About Us
The book world has changed since the days when an independent bookstore in Paris could launch Joyce’s Ulysses into a culture populated by discerning readers who were open to new forms of literature.
The original Shakespeare and Company, Ulysses‘ incubator, is long gone and that sort of reader may be gone too. The United States had a bookstore that had the qualities of the great Paris store, The Gotham Book Mart on West 47th street in New York, but after 85 years of introducing literature, great and experimental, to American readers, it folded up its tent (2007) and faded into memory.
We live in a post-Amazon world. It is and was perhaps inevitable. But we understand the effect of Amazon. It is a monopoly with such pricing power that has driven down the price of a book (a 57% discount demanded of the publisher and, therefore, of the writer) so a small store and a small publisher has little chance of surviving.
A publisher has to sell thousands of books to make a profit, and some books––poetry, eccentric thought––do not sell thousands.
Porcupine Press came into existence in response to this situation. We perceived that there were many good writers, writers with capabilities, tastes, and ambitions that were more literary than popular, whose work was unlikely to see the light of day.
Our books are available on Amazon’s platform, of course; but we favor the independent bookstore. In France, where our editorial office is located, it is against the law to discount a book more than 5%.
Independent bookstores form the intellectual backbone of every town in France and every neighborhood in Paris. Porcupine Press is
Bookstores can order Porcupine Press books from our distributor, Itasca Books.