Matthew Lindeboom, The Examiner
2008-06-07 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

Gregg Wilhelm, lanky and bespectacled, paces the front of the classroom and holds up a book just off the press.

“We do real book publishing here,” he tells his Loyola College students, who work for Apprentice House, the country’s only college book publisher staffed by undergraduates. “These are real books and real authors.”

Wilhelm, a veteran book publisher who serves as director and editor in chief of Apprentice House, brings reality to the basement classroom of Dorothy Day Hall on Loyola’s Evergreen campus.

“Publishing,” he quips, “can be exciting, trying and backbreaking, especially if you’re lifting the books you’ve just printed.”

But that isn’t to say the fledgling publishing house is small-time or limited in scope.

Among its eclectic mix of 15 published titles: “Prayer for the Morning Headlines: On the Sanctity of Life and Death,” poems by Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and peace activist, chosen by photographer Adrianna Amari, whose photos of cemetery statues accompany the poems; “Writing Green: Advocacy & Investigative Reporting About the Environment in the Early 21st Century,” by veteran journalist and author Debra A. Schwartz; and “What would You Die For? Perpetua’s Passion,” a new translation of the prison diary of the third-century Christian martyr.

Amari praised the work of Apprentice House, from conception to final product, marketing and book signings.

Bigger publishing houses seemed reluctant to take on the high cost of reproducing color photographs, Amari said. But print-on-demand allows authors to have books published as customers order them, avoiding high upfront costs of major publishers and the traps of notorious pay-to-publish “vanity publishers.”

“I felt that I was in good professional hands, and I was thrilled by the finished product as well as the reception of the book,” Amari says.

“To have students half my age bring the book to fruition seemed perfect, even inspirational.”

The course exemplifies “experiential learning,” bridging the gap between academe and the publishing world.

Some 40 students in three classes — Book Publishing, Book Marketing and Promotion, and Book Design and Production — work on books from idea through publication and marketing, an 18-month process.

Students prepare manuscripts for publication — collecting information about the author, editing the manuscript and compiling blurbs, introductions and prefaces. At the end of the semester, students pitch books to the Apprentice House board, comprising members of Loyola’s Communication Department and other departments, such as writing and classics.

If the board accepts a title, it negotiates a contract with the author, including royalties, and students work on design before the final phase, creating a cover and developing marketing and promotion plans.

In the classroom, Wilhelm shows students the cover to “Eager Street: A Life on the Corner and Behind Bars,” by prison inmate Arlando “Tray” Jones. Senior Michael Tirone can hardly contain his enthusiasm.

“I had been staring at this book an entire semester, the whole time,” Tirone said. “Now I was holding the proofs, and looking at it made the entire experience came back for me.”

Tirone’s since moved on to writing the marketing plan for “Who Killed Dante Manning?”

Such hands-on experience will give Apprentice students a big advantage if they seek publishing jobs, says Kevin Atticks, the Apprentice House publisher and a professor in the Communication Department.

“At the very least,” Atticks says, “we want students to leave Apprentice House and be able to confidently say, ‘I edited and managed real books.’ ”

Some lessons in publishing could perhaps be learned only through experience. Take the cover of “Reading Lips.” Apprentice deemed the pair of female lips in the first cover too sexy. Next go-round, the colors came out too dark. Then the printed copy came back with no lips at all, just a white, lip-shaped void. Finally, the canary-colored cover, and the lips, came back just right.

“Thank God we don’t have a warehouse full of 3,000 lipless books,” Wilhelm said.

“One testament to the advantages of print-on-demand is that such mistakes would have cost traditional publishers thousands of dollars.”