By Brian Dunlap

Los Ángeles has a deep literary tradition. Commonly, its origins are traced back to 1884 and Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. Set in Southern California after the Mexican-American War, Jackson portrays the life of a mixed-race Scottish-Native American orphan girl, Ramona, who suffers racial discrimination and hardship. However, when the first Europeans begin to arrive in Southern California in the 1700s, they wrote diary entries and letters about their experiences in Southern California. And before them, the native Tongva, Chumash and Payómkawichum, among other native people in Southern California, told their creation stories and morality tales to successive generations for thousands of years and continue to do so to this day.

When Black Sparrow Press was founded in Los Ángeles by John Martin in 1966, to publish the work of Los Ángeles writer Charles Bukowski and other avant-garde authors, he was entering a rich story telling tradition few knew.

At the time of Black Sparrows’ founding, Martin was manager of a Southern California office supply company that did some printing. But he was also a lover of literature, having both collected books since he was 20, and acquiring his father’s collection. At 35 he had amassed a collection of D.H. Lawrence first editions. He had just read the work of L.Á. writer Charles Bukowski in mimeographed magazines and fell in love. He sought him out.

During this time, the 1960s, the Los Ángeles literary community was expanding. The Black Arts Movement exploded in South Central and Watts, in the aftermath of the Watts Rebellion in August 1965, and poetry took off with the founding of the Watts Writers Workshop. These poets—Quincy Troupe, Johnie Scott, Kamau Daood, the Watts Prophets, and even for a time, Wanda Coleman, among others—wrote about their truths, their realities, in ways that resisted western traditions to find new ways to express these realities.

In the late 1950s, a small group of Beat Poets began to coalesce around Beat Poet Stuart Perkoff’s Venice West Café Expresso on the Venice Bordwalk. This group of poets, that included Lawrence Lipton, Charlie Foster and John Thomas Idlet, were united by a rejection of a society of growing affluence. This tradition of Venice’s resistance poetry has continued through the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, founded two years after Black Sparrow Press, in 1968, by George Drury Smith. Over the years Beyond Baroque has promoted the Venice Beats work and history.

So, John Martin sought out Charles Bukowski, a writer influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Ángeles, as experienced through the ordinary lives of the poor, to publish him. Martin only wanted to publish “what I really liked myself,” he said in a 2002 Metroactive story about Black Sparrow Press. In order to afford to publish Bukowski, he sold his D.H. Lawrence collection to UC Santa Barbara for $50,000 to officially establish Black Sparrow.

Meeting with Bukowski over the next six months, while continuing to work at the office supply company, Martin and Bukowski worked out a deal. Since Bukowski needed $100 a month to quit his job at the post office to devote himself to the stacks of unfinished writing piling up, Martin bet on Bukowski by giving up one-fifth of his monthly salary ($100) to become Bukowski’s publisher. The first piece of writing Black Sparrow published in April, 1966 was 30 copies of Bukowski’s poem “True Story.”

Martin began publishing literature in L.Á. at a time when publishing in the community consisted of poets and writers self-publishing—distributing broadsides of their poems in small numbers, for example—publishing in small locally established magazines like California Quarterly and Coastlines, or traditionally publishing with presses outside Southern California like New York.

It was two years before George Drury Smith started publishing the magazine Beyond Baroque that would evolve into the literary arts center that has continued its tradition of publishing, around the time The Watts Writers Workshop published two anthologies of their writing edited by founder Bud Schulberg, and not until the 1970s when former local bookstore Papa Bach, began to publish.

But soon after Black Sparrow began to publish, they printed from Santa Barbara and Santa Rosa, California before John Martin closed shop in 2002.

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Black Sparrow Press wasn’t just John Martin. His wife, Barbara, was intimately involved. She had a creative mind and used it to create the cover designs for their books. Covers that people said were distinctive, eye catching, helped sell their books, and today, that they call iconic. She designed the covers with distinctive colors, graphics and type. It all began when she looked at the designs the printer created for their early broadsides and said, “I can do better than that,” John Martin relayed in a 2014 Gizmodo article. “Let me see” he said and Barbara began to sketch.

There was also Graham Mackintosh, a typographer and fine printer, who Martin opened a print shop with in Santa Barbara in the early 1970s. It was Mackintosh’s literary connections that gave Black Sparrow an in to the literary world. He had worked with small presses in the past.

With these initial connections in hand, and starting out working on Black Sparrow until 2am on weekdays and all weekend, Martin was able to create “a built-in group of maybe 50 booksellers all over the world,” that he could sell to, he said in the same Metroactive story. They took everything he published. With this, and Martin’s eye for talent that included publishing L.Á. writers Wanda Coleman, John Fante and Diane Wakoski, along with Bukowski, he was able to finally turn a profit in 1971.

Martin said he could always identify good writing because it “has to have some fire and some soul in it.” He could always tell if they were struck, and he’d found a gem, from “those first few notes.”

With Wanda Coleman, Charles Bukowski and John Fante gaining wider recognition, thanks to John and Barbara Martin and Black Sparrow, John Martin came along just after the Los Ángeles literary community began to democratize, to become more easily accessible, in large part due to the Venice Beat Poets. An evolution that continued with the Black Arts Movement and the Watts Writers Workshop, in the 60s and early 70s, and The Woman’s Building, founded in the 70s.

Founded in L.Á., Black Sparrow Press was birthed from Los Ángeles’ long and rich storytelling tradition.