Long-time editor and publisher Frederick Ramey has launched Leaping Man, a collaborative not-for-profit publishing and production company "exploring the intersection of visual, narrative and performing arts." Ramey will serve as the executive director and will answer to a board of creative people recruited from a number of fields.
"Those who know me well have heard my thinking about this for quite a few years," Ramey said. "With the passing of John Berger, who has long been an inspiration for me, I wanted to bring things together for the cross-genre and cross-media endeavor we've dreamt about for so long. Berger taught us about the responsibility to look for correspondences and to ask essential questions. We mean Leaping Man to be a vehicle for doing that."
Ramey is one of two owner-publishers of Unbridled Books and a member of the board of Denver's Colophon Literary Center. Previously he was a founding editor of the BlueHen imprint at Putnam and through the 1990s was publisher and executive editor of MacMurray & Beck.
According to Ramey, Leaping Man "aspires to increase and intensify exchanges among the arts--regardless of medium or forum--and so we will seek out direct partnerships with visual, literary and performance artists to create work in a variety of media and platforms. We expect that each project will be coordinated with a limited print edition or other artifact, but the parameters for LM's undertakings will be as open as possible."