BareBone Books was set up to provide a home for writers whose books are falling victim to the recession. These are works by writers who would once have been snapped up by the major publishers, but who are now rejected because their first name is not ‘Paris’ or ‘Jordan’ and whose projected sales will not exceed 250,000 copies.
There is a term for small presses like BareBone Books. It is salon des refusés, a phrase first coined in 1863 when some painters were rejected by the established Salon de Paris. They set up their own alternative exhibition which included Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl.
In the book world the salon des refusés is not a new concept. When Virginia Woolf’s books were rejected by the publishing houses of the day, she and her husband, Leonard, set up the Hogarth Press in their kitchen. From these humble beginnings they went on to publish Maxim Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, the 24-volume translation of the works of Sigmund Freud and T S Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Our first publication, The Double Happiness Company, is a page-turning, lump-in-the-throat read that was almost accepted by four large publishing houses who shall remain anonymous. At least for the moment.
Nearly 20 years after it was first published, and acclaimed – and bizarrely lost – Elise Valmorbida’s debut novel Matilde Waltzing has been reincarnated. At BareBone Books we say thank God, or Saint Barbara of the Apparition, for the technological revolution.
Find this apparition at Amazon for your Kindle
After being translated into Korean, German and Serbian, this popular collection of ‘True stories about finding love’ has finally been translated into an ebook for the Amazon Kindle.
