Who We Are

It started with a manuscript, one we knew was great but we also knew wouldn’t find a publisher. People don’t buy fictional short story collections about America’s presence in post-Cold War Europe, so publishers don’t publish them.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with—in fact, something admirable about—a press publishing books they anticipate readers will actually want to buy and read. We hope to do the same.

But a temptation arises to select manuscripts similar to books that already exist and sell. Again, there’s nothing sinister about this model, but it is, by its very nature, derivative.

You can’t fall in love with the book you’ve never read, the one unlike the last one. You don’t know the girl you’ll fall for until she shows up at the dance. Until you try falafel, it can’t seduce your tongue. You can’t read the book you can’t buy, and there can never be a market for a book that never makes it to market.

At the age of 12, I (Lucas, co-founder) found Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and was changed, precisely because it was entirely unlike anything I’d seen or read before. I never could have known I’d be changed by pre-revolutionary China, or the earth itself, or O-Lan, still among the greatest characters in all of literature. It was timeless and original all at once, a 75-year-old testament to that eternal truth that “one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.” Even a kid feels that in his bones.

Like most archaeologists, Ryan (co-founder) probably became an archaeologist because of Indiana Jones. Sure, there’s excitement and honor and snakes and shootouts with Nazis. But after the Nazis melt and grail meets bedrock, a child experiences a certain kind of enduring reverence for the newfound truth that buried beneath the earth itself is the history of the world. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.” So ancient things took on new life, and ten thousand archaeologists sprang forth.

We need books with timeless themes, ones about timeless things, the ones that go unpublished because timeless things are, by their nature, rarely trendy. In the current moment, a Hemingway would have a hard time finding a publisher. The adventure story fueled by love and honor, liquor and women, gunfire and duty endures among readers but dies in the arms of its editors. We aren’t scouring the earth for Hemingway’s resurrection; we’re simply nervous that we may be missing our geniuses, be they alcohol-drenched ambulance drivers or Haitian nuns with a Substack. Readers still ache for literary fiction that draws on something more enduring than the romantic self-obsession of a melancholic youth. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.”

And then there are the ones that go unpublished because courage is sometimes lacking. The year before we started our press, Kathleen Stock could find no American publisher (despite being published in the U.K.) for a book about sex, gender, the philosophy of fiction, and feminist criticism. Anchored in traditions of more substance than the culture war camps of the day, it still managed to speak to a topic of genuine modern interest. And boy, was there public interest, as demonstrated by the very public campaign to strip her of her professorship. This is the other danger of judging a book against the perceived trends and social convenience of the moment: You’re often wrong. And it probably cost the publishers.

So this veteran/photojournalist/archaeologist and Near Easternist/schoolteacher duo founded a press because we want to publish books you haven’t read before that speak to past and present. No fads, no kitsch. There’s timeless stuff that isn’t already on the shelf. And we want to put it there.

The Team

Spade & Scroll works with various graphic designers, photographers, printers, distributors, and social media and marketing consultants to turn killer manuscripts into worthy books and then get them into the hands of readers.

If you’d like to see how you can get involved, feel free to send an email to queries@spadeandscroll.com.