ATHOL — There can’t be many shops that deal both in the objects made in bygone times and the output of living minds.
Marcia Gagliardi’s business does just that. When Gagliardi inherited the home she grew up in at 488 South Main St., it was floor-to-ceiling with antiques. Having worked at an auction house and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, cleaning out the family home became a small business, but the antiques business left her with frequent and unpredictable stretches of downtime. Two people might come in on a given day, she said, “and I’ve always had ink in my veins.”
In addition to her experience with art and objects, Gagliardi has a background with words as a journalist and editor, and decided to do it all. Since 1989, she has been ushering small-run limited edition books to print as Haley’s Antiques and Publishing.
Gagliardi said she had much to learn when she started out. “I understood about putting ink on paper, but I didn’t necessarily understand about books,” she said.
Allen Young ran his own small publishing operation nearby, Millers River Publishing. She approached him with her plans and found him very receptive. He mentored her and let her cut her teeth on two books, then closed up his operation as she opened hers.
What Gagliardi understands about putting ink on paper now bridges a period of change in the way printing is done. When Gagliardi started in print, the industry used hot type, which is to say, lead. The process employed text stamps molded in a linotype machine to suit the edition. Then came compu-graphic printing. Gagliardi wielded a razor in this stage of printing, slicing up typed sheets to arrange them onto a mock-up of the newspaper page, which was then photographed and printed.
In about 1984, computer programs like InDesign, PageMaker and Quark took over and the hardware component of the editor’s job shrank to a literal and digital desktop, with keyboard and mouse.
The jump to computers wasn’t a small hurdle. Gagliardi attended trainings hosted by the big software developers as they pushed their products to the print industry. She also had the help of a three-day, unsolicited intensive workshop led by a college friend with a head for numbers who had become a consultant for Microsoft.
But publishing isn’t all about the technology of the moment, knowing what to do with a razor or a computer cursor.
“There is a lot of communication between the author and the editor … I believe in collaboration and I think it’s important for the editor and author to agree about the approaches and the material,” Gagliardi said.
Gagliardi said she tends to serve as the line editor on the team that coalesces around each publishing project, a group that usually includes a copy editor and photographers or artists.
As the publisher and line editor, she talks to the author, works out what portion of the cost she will assume as the publisher and what the book needs to be publishable.
Haley’s is a small press; 2,400 stands as the record for books sold from a single print run. The financial arrangements often include some of the author’s money, although out of 140 or 125 books maybe three have been wholly at the author’s expense.
To keep the risk low, she prints primarily through a print-on-demand service. It’s slightly lower quality than offset printing, but safer. Gagliardi can now pick a print run of any number, rather than gambling that a book will sell enough copies to float the minimum run of, say, 650.
Gagliardi treats writing as education. She is anxious that books impart information without making assumptions about what the readers do and don’t already know and without insulting their intelligence. “That’s what we talk about, how to address the intelligent, uninformed reader in a way that suits the material and respects both the author and the reader,” she said.
A quick run-through of titles and how they came to be includes: manuscripts that arrived by email and took years to finish, a manuscript she spotted on a friend’s kitchen table and a memoir whose author’s arm had to be twisted into writing it. That was a story Gagliardi wanted to read, and a unifying characteristic of her publishing. “I won’t publish anything I don’t want to read. Nothing,” Gagliardi said.
She tends to the left of the political spectrum, and is proud of the radical output of the past decade, but says she publishes authors from the right and elsewhere as well.
Gagliardi said she writes a little, but is more of a hack. “I love to see other people’s work shine. I really love that,” she said.
You can reach Chris Curtis at: ccurtis@recorder.com