by Jacob Uitti | Contributing Writer
Looking back on it, it seems like an incredible risk in 1965. At the time, Los Angeles-native John Martin, a manager of a large office supply store, decided he would dedicate one-quarter of his monthly income in perpetuity to a relatively obscure writer with a penchant for drinking. But Martin, as it would turn out, bet on the right horse. His deal with L.A. poet, novelist and short story writer, Charles Bukowski, would end up making historyâand the both of them hundreds of thousands of dollars, too. Bukowski, known as the poet of skid row, wrote poetry books like Love is a Dog From Hell and novels like Ham On Rye and Women. Together, he and Martin helped to change modern American writing, bringing poetry and prose to a street level where they could be read and enjoyed by the âcommon reader.â
Martin, born in 1930, is now retired from the publishing house he founded, Black Sparrow. He has sold the rights to Bukowskiâs work and the work of a few other authors to ECCO, a subsidiary of Harper Collins. Black Sparrow, in its modern form, continues to exist, publishing work, though itâs stewarded by new publishers and editors. We caught up with Martin to talk with him about his early love of literature, his $100 deal with Bukowski, âinsidersâ versus âoutsiders,â his other favorite authors and much more.
As a reader, do you remember the first book you fell in love with?
Oddly enough, it was The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. Isherwoodâs oft-repeated mantra was, âI am a camera.â It was the first book I had ever read where the style was no style, was so direct, so without artifice, with nothing between me and the authorâs eye. Isherwood did indeed write like a camera. Books like this enabled me to appreciate later the finger-on-the-pulse writing that Bukowski developed, writing that explained little bit still managed to say it all. The next significant author to come my way was Paul Bowles, who wrote in the same unvarnished way. Then I was drawn to the Objectivist poets like Reznikoff and Oppen. For all of my publishing career, I looked for writers like that.
Another writer youâve spoken about is D.H. Lawrence. Can you talk about the ideas or words or worlds that drew you in to his writing?
I started much earlier with D.H. Lawrence, in the late 1940s. He was another kind of writer altogether. His roots may have been in the nineteenth century, but his ideas and writing began the formulation, the foundation, of modernism. His original insights into the human condition, plus his sensuous grasp of the natural world, was very appealing to an eighteen-year-old. He soon became my all-time favorite writer. His writing style may have been less direct than the modernists to come, but he still was able to plunge deep beneath the surface, to address âthe substance of things not seen,â to touch and reveal the essence of life.
That seems to be an important part of your ethic.
Yes, thatâs what drew me to writers such as Bukowski, Reznikoff, [Diane] Wakoski, Wanda Coleman, and others.
You famously sold a bunch of first editions to fund the start of Black Sparrow. Was it hard to see those books go?
No, I was anxious to move on with my life. Then later, I just recollected everything even better than before.
How did the West Coast and Los Angeles shape your literary sensibilities?
Well, thatâs where I was. And there was the San Francisco Renaissance and I became interested in those poets. In fact, the firstâwell, the first thing I ever published were five broadsides by Bukowskiâbut the first little book I ever published was by a poet in Berkley named, Ron Loewinsohn. I published Michael McClure and David Meltzer and a number of the members of the San Francisco Renaissance. And then I began publishing people like Robert Kelly and Wakoski, who represented the New York school, at that time. I then went on and published John Ashbury and Kenward Elmslie, who were surreal New York poets. I wanted to publish everything!
My other goal in publishing was to start with a writer and then stick with him, more or less, forever. Because of D.H. Lawrenceâs careerâhe bounced from publisher to publisher to publisher and I could see how scattered that made his work. You couldnât get it all from one publisher, different publishers had different house styles, and I thought it would be best for any author if he had his or her own publisher who would keep their books in print and publish their new books.
Youâve talked about the difference between literary insiders and outsiders. And you often published work that showed the underbelly of industrialization and modernity. Where did that ethic come from?
Itâs so clearâI mean, going back to Walt Whitman. You have the famous poets of the day, like Longfellow and Whittier. And then you had this little guy in Brooklyn paying to publish his own book, Leaves of Grass. Itâs always been a matter of insiders and the outsiders. The insiders are the poets and writers that write for the establishment. The outsiders are the poets and novelists who write to bring down the establishment. But almost every really significant writer that I can think of in the 20th century, from Virginia Woolf to T.S. Elliot to James Joyce, their first books were all published either by themselves or privately.
How did you find the writers you published?
Well, thatâs easy. Because as soon as you publish a writer and that writer flashes his book in his circle of friends, you get manuscripts from all those friends. And you get many, many other manuscriptsâsome of them very goodâthat you canât possibly publish. So, you just publish as much as you can of the very best that come in. But you donât publishâor I didnâtâon a one-shot basis. Even if the book looked promising, I shied away if I didnât think a second book was in the pipeline.
I remember I was at a poetry conference in San Diegoâoh, I guess it would have been in the 60s. Creeley was there, I think Michael McClure and some others. I was offered a manuscript by Jim Morrison. But that did not fit my scheme. I could have lived off that book forever. It never would have gone out of print. It would have sold thousands of copies every year. But thatâs not what I wanted. I wanted my program to be something else. I didnât want to publish lucrative books. I wanted to publish serious books.
You paid Bukowski $100 per month to quit his job at the post office and write full time.
Thatâs kind of a funny story. I mean, we sat down one day and he got out a little piece of paper and gave it to me and I took a pen and he gave me his expenses. He was working in the post office at the time. His rent was $35 a month. He had $15 a month child support. He wanted $15 a month for booze and food. He needed another $10 a month for car insurance and gas. When we added it all up, it came to $100. I said, âYou can really live on $100?â And he said, âYeah.â So, I said, âOkay, Iâll give you $100 for life if you quit the Post Office and write full-time for Black Sparrow.â
Prior to the deal, had you thought about this plan before making the offer?
No, no. It just popped into my mind because he was complaining that he couldnât get the amount of work done that he wanted to get done under the circumstances. He worked the night shift at the Post Office from 10 oâclock in the evening to 8 oâclock in the morning. Then he would come home and sleep. Heâd sleep until about the early afternoon, a short amount of sleep. And then he would write in the late afternoon and the early evening until he went back to work. It was very draining, so thatâs why I felt if he could be freed from that kind of drudgery, we could get somewhere.
And he did. We made the deal. I think that was in November of â69, around there. He said, âOkay, Iâm going to work until the end of the year and then Iâm going to quit.â I said, âFine. Itâs a deal.â And he said, as an aside, âBut Iâm going to take January 1st off because itâs a holiday.â And I thought, âUh-oh, whatâs all that about?â And I think around the middle of February, he sent me the first draft of the manuscript of Post Office. I called him and said, âWhere did this come from?â He said, âWell, you said you wanted a novel to start with and here it is.â I said, âHow could you write a novel in just a few weeks?â And he said, âFear.â

How would he get you his work, would he send it in the mail?
Well, I was living in L.A. at the time. Heâs 15-20 minutes away. But then when I moved to Santa Barbara in 1975, then it was all phone calls and through the mail. When I moved to Santa Rosa in â87, it continued to be phone calls and through the mail.
Did you ever go to the track together?
No. I did not want to intrude on his personal life at all.
Bukowski was often frightened of people. But why do you think you two hit it off so well?
Well, here I come out of the blue. Heâd never heard of me and I lavished praise on his work, which he was not used to. And I was in a position to actually begin printing and publishing his work. I managed a large office supply company and one of my duties was to manage the print shop. So, I had available to me printing presses and printers who, in their spare time, could do for me whatever I wanted. Thatâs how I printed the first five broadsides by Bukowski and the first little booklets.
What was it like to see his legend grow in real time?
It was certainly satisfying. But youâve got to remember that both of us were under a lot of pressure. I was trying to keep a small business afloat and after I started Black Sparrow in 1966, I kept my day job until 1969 or 1970. I would work all day and I had an office that someone had let me use where I went in the evenings and did all the office work – the editing, catalogues, mailing lists, the shipping. I would work at my regular job from about 8 oâclock until 5 and then Iâd go home and have dinner and Iâd work at my office from 7 until midnight. And I did that for three or four years. In one year, I think it was 1969, if you look in the Black Sparrow bibliography you can check that, I published 35 books. I didnât have a secretary, I didnât have a helper, I didnât have a book shipper. I had nobody. And my really long hours would be supplemented by weekends where I could work a 12- or 14-hour day getting everything caught up from the week before. Later I was able to start hiring people and it got easier.
How does it make you feel that Bukowskiâs books are some of the most stolen from bookstores?
Those are the amusing asides. I had noticed that bookstores were re-ordering even more than Iâd hoped. I guess that was the reason. But those werenât my problems. I was trying to feed and house my family and build this business up and, as I added authors, I had to keep them happy, publish their books, get the books out there, arrange readings. It was a big job.
Something thatâs not always talked about with Bukowski is that the sale of his books helped fund the publishing of others Black Sparrow authors.
Thatâs true with any publishing company. Thatâs why Random House publishes movie star tell-all books. They sell 1,000,000 copies and pay for all the books that break even or lose money.
Is that something you two ever talked about at all?
No. He knew what the story was. He knew what the score was. He was no fool.
Do you remember when you found out heâd died?
Yeah, Linda Bukowski called me. I knew he was very sick and that he was in the hospital. I still wasnât prepared for it. She said, âJohn, Hankâs gone.â I said, âOh my god.â But, you know, [Laughs] Hank was, you know, he was not well received, critically by the insiders, if you know what I mean. And it irked it him. He would kind of sneer at what he called âprecious poetsâ who would publish little 30- and 40-page books of poems while he was publishing 250 and 300-page books of poems. So, he asked me to put asideâ and I began doing this in the 70sâpoems I really, really likedâIâd say the best poemsâand hang onto them. He wanted to go on being published after he died and thatâs exactly what happened. I sold the rights to his books to ECCO press and I added nine full-length books to his published poetry. All those poems that he had asked me to put aside.
And I bought all of them!
But they wouldnât have existed otherwise. I have to say in all candor that over the many years I had a hard time keeping up with what he wrote in spite of the ones I was putting aside. If I had published all those poems as we went along, Iâd have had to publish a big book more than once a year. And I really didnât want to do that. You can over-saturate anybody, no matter how good they are. You can make it seem too common and not special enough. So, I would publish a book of his approximately every year-and-a-half, which is a lot. Most authors donât publish a book every year-and-a-half. But by the time I would be ready to publish a new book, the demand would be there. Our salesmen who were out calling on bookstores would be asked, âWhenâs the next Bukowski coming?â
Were there many poems he sent you that you didnât include in books or never published?
Yes, they are in the university archives.
If Bukowski was alive, how do you think he would do in quarantine today?
I think heâd like it. He could just sit and think and write. The only thing heâd miss is going to the track becauseâafter everything was settled down and he was successful and he was living in San Pedro, heâd get up early, heâd have breakfast, read the paper, get ready, leave at about 11 oâclock for the track, spend the afternoon at the track, come home, have dinner, go upstairs at about 8 oâclock and write until 2 in the morning. And that was inviolable. He never broke from that pattern. It was comfortable and itâs like anything else, if you start some kind of project every day at the same time, itâs there for you the next day. So, writing at almost exactly the same time every day, or every nightI donât think he ever had writerâs block in any significant sense.
Looking back, what do you think Black Sparrow did for American literature?
Well, I hope it had some impact. I mean, I published nearly 1,000 books and I published, in addition to Bukowski, some very significant authors. In fact, in this weekâs New Yorker, they have a big double-page spread on Wanda Coleman, who was one of my favorite authors and who lived in L.A. She was a major voice and now, four or five years after her death, sheâs still significant enough to where she gets a two-page spread in the New Yorker, with a photo! Â
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Jake Uitti is a Seattle-based writer whose has been featured in the Seattle Times, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, and The Monarch Review.