Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire

This memoir that reads like fiction recounts the never-before-told story of the heyday of small presses in the 1980s and 1990s in San Francisco when Bay Area presses—armed with arrogance and personal computers—took the publishing field. The invention of the desktop computer was akin to the invention of printing press at the end of the Middle Ages, heralding a renaissance in the book business and ushering in a hotbed of creativity recognized even by New York City, the long-held center of all things publishing. In these glory days, presses like Foghorn Press, Nolo Press, Ten Speed Press, Heyday Books, Wilderness Press, New World Library, and Chronicle Books were a just few of many to partner with independent neighborhood bookstores to stage the first San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival which drew 35,000 readers.

This is the often comic story of one of those presses and its intrepid publisher, Vicki Morgan.  At Foghorn Press, Vicki was 25, young and brash and ambitious. She set out to quixotically build a book publishing company from scratch with her eccentric brother to help. As part of their optimistic Morgan heritage, the siblings employed every strategy they had to grow Foghorn Press with no capital, 100-hour work weeks, cheap beer, irrepressible belly laughs, and no book publishing experience. Over 13 years, they assembled a cast of often preposterous authors and resistant staff while surviving a drunken ex-husband, a con artist, calculating distributors, a fleet of good ol’ boys, terrible cash flow, and their own differing aspirations. Books were brought to market and miraculously sold from their offices in the Boiler Room until Foghorn became a resounding success with sales, media, acclaim. But of course, the story doesn’t end there.