Scribe’s Founder and Publisher-in-Chief

My career path is, to put it mildly, not typical. I’ve never worked for any other publisher, nor been trained professionally to edit, typset, and publish books. Nor have I come to my position through sales and marketing. But I’ve always been oriented to the culture of the written word: I was a high school and university writer and editor, an industry house-journal editor, and wrote as a freelancer for the newspaper Nation Review in 1972. Then I worked in the Whitlam government.

So, founding Scribe in the mid-1970s seemed a natural progression to me — a way to pursue my interests in serious non-fiction and quality fiction. Without realising it, I became a member of an endangered species: an editor/publisher, driven by content.

I’m sure this had a lot to do with my background as the son of Holocaust survivors and a student of history and literature. I felt the world was a serious place, and I was wedded to a ridiculously romantic concept of the heroic editor and the campaigning publisher. Basically, I became a trade publisher because I wanted to publish books that mattered.

Many years later, we still try to publish books that have a reason for being, beyond the need to generate money. We put a lot of work into editing and shaping them, and try to make them as good as they can be. I’m not trying to suggest that we do any of this without a concern for the market; but it is true that we’ll often make a decision about a manuscript’s intrinsic qualities first, and its potential market second.

I’m still drawn to non-fiction writers who have a good case to argue, or who offer fresh perspectives on old stories. With fiction, I love writers with verve and panache who have something to say. Whatever the genre, I’m drawn to books that treat readers as intelligent. As a consequence, we seem to be attracting books by journalists who can think, academics who can write, and freelancers in search of a home.

I’m driven by a conviction that we have to provide a means for authors to tell the truth about what they see and what they know, and that we have to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted’. This is perhaps a bit prosecutorial for a publisher, but there you have it.

Henry Rosenbloom is Scribe’s founder and publisher-in-chief.