Spinner Publications is a community-centred, non-profit publishing house based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and for the whole life of Baker Books it was the single most important press on the local-interest shelf. Its subject is the history and culture of the cities and towns of southeastern New England — its own backyard, and the store's. Anyone who grew up in the Greater New Bedford region, or who is simply a New England history reader, will find a great deal between its covers.
What a regional press is for
The books a region needs are almost never commercially viable at national scale. A photographic history of Fairhaven, an oral history of a mill neighbourhood, a study of a six-month textile strike in 1928 — no trade publisher in New York is going to take those on, and no algorithm is going to surface them. A non-profit regional press exists precisely to fill that gap, and the test of whether it is working is whether the material would otherwise be lost. By that test Spinner has worked for decades.
The name is a good one. A spinner is a spinner of tales as well as of cloth, which in a textile city is the whole point. The Spinner anthologies themselves — successive volumes of oral histories and essays — collect the stories of individuals and families, neighbourhoods and ethnic groups, industries and the land across southeastern Massachusetts.
Titles the store kept in stock
Daniel Georgianna's The Strike of '28 is the essential account of New England's largest strike of the 1920s, when thirty-five thousand New Bedford and Fall River textile workers walked out against a ten per cent wage cut and stayed out for six months. It is discussed at more length on the New Bedford page.
Drifting Toward the Southeast is one of the strangest and best stories the region produced. In 1841 a fourteen-year-old Japanese fisherman named Manjiro was shipwrecked with four companions and picked up by a New Bedford whaler; the captain brought him home to Fairhaven and had him educated in English, mathematics and navigation. Manjiro later shipped out as crew, circumnavigated the globe, joined the California gold rush to earn his passage, and returned to a Japan that still punished such returns with death — arriving just as Commodore Perry's squadron made his knowledge of the West suddenly indispensable. Spinner's edition presents his own 1852 account in translation.
Out of the Earth: A Heritage Farm Coast Cookbook looks like a cookery book and is really an argument about farmland preservation, working through the agricultural history of the Westport–Dartmouth–Little Compton coast, the farmers still on it, and the local crops — berries, corn, beans, apples, peaches and the region's own Macomber turnip — with recipes gathered from local chefs and farming families.
The press also publishes photographic and postcard histories of individual towns, of which the Fairhaven volume was a perennial: a town that manages to contain Wampanoag and colonial history, Revolutionary War actions, a seafaring heritage and a set of extraordinary Victorian public buildings within a few square miles.
Small presses generally
Spinner was the local instance of a principle the store believed in generally — that independent presses take the risks large houses will not, on untried formats, on first-time authors, on poetry, and on subjects with a real but limited readership. The store made that argument formally every autumn through the Get Lit promotion.
For readers pursuing the regional material further, Digital Commonwealth hosts digitised photographs and documents from Massachusetts libraries and historical societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities funds much of the state and local humanities work that regional presses draw on.