LITTLE ROCK — For close to half a century, a World War I veteran’s manuscript had passed from one relative to another, from one drawer to another.
Then last summer it got in the hands of his granddaughter, Pat Mastropieri, who was talking with a friend at church and learned of a new publishing house at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he works.
She went home, got the 200-plus pages of lined notebook paper on which Frederick French had written his story and gave it to Chuck Anderson, UALR professor of rhetoric and writing.
The manuscript - handwritten in pencil in an almost Edwardian script - will be the first book offered by River Market Press, a print on demand publishing house for nonfiction works such as autobiographies, biographies,memoirs and personal-essay collections.
“The first thing I did was put [his manuscript] in acid free sleeves,” Anderson said. “His handwriting is just beautiful. ... It’s almost a print.”
George Jensen, chairman of UALR’s Rhetoric and Writing Department, hopes that first book will be available for sale in nine months to a year. The time between now and then will be spent editing and formatting the manuscript.
The inspiration for River Market Press was Moon City Press, where copies of a book are not printed until an order is placed. Moon City is based at Missouri State University in Springfield.
Jensen hopes River Market Press will open the door to books that might not attract traditional publishers, where even a small press run can cost about $20,000.
“These publishers may feelthat the market is too small for these works, or the works could not be easily marketed,” he said.
French’s memoir, titled Tommy Adkins at Home and Abroad, tells of his service with the British Royal Army Service Corps - primarily in England and in Mesopotamia along the Tigris-Euphrates river system in modern-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Tommy Atkins, or Adkins, is a nickname for British soldiers.
“I just think it’s a treasure,” Anderson said of the manuscript.
In his introduction, French writes, “I’m not a writter” - yes, with two t’s - but declares he’s going to try.
“It’s fairly rough” at the start, Anderson said. “He never met a paragraph in his life. I don’t think he was a very strong acquaintance of sentence-bounded punctuation. ... But as the book progresses, he gets better and better and better.”
For instance, French spells “Adkins” with a “d,” even though it was commonly spelled with a “t.”
“We’ll explain that it [the surname] was spelled both ways,” Anderson said. “But the publisher probably will go with the title as French spelled it.”
French, known among relatives for singing British drinking songs, “sort of grows up as a writer” as he tells his story, Anderson said.
“This is by a man who’s not a ‘writter,’ but he certainly knew how to write.”
River Market Press intends to include a scanned copy of French’s handwritten title page among other original pages, Anderson said.
French’s real surname was Cadosch, his granddaughter said. He joined the military because, like so many people then, “he needed a place to sleep and food in his belly,” she related.
Later he wanted out and deserted, only to return to the service under his mother’s maiden name, French.
In about 1925, he came to the United States and ended up living in Detroit until he died in about 1952 at 67. He maintained the assumed name of French, and that is the name his book will bear, Mastropieri said.
Authors published by the new press would receive royalties after River Market recovers its own expenses.
Books will be available online, and River Market Press plans to start a website.
When someone orders a copy of a book, the publisher will notify the printer, who will mail it to the buyer.
“It’s a new technology that allows us essentially to print one book at a time, which means we don’t have to have a lot of capital to get the publishing company going,” Jensen said.
“Instead of having to come up with $20,000 every time we want to publish a title, it’s really going to cost us a few hundred dollars to do the upload fee” to pay the print on demand company to publish the book.
“These are not books that are likely to be best-sellers,” Jensen said. “These are books that as a general rule are going to have a limited audience but still be books that a select audience is very interested in.
“We’re not going to be a high-volume publisher,” he added. “We may do only one or, at the most, two books a year.”
River Market Press hopes to include books with regional interest.
“We definitely do not want people to send manuscripts,” except upon request, Jensen said. Letters of inquiry are fine.
Students, overseen by a faculty member, will handle editing and production of each book in exchange for class credit.
“They’ll receive plenty of hands-on experience,” Jensen said.
An editorial board of rhetoric and writing faculty members will review submissions and decide what to publish.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 06/20/2010