreciate how bold it is to be “retro” in publishing these days, let’s remember what happened to the industry, especially in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the days of infamy, when the independent institutions of New York publishing—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper & Row, Penguin, and others—were being swallowed up by massive international media conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, CBS, and News Corporation.

Suddenly book publishers, who were accustomed to seeing profit margins between 3 and 4 percent, were expected to contend with their conglomerates’ film, cable television, and other media subsidiaries, which typically saw gains of between 12 and 15 percent. Under this enormous pressure to increase their margins, and with financial and marketing people now weighing in heavily on publishing decisions, editors became consumed by the hunt for the next blockbuster book (think Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus). Meanwhile, they could no longer “afford” to publish a title that was projected to sell fewer than 15,000 – 20,000 copies, regardless of its literary merit. In effect, the business of printing books, which had long been guided by a cultural mission to make literature and ideas available to the general public, was surrendered to the great, equalizing jaws of the market.

Publishing veteran André Schiffrin explains how market theory transformed the industry in “The Corporatization of Publishing” (The Nation, June 3, 1996) and at greater length in his memoir, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).

So how does Europa reconcile its seemingly lofty cultural mission (to foster through literature the dialogue between nations and cultures) with the equally formidable task of turning literature in translation into a viable business venture in the United States? Looks like I’m still honing in on the answers . . .

I love everything about these bold and stripped-down designs, which are by the Montreal firm Paprika—but especially the colors. One thing that makes this series work so well is that the design is very consistent, but each cover is also unique, which keeps things interesting. The Dada-esque illustrations are by Alain Pilon.

They look really good all together in a pile:

Image from AIGA Design Archives

Paprika won a lot of recognition for these designs, and you can read some comments on the work here:

• STEP Design 100 Judge’s Selection
• Graphex 2008 Judge’s Choice
• AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 2007 competition

Horace Engdahl, a Swedish literary historian and critic, who presides over the Nobel Prize jury, caused quite an uproar last fall when he remarked to the Associated Press that American authors were not in real contention for the most prestigious international award in literature. “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature . . . That ignorance is restraining.” Indeed, the Nobel Prize has not gone to an American author since Toni Morrison received it in 1993.

A week after Engdahl’s inflammatory comments, the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Le Clézio’s books, it so happens, are not widely available in translation in the United States. The Prospector (1993), a translation of Le Clézio’s Le Chercheur d’or (Gallimard, 1985), is published by David R. Godine, Inc., a small, independent press in Boston whose recently launched series, Verba Mundi, features some of the most prominent names in world literature. (Other publishers of recent Le Clézio translations include the University of Chicago Press, The University of Nebraska Press, and Curbstone Press.)

Is it only the so-called provincialism of American readers that’s to blame for the stunted growth of literature in translation in the United States? Champions of the neglected genre point out that the lack of multilingualism among American editors (by comparison to their European counterparts) makes it hard for them to judge with confidence which foreign language works have promise. Others note that translated works are seldom backed by vigorous marketing efforts—such that lackluster sales become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Next week I will revisit the question of “focused, long-range editorial vision,” the principle upon which Europa Editions is founded.