A life changed by reading

 Alan Swallow is a good example of a life influenced by reading.

He grew up in Wyoming. As a boy, he was interested in cars and motorcycles and hoped to be an engineer. When he was 16, about the time the Depression was setting in, he got a job at a gas station at the north end of Yellowstone Park. He was busy in bursts but would then have 30 minutes without a customer. He discovered the Haldeman-Julius Blue Books, published in the small town of Girard, Kansas.

Emanuel and Marcet Heldeman-Julius published cheap paperbacks, small enough to put in a pocket, that were designed to give working-class people access to what educated people were reading. The series included classics — essays by Thoreau, stories by Maupassant, and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare. Will Durant’s series of little books on philosophers was republished as The Story of Philosophy.

To the teenaged Swallow, the selling point was that he could buy 20 for a dollar.

All that reading changed him. America lost a mechanic or automotive engineer but gained a literature professor and small publisher.

Swallow preferred “little publisher.”

 “The term ‘little,’ of course, refers to an attitude, not to size,” he wrote. “The analogy is that book publishing should be informed by the same noncommercial dedication as characterized by at least the best of the little magazines.”

He sometimes used the word “idealism” in a personal sense, in the same way religious people talk of their faith. Swallow believed that good literature should be available and inexpensive. He set up his first small press in 1939 when he was a graduate student at Louisiana State University. He borrowed $100 from his father and bought a hand press. He went to the library to learn how to use it. He envisioned selling pamphlets for 25 cents.

He wrote that he was born on the frontier, and believed he’d inherited a tendency of frontier life. “That tendency is to act on one’s beliefs and ideas. I value this inheritance probably more than any other. Translated to the situation in 1940 when I had finished two jobs with my hand press, it meant that I would be compelled by my own character to act, that is, that I would do what I felt should be done, and those things that I felt should be done were informed by the idealism that I have mentioned.”

• Source: Swallow’s essay originally appeared in New Mexico Quarterly, XXXVL, 4 (Winter, 1966-1967), pp. 301-324. I found it as “Story of a Publisher” in The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To, edited by Bill Henderson, The Pushcart Press and Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980.