The Best Titles from the Small Presses

A Bookish List for the Holidays

By Allen M. Jones, 11-30-05

Books and reading, of course, have been around for a while. If you believe the press releases from the professorial, they’re the cornerstones of western civilization. The life blood of today’s publishing community, however, has very little to do with tried and true tradition, with edification and entertainment. Instead, American publishing depends on two relatively recent phenomena: Airlines and Christmas.

First, airlines: All it takes is a layover in Salt Lake to see that if it weren’t for the staggering incompetence of Delta and Northwest hardly anyone in this country would be taking the time to read at all. Look at all these bored, well-intentioned souls waiting for their delayed flights, hunched in uncomfortable chairs, flipping through the most recent Oprah selection. And Christmas. Thank the publishing gods for Christmas. If it weren’t for the notion of last minute reciprocity – buying a gift for your neighbors because rumor has it they bought you a gift – seems like the only thing being published these days would be cookbooks.

It can be tricky, though, choosing a book to give as a present. Apart from the unlikely possibility that the thing will actually be read, there are all sorts of other considerations roiling under the surface. For instance, is it expensive enough? Also, does it make me seem smart and sophisticated and in-the-know? And most of all, is it going to be easy to wrap? In the West, the smartest move is almost always to avoid the big Manhattan houses in favor of regional relevance. Anyway, pulling a book off the shelf as you walk into Borders violates the first rule of holiday book buying: Make it look like you’ve put some thought into this. And so, small regional presses. That’s the way to go.

One of the best books to put under the tree this season comes from the University of New Mexico Press and author Clemens P. Work, director of graduate studies in the School of Journalism at the University of Montana. Work’s Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West is a formidable piece of scholarship, a fine and readable history on the wax and wane of free speech, our ability as Americans to say what we believe. Shot through with contemporary resonances, Work’s book would make an ideal present for anyone with the least bit of political leanings (conservatives who might need a history lesson, liberals who perhaps need reminded that our most treasured rights have often come at a price).

In the same tone, and along the same political lines, a book from Oregon State University press, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War seems a fine blend of scholarship and politics. Endorsed by none other than Donald Worster (“...a timely and valuable addition to our thinking about why wars happen, what intended or unintended effects they may have, and how – like everything else – they touch on humankind’s relationship with the earth.�), this would be a nice little bit of gasoline to throw on the spark of the family’s Fox news watchers.

Of course, it’s hard to go wrong with a good coffee table book. The best coffee table book in the world is last year’s fifty pound compendium of complete New Yorker cartoons. After that, however, the field is wide open. From Mountain Press Publishing Company in Missoula, the collection of photographs L.A. Huffman: Photographer of the American West by Larry Len Peterson makes for a fine blend of browsability and nutshell history.

From Riverbend Publishing in Helena there’s Crown of the Continent: The Last Great Wilderness of the Rocky Mountains by Ralph Waldt. Including over 100 color photos of the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem and its wildlife, Riverbend describes this book as “A professional naturalist’s incredible personal portrait of America’s largest and most pristine wilderness in the Lower 48 states.�

In a similar vein, the University of Nebraska’s recent release, Seeing Yellowstone in 1871: Earliest Descriptions and Images from the Field looks to be an important look at the nation’s first national park. Edited and with an introduction by Marlene Deahl Merrill, writer Paul Schullery endorses it by saying, “The absorbing immediacy of the text and the eyewitness mood of the photographs and illustrations make this book a special treat in the literature of Yellowstone.�

Also for the historian, and if you’re not sure about the Huffman or the Yellowstone book, you might want to take a look at Where Custer Fell: Photographs of the Little Bighorn Battlefield Then and Now. Published by the venerable University of Oklahoma Press, this compendium of photographs “provides a view of the battlefield as it must have existed in 1876.�

From the University of Nevada Press, firefighter David J. Strohmaier’s Drift Smoke: Loss and Renewal in a Land of Fire, is described as “a powerful and moving meditation on wildfire by someone who has seen it in all its terror and beauty...�

Once you think about it, it’s actually a great opportunity. Passing along a book, fulfilling certain obligations even while you’re asking someone close to you to spend a few hours with a book that you’ve found to be worthwhile. It’s the tag-team touch of an aesthetic, a baton-pass of awareness. In a way, this book is part of who I am. It is in fact a kind of gift that the small Western presses have given to us: They’ve provided us the opportunity to take a look at ourselves.

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