Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

I picked up catalog for fall 2008, and I fell to reading the backlist. What memories it brings!

When Bob Friedman and I founded Hampton Roads in the summer of 1989, what a different world it was then. No Internet, no e-mail in common use, even fax machines and answering machines were fairly new. In those days independent bookstores made up perhaps 60% of our customer list, before they were decimated wholesale by the onset of the chains.

A bigger difference, though, could be seen, looking back, in what was considered “far out” then as opposed to now. I like to think that we contributed our bit to that change.

Younger readers would find it hard to believe how many things that they take for granted were once considered superstition, or foolishness. The materialist bias that used to rule America’s intellectual life walled off discussion of spiritual or nonphysical reality into a sort of ghetto, good enough only for people who were afraid to face facts. Life was considered to be chance, accident, coincidence, followed by extinction. Anyone’s personal testimony of their experience of extra-sensory perception, alternative realities, the afterlife, nonphysical guidance, energy healing, etc., was dismissed out of hand. People who did not remain within the materialist cage were “flakes” or “dreamers” or “mystics”-none of these descriptions being intended to be complementary!

Well, slowly, we’re winning. It takes a long time for cutting-edge science to work its way into mainstream assumptions, but for those who already see what’s what, it is clear that the old Newtonian Cartesian mental universe was only a nightmare, or perhaps we should say, a failure of vision.

I think I will devote a few posts here to looking at some of the books we have published in the past 19 years that I always knew were important, but were not obviously so at the time.