News Ticker

The Meteoric Rise and Fall of Gnome Press

In my day job, I work with MBA students, and in the time that I’ve been doing that (and working at my regular job), I’ve gained a certain appreciation for how businesses function. When it comes to researching the column, looking at how a business functions has a certain appeal, especially since a major, unspoken element of SF History is really a sort of business history.

An excellent case in point is the rise and fall of a small, independent publisher, Gnome Press, which existed for just over a decade in the middle of the 20th Century. They published some of the genre’s greatest authors, but ultimately failed, overtaken by their own inability to sell books and by changes in the marketplace. Gnome is an interesting business to study, because it carries with it some important lessons.

Read The Meteoric Rise and Fall of Gnome Press over on the Kirkus Reviews Blog.

About Andrew Liptak (167 Articles)
Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He is a 2014 graduate of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, and others. His first book, War Stories: New Military Science Fiction is now out from Apex Publications, and his next, The Future Machine: The Writers, Editors and Readers who Build Science Fiction is forthcoming from Jurassic London in 2015. He can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

1 Comment on The Meteoric Rise and Fall of Gnome Press

  1. Mark McSherry // March 28, 2014 at 8:13 am //

    Though its posts are currently few and far between, the Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey website is a great resource—

    http://gnomepress.me/gnomepress/

    An example of Aaron’s thoroughness:

    Close-up: MEN AGAINST THE STARS
    http://gnomepress.me/2009/05/10/close-up-men-against-the-stars/

    Review: MEN AGAINST THE STARS
    http://gnomepress.me/2009/05/20/review-men-against-the-stars/

Comments are closed.
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/03/the-meteoric-rise-and-fall-of-gnome-press/
www.sfsignal.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-14
70199
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NIFLAYHN2HQITV57TYNDGR4V66Z7AVFL
<urn:uuid:dd259332-2dd6-45cd-aa34-1a84ee8d4c8e>
2015-03-27T03:44:34Z
192.254.207.15
sha1:ZH33ATMQV6H3A6VJQEPNRY75JUG3TWQ2
<urn:uuid:efd44952-9883-45d4-9ede-68c463b44f45>
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/03/the-meteoric-rise-and-fall-of-gnome-press/
length
response
<urn:uuid:297ef5e2-6186-4f5e-b265-b396e498f2e8>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-14
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf