Presses: South End Press

The way I envision doing this blog for now is focusing on different presses across different posts, which is to say that I will focus on the South End Press now but return to it in other posts, rather than covering all of it in one post. That is where I see the blog as specifically useful as a platform, rather than a book manuscript which needs more cohesion (says the book editor). This will ultimately stitch together, I hope, but I want to put things out as I research and write them up, so it may have the stops-and-starts of research; the meandering path; the return to, the course correction, the reversals? We'll see.

I'm also going to feel free to include autobiography without being self-indulgent.

I moved to the South End after living in Boston for a bit under two years, and I really didn't know much about the neighborhood. I knew it had a reputation for being gay, and I was moving with a male partner. I had lived in London for three years and the South End's roots in the UK were clear: cobblestone streets here and there, Victorian rowhouses, squares built around parks, residential side streets and larger "high streets" with shops. Given that I was early in my publishing career, working at a non-profit publisher no less, and my partner was a grad student, we moved into the most rundown part of the neighborhood in 2003, which was by the Boston Medical Center, and we moved in with a roommate, who took the "room" that was actually an open loft space over the kitchen, which became a true sauna in the summer. (We were also on the top floor of the building with no a/c in common area.) Of course, I didn't know a ton about the history of the area, as a neighborhood or specifically this corner of it, which has its own history.

I learned about South End Press fairly quickly, not due to any proximity as they were long out of the neighborhood but due to their politics. They were proudly leftist and were continuing some fantastic publishing in the post-9/11 era, where conservatives labeled any left or even liberal effort as "anti-patriotic." I don't know what I made of my new neighborhood being used as a name for a press publishing such radical material.

When I became newly interested in that history recently, this 2002 article, published a year before I moved into the neighborhood in Z magazine, answered a lot of basic questions. The Press seems to have been the brainchild of Michael Albert, who also founded Z magazine. He pitched the idea to his then girlfriend Lydia Sargent, in 1976 (also, the year I was born). He discusses this on Democracy Now, at around 49:30. They pulled together a ragtag group of leftists for this endeavor, many of whom came out of the PhD program in Economics from UMass Amherst, long a hotbed for Marxist thought. That same Globe article says of the founders, "all of whom knew each other at UMass Amherst, where most were either teaching or working on graduate degrees." 

Here is what I can find from those founders:

- Michael Albert [kicked out of MIT, b 1947, still living; according to 8/29/84 Globe article, “completed all but his thesis toward a PhD in Economics at UMass Amherst”],^[1] 

- Lydia Sargent (died in 2020, partnered with Albert since ‘74)

- John Schall [now owner of El Jefe’s, came out of UMass economics dept (PhD?)]

- Pat Walker [died 2024, also UMass PhD, ran Mel King’s mayoral campaign], 

- Juliet Schor [umass grad student],^[2] professor at Boston College]

- Mary R. Lea [now lecturer in writing at the Open University]

- Joe Bowring [PhD from UMass in economics, now President of Marketing Analytics at US Energy Assn]

- Dave Millikin [journalist? Umass student, otherwise not sure]

In the Z magazine history piece, Sargent says she and Albert pulled together a planning committee in 1976 and decided they needed to raise "at least $150k" in the first three years. When they raised money, they used $40,000 to buy a brownstone, possibly at 116 Saint Botolph Street, where it seems those founders lived and worked, at least to start. It was in their South End building that they founded the Institute for Social and Culture Change, d/b/a South End Press. Sargent reports that they provided room and board and no salaries, so everyone worked others jobs, at first. 

I get confused about addresses, as I understood this to be the start of the Press, at 116 Saint Botolph Street. I assume this is where they were as Sargent describes it: "By the fall of 1977, six of us were in a building in the South End of Boston, with procedures in place for a working and living collective." But Sargent says in her random list of memories,  

      Daily breakfast meetings where we created the mission statement and all the other                  principles on which the press was founded, with the sun shining in through tall windows in       the “nook” at 127 Pembroke Street, our first office 

Was their first brownstone on Saint Botolph or Pembroke? Pembroke is much more in the South End proper and definitely five stories. I'm just not sure if they lived and worked there or had someplace like Saint Botolph as their home base and Pembroke as an office. Unlikely, I suppose. It's also confusing as the Saint Botolph address would come up on much later publications, as late as the 1991 copyright page for the Press's edition of Media Strategies for Grassroots Organizing by Charlotte Ryan. 

I'm also intrigued by Sargent remembering early debates over the name of the press - "Heart of the Beast (HOB) Press vs. Seventh Wave vs. Left Field Books vs. Peace Press vs. People Press, and on." How did they settle on naming it after the neighborhood around them, and why?

As I go forward, I want to explore the neighborhood at the time of the Press's launch, which should give a sense of their inspiration. The name is a bit of a frozen snapshot of a neighborhood that changed quickly, leaving this press's name, now at risk of being forgotten given its closure some years ago, an added weight. It's hard to look at the South End now and see it as a place that seemed so relevant to these leftists that they wanted to put it on every spine for every publication going forward. And it sat on some incredibly important spines. It does give me an odd sense of pride, and maybe even some hope.