Among the many contributors to Among Friends: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing & Bookselling in the 20th Century, published last fall by Two Trees Press and distributed by Ingram Content Group, is John Cassidy, co-founder and longtime head of Klutz Books. Here we reproduce his contribution, which focuses on Klutz and "Event Publishing."
In 1977, I was 27, living the unmarried, van-based, low-overhead lifestyle. During the summers, I was a guide leading river trips in California and Idaho. (Think "ski bum" without the snow.) Like most of my shiftless friends, I enjoyed the freedom and was open to ideas about how to make a living without "making a living."
At night, around the campfire, we were expected to entertain the guests. I couldn't sing but somewhere in my checkered past I had learned how to juggle. Frequently, after dinner, I would take a group down to the river and teach them how to juggle with rocks--or at least try.
Juggling proved surprisingly popular and when fall rolled around with its attendant cash-flow issues, I approached a friend, B.C. Rimbeaux, and proposed that we go back to the Bay Area and spend a little time busking on the street, selling bean bags and giving away juggling lessons. I suggested $5 for three bean bags. We sewed them ourselves.
After a week of this, we had cleared more than $30 and it was then, I believe, that we first realized the sky was the limit.
While Rimbeaux decided to take a much-needed vacation, I stayed in the Bay Area and wrote a booklet titled Juggling for the Complete Klutz, an homage to John Muir's How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual for the Complete Idiot.
On his return, Rimbeaux and I pooled our resources and with $6,000 in start-up capital, we felt we were ready to publish. Except our juggling book lacked art. Fortunately, I had just met Diane Waller at a party, and she mentioned that she liked to draw. That was good enough for us.
Another friend in business school joined us, and talked one of her professors into investing a little. Thus were we incorporated and capitalized.
In October 1977, we ran off 3,000 copies of Juggling for the Complete Klutz. Our hope was to make an immediate fortune and retire to a lifestyle of excess and indulgence. At the same time, we were realistic and figured the far greater likelihood was abject failure.
The following year turned out to be quite disappointing. Not because the business was a failure, but because it wasn't. We were not interested in a career--only immediate outcomes, good or bad--and our little book on juggling just kept chugging along, gradually building sales and distribution in the face of a fairly aggressive degree of neglect by its publishers, the three of us.
Eventually my partners both got married and left, although they retained their financial interest. I ended up doing the same--getting married, that is--and shortly after that I became parental. Thus the "c" word ("career") began to lose some of its terror.
I should pause here for a moment to say something about our decision to package our book with three bean bags.
We are occasionally given credit for pioneering this format, for packaging how-to books with the tools of their trade and breeding what eventually turned into a publishing category: books plus. "What a brilliant idea!" we've been told. "Packaging genius!"
Actually, packaging the bean bags with the book was a huge hassle. But one cannot learn to juggle with almost anything except bean bags. And since one cannot run down to the store and buy bean bags, our hands were tied. We had to package them together.
By 1982, we had sold some 50,000 books on juggling, and the ceiling of that industry felt nearby. I had a young child to feed and rent to pay. Thus I began to wonder... does the world want to learn anything besides juggling?
At a trade show, we met some young guys from Oregon with a new game they were calling Hacky Sack. It was like juggling in that the goal was to keep a bean bag in the air, but you could only use your feet.
A few months later, I saw kids playing it on our street. I gave those guys from Oregon a call. The Hacky Sack Book sold 100,000 copies in its first year, and Klutz now had a catalog. Two titles long.
I knew absolutely nothing about publishing, printing, distribution, marketing, accounting, warehousing, or management. I had to borrow a coat and tie for trade shows. As the years wore on, I was forced to learn stuff that an English major ought never to know.
Over the 25 years of our independent life, Klutz published something like 75 titles. We never sold any equity or borrowed from anyone. Nothing went out of print and many of our books sold more than a million copies. We did titles on games, science, cooking, crafts, art, journaling, and beauty (or "preening" as I sometimes called it).
Thanks to our reputation, we were able to order large print runs and devote significant resources of time and money to the editorial process. Everything was created in-house, and we published two or three titles a year. We called it "event publishing" and every title was given a red-carpet launch. All the books were putatively for kids, although I'm sure many adults sneaked in.
By 2000, we had a staff of 45 and revenues of about $45 million. It was then that my partners announced they wanted to sell. I considered going to a bank and buying them out, but eventually decided against that. Part of me still remembered my early footloose years, and a big loan didn't comport well with that memory, or a vision of my future either.
We held an auction and attracted the interest of publishers and media players, including Penguin, the Discovery Channel, Scholastic, and a small Toronto animation house called Nelvana. I ended up choosing Nelvana. There followed an awkward year after Nelvana was purchased by a Canadian cable company, Corus Entertainment. I had one foot out the door when Corus announced unexpectedly that they had closed a deal to sell Klutz to Scholastic.
I stayed for five more contented years running Klutz, a division of Scholastic, in our California offices. But then I was almost 60 and retirement was on my mind when a couple of things triggered the decision.
Since the beginning, readers had approached me to say how much they liked the juggling book. I had developed a stock response: "So you learned to juggle and ran off to join the circus, right?" To which they inevitably responded: "No, actually I lost the bean bags."
This happened so reliably that I told a co-worker that if anyone ever gave me a different response, I would promptly retire.
In fall 2008, a young parent came up to me and started the usual dialogue. They'd been given the juggling book when they were a kid... etc. etc.
"So you ran off to join the circus?" I asked. "Absolutely," said the fellow. "I spent five years with Ringling Brothers as a clown. How'd you know?"
I retired later that year.