Our mission: Restoring lost stories

Vermont Books Press is all Vermont—topics and/or authors—all the time. 

Because we’re all Vermont, all the time, we’re also all about accessibility, in two forms: affordability and availability. Vermont Books Press offers new texts at prices affordable to all, and is bringing back into circulation texts long absent from Vermont’s library shelves at those same minimum prices.

And, lastly, we—partners, Don Peabody and Lianna Tennal—hope to fill a void, to offer an at-cost, not-for-profit, opportunity for Vermont authors, or authors of things Vermontish, who might otherwise go unheard.

How VBP came to be:

From the East, Bearing Gifts: Vermont's Firsts to the Nation is the “mother book” for Vermont Books Press. Thanks to a lot of pro bono help from generous friends—especially critical readers Marge Cady, Charles Johnson and Daniel Neary, editor Bruce McNallie, copy-editor Nina Jaffe and book editors/designers John and Sue Morris of Editide—it's ready to market.

Marge Cady thought every student of, and every student in, Vermont would want a copy of From the East. Hopefully so. Publishers wanted it, too, but, unfortunately, at terms we couldn’t accept: We couldn’t persuade them to price the book such that “every student of, and every student in, Vermont” could afford it, nor would they allow us to discount it—ever. 

As we cast about for other options, we discovered a sad fact: The old Vermont stand-bys are gone: Greene, Daye, Countryman, Tuttle, Little, Erickson, New England Press (the Rosas)—all gone. We couldn't find a bona fide, down-home publishing company ready, willing and able to put the “made in Vermont” seal on home-grown books. There should be such; it’s so easy, these days, to become a publisher. 

And, we realized, we’ve got just the right book to give such a venture a happy launch. Not only that: Researching From the East led us to long-forgotten texts, stories that, while bespeaking the spirit of our state in ways no others can, exist largely inaccessible and—out of sight, out of mind—below public consciousness. 

When we thought of those texts, a light went on for us: We decided to publish From the East ourselves and formed Vermont Books Press to do so—an exclusively Vermont, and decidely non-profit, operation. That decision leads us to hope for realization of another goal as well: to follow-up the mother book with some “babies.” 

We’ve worked to restore these lost stories to the commons, to bring them back to where they can be heard again. We’re creating clean electronic copies that can be printed affordably and read by the public-at-large not just by researchers in archives and special collections. 

The “mother book”—From the East, Bearing Gifts: Vermont’s Firsts to the Nation—is all set to go. The derivative, discovered works—the “babies”—are in various states of final design, but will be added to the “family” soon.