First, an introduction to our company, and then to some of the many people, past and present, who have contributed their talents to making it a success.

…and its legacy of 70 years experience in publishing books on Americana, travel, cooking, advice, the graphic arts, and many other subjects.

Formed for the purpose of telling the world about America, this renowned publishing house is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Hastings House has grown from a one-book, one author operation into a medium-size publisher with a wide program. It has told the world about America and a lot of other things as well. One of the messages has been that a publisher of modest size can produce books of excellent design for a wide audience.

On this blog we at Hastings House, along with our friends, will tell you about a great American book publisher and our involvement with them, their fascinating past, views on the future of publishing, excerpts from their books, and complete chapters from their Daytrips travel guides that you can download and use for your own adventures. New selections will be added frequently, so bookmark this page and visit often!

SCROLL DOWN FOR A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE COMPANY, following a bit about the people who made it happen.

That's the view from our window

                           ...and here's our storage facility

We have all of the catalogs since 1936. Photocopies are available on request. Reprints using Print-On-Demand (POD) technology can be arranged.

For a sample of Permissions we've granted, CLICK HERE. and HERE. These go to Tenth Planet Telegraph.

CONTACTS:

A Letter From The Publisher

e-mail: HastingsDaytrips@embarqmail,com

web: www.HastingsHouseBooks.com

         www.DaytripsBooks.com

phone: 1-800-206-7822

Peter Leers, Publisher, a native of Germany and resident of the U.S. since 1965, attended the University of Cincinnati under a Fulbright scholarship, and was trained as an automotive engineer. He held executive positions with VW in Australia and Ford in Germany, Belgium and the United States before founding and heading his own insurance firm in 1971. He later sold his interest in the U.S. insurance business and focused on his family's real estate holdings in Germany, adding insurance and financing divisions to form the Peter Leers Group. In 1996 the group purchased 100% of the stock of Eagle Publishing Corporation, the New York-based corporate parent of Hastings House, book publishers since 1936.

Earl Steinbicker, Writer and Editor, a native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, moved to New York City at the age of 18 and became assistant to the noted photographer Richard Avedon. From 1957 through 1959 he served in the U.S. Army Security Agency as an information specialist based in Tokyo, Japan. Returning to New York, he became studio manager for the Avedon Studio, and in 1965 opened his own studio. Considerable world travel led him to develop the Daytrips series of guidebooks, which were first published by Hastings House in 1982.

James Postell says: "Good fortune shined on me as I began traveling the world with my wife and landed a contract to write travel-related materials for Hastings House Publishers. I met an interesting editor, who became my writing ‘godfather’ and as a result of his mentoring obtained several magazine gigs and a second book contract. I always envied people, like my dad, who actually practiced their trade on the off hours as a form of enjoyment. And now I have the same opportunity by entertaining friends and family with stories of travel to Australia, Bali, and New Zealand. My recently released travel guide, Daytrips Eastern Australia, is selling well and my research has turned to the Florida tourism market."

Rachel Borst — a native of Vermont, where she completed undergraduate work in literature and languages at both the University of Vermont and Middlebury College. Rachel began working at Hastings House in 1997 after completing graduate work in Russian literature and publishing studies at NYU. An indispensable presence at Hastings House for five years, Rachel finished her full-time career here as senior editor and was instrumental in the acquisition and development of the company's trade book line, which contains many titles in virtually every subject area. As senior editor she was critical in the development and promotion of a wide variety of titles, most notably such bestsellers as The Complete Book of Baseball's Negro Leagues, hailed by producer Ken Burns as "groundbreaking," Great American Mansions — and Their Stories, which received praise from the New York Times, Fifty Dead Men Walking, which spent weeks on the London Times, its sequel Dead Man Running, and the medical guidebook, Injured — What Now?, which was edited from a very loose German translation. She continues to play an active role at Hastings House within a freelance capacity.

Henno Lohmeyer, journalist, has spent a great part of his career with Springer Publishing in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. correspondent in Africa, editor-in-chief "BZ," Berlin's largest daily newspaper 1992-94. A talk show host in the early days of German TV. Writer and producer of well over 250 TV programs, featuring Burt Lancaster, Placido Domingo, Benny Goodman, Tony Randall, Victor Borge, and Giorgio Moroder. Twice winner of the "Rose d'Argent" at the prestigious Montreaux Festival. Founded PR agency, representing clients such as Andre Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Oscar Peterson, Melina Mercouri, Stanley Kubrick, designing campaigns for Charlie Chaplin's movie classics or Frank Sinatra's ill-fated last European tour.In the United States since 1978. Produced for German television "The Best of Broadway" (Tony Awards Show) series, "The Greatest Show on Earth" "Siegfried & Roy." Editor and anchor of German language version of daily "Wall Street Journal News."

Thomas Tafuri has been a designer since 1969 when he started One Plus One Studio in Manhattan with his wife Nancy. Over the years the studio, now located in Roxbury, Connecticut, has concentrated on working in the book publishing area.

Barney Rosset: Creator of Grove Press, Evergreen Review and Blue Moon, Barney Rosset's name is a well-known synonym for independent publishing. In an ongoing legal and literary trench war, BR cleared the path for most of what we think as post-war literature, publishing Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Ionesco, and of course Samuel Beckett, as well as a host of others. Bete Noir of the C.I.A. and American authoritarianism, Barney has survived many kinds of assault, from Japanese guns and grenades launched by reactionary Cubans, to feminist assailants and corporate raids by narrow minded entrepreneurs. He was arrested in numerous cities for publishing Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but eventually won that battle. Similar fights followed with Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, and William Burrough's Naked Lunch.

Rosset published Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1954 and sold just 341 copies that year. It has now sold more than 1.5 million copies. In November 1988 Barney Rosset received the PEN American Center's Publisher Citation, which reads "for distinction and continuous service to international letters, to the freedom and dignity of writers, and to the free transmission of printed word across the barriers of poverty, ignorance, censorship and repression."

Professor Stan Gontarski, of Florida State University and a publishing historian said about Barney Rosset: "When Barney Lee Rosset, Jr. bought the floundering Grove Press in 1951 for $3,000 few could imagine that it would develop into the era's most explosive and influential publishing house which exercised so formative an influence on that nexus of sex abd politics we loosely call the sixties. Rosset and Grove sat at the eye of that destabilizing storm of sex and politics, in fact generated much of its turbulence which in turn catapulted a small, unkown publishing house, featuring at first little more than reprints of literary classics, into the most influential, innovative, audacious, pugnacious, controversial, and finally self-destructive publishing concern in the United States for nearly two decades."

It was in 1936 that Hastings House was founded by Walter Frese (photo, left), then vice-president of the Architectural Book Publishing Company of New York. At that time Samuel Chamberlain, a well-known architectural photographer and writer, proposed doing a book on small homes in New England in light of the demand for more modest housing brought on by the Great Depression. Deciding that the idea was not a good fit with their other books, the publisher turned him down. Mr. Frese, however, saw great value in a beautiful little book aimed at a broader audience, specifically the "little old ladies in their white hats" who visited New England. He then decided to start his own publishing business with Samuel Chamberlain's A Small House in the Sun as its first title. The business name, Hastings House, was chosen because Mr. Frese then lived in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson.

Following the success of the first book, other titles by Chamberlain soon appeared, eventually totalling some 65 volumes. The firm then began publishing books about other parts of the country and diversifying into various fields, mostly on Americana. One of the largest undertakings was as part of the WPA Writers' Project, a federally-funded New Deal program designed to keep writers from starving during the Depression. These State Guide Books, although nearly 70 years old, are still highly regarded. After the program was dissolved one of its founders was engaged by Hastings House to produce a massive one-volume guide to the entire United States in 1948 called The American Guide, which became the Book-of-the-Month Club's most successful divident up to that time.

The company became noted for its books in series, in which each title complemented others in the same series. Among the better known were The Visage of America, including Fair is Our Land, The Missions of California, Natchez: Symbol of the Old South, The Pueblos, Behold Williamsburg, Cape Cod in the Sun, and West Coast Portrait, to name a few.

The American Procession Series was a significant literary venture of dramatic non-fiction books that center around the epic episodes in out history and cultural growth that have not been adequately told, crucial developments that set the direction of our civilization. These books are concentrated in time rather than geography. They deal with great movements, political, social, economic, not with long-range trends. There was also a series on Latin America.

In 1947 and 1948 Walter Frese was the youngest president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, which led to books on visual communication and the graphic arts. Many of these became textbooks for various universities, so that although the firm was small it produced more of these titles than any other publisher. In 1956 a juvenile division was added to produce children's books.

One of the firms's best sellers was Frank Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia of Wine, considered to be the standard book on that subject, which was translated into six languages — including French! Other wine books were added, along with titles on food and entertaining. By that time Hastings House was firmly settled in its offices at 10 East 40th St., New York, practically next door to the New York Public Library and a short stroll from Grand Central Terminal.

In 1982 Hastings House published the first title in the new Daytrips series of travel guides, Daytrips from London. These continue with new additions and revisions of the older titles.

When Walter Frese retired in 1985, the firm was acquired by Eric Kampmann, formerly an executive with one of the world's major publishers. Later on, in 1989, it was sold to Hy Steirman, a gentleman with a long history in both book and magazine publishing. Mr. Steirman soon moved the company to new offices in suburban Mamaroneck, New York. A few years later it was again sold, this time to Peter Leers, a businessman from Cologne, Germany, who again moved it first to Norwalk, Connecticut, and later to the suburbs of Orlando, Florida, where it is today.

Today, Hastings House is a pioneer in the use of modern Print-On-Demand (POD) technology through its association with Booksurge LLC, a division of Amazon.com.

Comments

[Murilo Sergio Romeiro]

Hi,
I have an exemplar of " The New England Calendar For Engagements" from 1949. I would like to post it ( cover and all the photos ) in my Flickr.com page ( MURIL0)but I don´t want problems about copyrights .
I would like the Flickr community could see the awesome photos by Mr. Samuel Chamberlain. I love this calendar ( It was a gift from my Dad and I preserve it because I was born in 1949,July,26.)
Can I do that or not?
Please send me a answer.
Thank you very much.
Murilo
Fone number 12-39312771 - Brazil

[Diana Garibbo]

Dear Sir, Madam,
My name is Diana Garibbo, from publishing House Lemniscaat.
I am looking for the right person who can help me with a reversion of rights.
Many years ago Hastings published "How to become a king" by Jan Terlouw.
I need a reversion of rights since the title is no longer available and out of print.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Greetings Diana Garibbo

[toni knox]

Is there any way to obtain Samuel Chamberlain photographs from "The Flavor of Italy"?

[Art Isberg]

Hello:
Do you accept, publish, and market novels of western fiction? I have a long list of short stories, paperback and hardcover books. My novels are available on amazon.com. My current novel, White Wolf, runs 324 pages and 97,000 words. If interested I will go further, but first I must know if that interest is there.

[Scott Beal]

My mother-in-law is looking for Gloria Michels, author of How to Make Yourself Famous, 1994. They went to high school together in Irvington, NJ. Do you have any information on her whereabouts today?
Sincerely yours,
Scott Beal
Ruth Barth is my mother in law