About this Event
This event is free to attend. Seating is first come, first served.
Meet the author, find out about a terrific new book, ask questions and hear directly from the author, and get personalized signed books!
Bookshop West Portal is looking forward to hosting local book and publishing legend Vicki DeArmon for an intriguing evening pulling back the curtain of how books are published and sold and her riotous adventures through the industry. Bibliophiles won't want to miss this memoir Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire.
You don't need to have read the book to enjoy the event! We do recommend reserving your copy ahead of time:
The heyday of small press publishing in San Francisco lives again
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.
Vicki DeArmon has been in the book industry for forty years as a respected publisher, bookseller, and innovator. She started her San Francisco publishing company Foghorn Press with a small advance on her credit card when she was twenty-five, growing it to a $2 million enterprise before selling it fourteen years later. She worked as the marketing and events director at Copperfield's Books for eight years and as consultant to California's independent bookstores. She's also a writer whose short stories and essays have won awards and appeared online and in print. Vicki is one of the founders of Sibylline Press and serves as its publisher. She lives in California.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
BookShop West Portal, 80 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco, United States
USD 0.00
