A Way With Weird : Ten Speed Press Founder Phil Wood Has Made a Small Fortune Publishing Books No One Could Imagine in Print

BERKELEY —  Like most publishers, Ten Speed Press founder Phil Wood is hardly fond of lawsuits. But he’s already licking his chops over the third threatened suit against Ernie Mickler’s “White Trash Cooking,” a Ten Speed imprint.

The 1986 cookbook--which sold a phenomenal 300,000 copies in its first year, or roughly twice as many as “The Joy of Cooking” sold in the same period--contains recipes for such delicacies as “Uncle Willie’s Swamp Cabbage Stew” and “Tutti’s Fruited Porkettes,” named for a cook “who learned to make her porkettes by using a Hawaiian recipe combined with Southern ingredients. You cain’t git trashier than that.”

The first suit against “White Trash Cooking” was filed on behalf of a woman whose photo appeared on the book’s cover, admittedly without her permission. Wood says the suit was settled out of court for $50,000.

The second suit, threatened by a hot-sauce company whose logo also appeared on the cover, was dropped when the logo was removed in a later edition.

But the potential lawsuit Wood truly relishes comes from the Junior League of Charleston, S.C. According to League president Sally Rhett, portions of the “exact text (in ‘White Trash Cooking’) were taken from the League cookbook, ‘Charleston Receipts,’ ” a plagiarism involving “more than 20 recipes.”

Hopes to Have Fun

“We anticipate having quite a bit of fun with this,” Wood says, sitting in a paper-strewn office full of books, toys and Ming antiques.

“(Some of) the recipes in question involve squirrel and possum. I’m interested, if it goes to court, in asking the Charleston ladies--they’re all married to lawyers--how they learned to cook squirrel and what method they use to skin their possums.”

It is vintage Wood. As nearly anybody in the book industry will tell you, he may well rank as the most unflappable, unconventional and jovial publisher in the business. Even among eccentric independent publishers, the man who proudly prints the recipe for “rack of Spam” is considered unique in that a remarkably high proportion of the weird books he publishes actually go on to make lots of money.

According to Wood, Ten Speed Press and Celestial Arts (the metaphysical house he acquired five years ago) will sell about $10 million worth of books this year, more than a few of which were initially rejected by East Coast publishers. Ten Speed alone has produced such unlikely winners as “What Color Is Your Parachute” (the career-planning guide with more than 3 million copies sold to date), “The Moosewood Cookbook (1 million in print) and “The New Laurel’s Kitchen” (1 million in print). But, along the way, Wood has earned a reputation for something even more remarkable in the publishing industry--treating writers with extraordinary care and kindness.

“He really cares about his books and his authors, probably in reverse order,” observes Brad Bunnin, a Berkeley-based attorney who negotiates publishing contracts for authors, several of whom have signed with Wood. “Phil loves to stick his thumb in the eye of New York publishing. He’s been successful. He can afford to take risks. His publishing interests are pretty eclectic.”

The term is accurate but probably inadequate when it comes to describing the tastes of a man whose current Ten Speed offerings include “How to Get Your Child a ‘Private Education’ in a Public School,” “Louder and Funnier” (on public speaking), “How to Repair Food,” “Kill as Few Patients as Possible” (on being the world’s best doctor), “The Alligator’s Life History” and “How to Have Sex in Public Without Being Noticed” (a humor book).

Intuition for Sales

Says Andy Roth, owner of Cody’s Books in Berkeley: “He (Wood) has an extraordinary . . . intuition about what’s commercially successful, something you wouldn’t automatically assume. It’s not that hard to tell a new Michener book is going to sell a lot of books, but Phil Wood seems to be able to find unknown kinds of books that are extraordinarily successful.”

This sunny winter day in Berkeley, Wood is dressed, by all accounts, rather conservatively. Though he’s known to favor antique Hawaiian shirts and sandals, he’s wearing conventional shoes, dark pants and a warm, sienna-colored shirt that’s a bit too tight, hand-stitched at the lapels and not tucked into his pants.

Sipping coffee, the 50-year-old publisher is describing his Southern California roots (he attended Glendale High and his father was a business manager for such celebrities as Bette Davis) and elaborating on Ten Speed’s philosophy. “We try to (make sure) every book we publish is the best book on its subject at this time for this marketplace, whether it’s pure fluff or a serious work,” he says.

Later, however, over lunch, he admits he probably has no idea what’s really going on. “I think the things that have really made us successful are the things we don’t understand. Early on, for instance, I made a decision not to sell the rights to ‘What Color Is Your Parachute’ to Bantam for $25,000. That would have been a $20 million mistake,” he says in retrospect.

Later, he takes another stab at defining goals: “We want to get the books they turn down back there (New York). That’s where we’ve had our greatest successes. We want to be the strange place in California that publishes books that even I don’t understand.”

Consider, for instance, how Wood came to publish an unsolicited, 1,000-page field guide and reference book on the mushrooms of North America, written by an unpublished mushroom lover with no agent.

Author David Arora somehow pinpointed the location of Ten Speed’s offices, though the address is not listed in the phone book, precisely to discourage would-be authors peddling unsolicited manuscripts.

The offices are tucked away-- without even a name on the door--on the second floor of a building on one of Berkeley’s fashionably homey streets. But Arora got in, lugging a manuscript in boxes nearly two feet high.

“He had a profound stutter. I mean a profound stutter. He was talking about his m-m-m-m-mushrooms,” Wood remembers. “At 3 o’clock in the morning I woke up and read the mushroom book all night. It was just beautiful writing and it was funny. It (“Mushrooms Demystified”) was a very expensive book to do, but we published all 1,000 pages of it. We did well with it and it’s now considered one of the finest books ever published on the subject. It’s $24.95 in paper and it’s the bible on mushrooms.”

Start of Ten Speed

Wood has similar tales to tell about many of his books. (Between the two houses, he publishes about 50 titles each year and has 350 books in print.) He’s excited, for instance, that John Jeavon’s “How to Grow More Vegetables” has sold more than 100,000 copies, been translated into 20 languages, and has landed the author gardening seminars in China.

And Wood doesn’t seem to mind retelling the story of the book that created Ten Speed. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1959 with a degree in Latin American history and working for a dozen years as a publisher’s sales rep/editorial talent scout, he tried to get his employer, Penguin Books, to publish a book on bicycle repair.

“In spite of having published 21 books in a row (recommended by Wood), only one of which didn’t make money, they said ‘no,’ ” he recalls. London-based Penguin, which had at one time employed Wood as head of its American branch, thought the bike book wasn’t elegant enough for the label, Wood says. So he published it on his own, calling his one-book house Ten Speed Press.

“It (“Anybody’s Bicycle Book”) sold 1,000 copies a day for a number of years and outsold any book at Penguin Books. They asked me to leave,” Wood says.

He Liked the Man

In 1972, a friend of Wood’s recommended that he look at a self-published book strangely titled, “What Color Is Your Parachute?” by an unknown writer, Richard Bolles.

Recalls Bolles of Wood: “He was in this little tiny apartment . . . that was doubling as an office. He had piles of books everywhere. It was very amusing. . . . He never argued with me that I should change the title. He doesn’t do the kind of thing a lot of publishers would do, looking at the bottom line and trying to think if it will sell.”

Says Wood: “I liked this wonderful man, Dick Bolles, and he could write brilliantly. . . . I can’t say I really understood ‘Parachute’ before I bought it, but I really liked Dick Bolles. The book didn’t sell well for the first year by my standards.”

Wood had promoted the book by sending free copies to college career placement centers and eventually landed a favorable notice in the Harvard Business Review.

But Bolles thought his publisher could do more. “We discussed this and reached am impasse,” says Bolles, an Episcopal priest. “I’m a Christian and I tried to think ‘What would a Christian do in this situation?’ ”

Bolles decided to renegotiate his royalty percentage--downward, from 15% of the net price of a book to 12 1/2%, a practice virtually unheard of in publishing.

And he demanded nothing of Wood in return. “I have no idea if he publicized it more,” he says. “I prayed about it.”

Wood doesn’t remember any unusual promotional push after the renegotiation, but shortly thereafter the book took off. This year, says Bolles, his book sold more than 315,000 copies (its largest annual sales to date) and has logged even more advance orders for next year. Sixteen years after Ten Speed published it, it’s still a staple on the national best-seller lists.

In the meantime, Bolles says he has not renegotiated his contract back to 15% and has spurned offers from New York publishers.

Why all the loyalty?

“I’m enormously happy with them. There have been other publishing firms that come along and start drooling when they see the sales figures, but when I tell them what I require (in editorial control) they just back off. At Ten Speed, nobody suggests how to rewrite the book,” Bolles says.

Received Bigger Advance

Even authors who have abandoned Wood for New York publishers speak well of the man.

Alice Kahn’s first book, “Multiple Sarcasm,” was published by Ten Speed in 1985. But last year, her second book, “My Life as a Gal,” was published by Doubleday, which offered the Berkeley-based author/syndicated columnist an advance she describes as “75 times what I got for the first book.”

Ten Speed elected not to match or exceed the offer, Kahn says, “and I wanted to see what it would be like to hook up with a New York company. I thought I’d have a better chance to get reviews in the New York Times, which I didn’t.”

Though Kahn loved the big advance, she says she was hardly pleased to go into a bookstore while promoting “My Life as a Gal” only to find it was no longer being carried. But, in the same bookstore, she’d find copies of Ten Speed’s “Multiple Sarcasm”--2 1/2 years after publication.

That’s because unlike many publishers, Ten Speed is known as a strong “backlist” house, promoting its older wares nearly as intensely its new titles. By contrast, new books from more typical publishing firms only remain in stores from two to three months unless they go on to become best sellers.

“No writer is ever entirely happy with a publisher,” Kahn concludes, “but Phil always treated me extremely well. He’s got a great sense of humor and likes to laugh.”

“I told her ‘Grab the money and run,’ ” Wood says of their parting.

While Kahn and numerous other Ten Speed and Celestial Arts authors speak highly of the publisher and his associates, Wood himself says he doubts that everybody he’s dealt with is pleased with all his decisions.

Ten Speed is known, for instance, for generally paltry advances. “If an author had to depend on Ten Speed advances for his or her livelihood for first books, it might be very tough,” says attorney Bunnin.

‘Maddening’ Slowness

However, the firm has been known to shell out bigger advance bucks on occasion (“White Trash Cooking” received a $160,000 advance after Wood outbid several New York publishers in an auction). And Bunnin says that what Ten Speed authors lose in advances, they can gain back in royalty agreements that are among the best in the business.

Other problems sometimes cited by those who do business with Ten Speed include general disorganization and “maddening” slowness in responding to book proposals. According to one author who requested anonymity, a publicist hired to occasionally work with the firm’s touring authors in one city referred to Ten Speed as “no speed.”

“Daily detail stuff is definitely not (Wood’s) forte. He’s much more tuned into where the world is going,” acknowledges David Hinds, senior editor at Celestial Arts. “As an example, he was one of the first people who started a file on AIDS and wanted to know everything about it, five years ago. He seemed to know this was going to be something which would would alter life as we knew it in the next few years.”

George Young, Hinds’ counterpart at Ten Speed, also admits that the publishing firm is sometimes a bit sloppy around the edges. Books promised in catalogues for publication at future dates, for instance, have been known not to appear--repeatedly.

“It happens more frequently (at Ten Speed) than at other firms,” Young says. “We’re trying to behave ourselves. We probably never will. The game we’re in has a lot of tolerance for anachronism and oddity. (However) I think if Doubleday tried it (failing to provide promised books), they’d get killed.” To hear his friends and associates tell it, Phil Woods rarely gets killed in the book business. Or any of his other businesses. (He’s bought and sold Chinese antiques and owns about five acres of industrial real estate in Berkeley.)

Indeed, on the surface, it might seem Wood’s life is entirely charmed were it not for a tragedy a year and half ago, a near-fatal car accident, which left his wife, Winifred Yen, a quadriplegic.

The subject is the only thing that makes Wood nearly speechless, though his sadness virtually screams through the few words he manages to share.

“She pretty well did herself in in a car wreck late at night,” he says of his wife, a Chinese-born American who came to the United States at age 11 and who now holds both a law degree and a master’s in city planning. “I don’t think the difficulties involved need discussion. She can get out and around a bit. She helps me manage the real estate. But she can’t do the research she was doing in energy policy planning for the U.S. Department of Energy.”

Yen appears far more accepting of her fate. “I don’t know the depth of it yet, what it means,” she says, sitting in a wheelchair in her office, on the first floor of the same building that houses the publishing offices.

A vibrant, youthful 41-year-old with a gently-spiked haircut, Yen is talking of her near-record walk of 216 feet in braces earlier in the morning. When she speaks of the accident’s effects, there’s no lingering bitterness or even remorse in her voice.

“It has its gifts and lessons,” she reasons. “ . . . In any trauma of this kind, you find out how good you have it, not only before but now, through such things as the blessing of friendship.”

Asked how she deals with her husband’s obvious sadness, she cites a Zen koan. “What’s one hand clapping?” she asks. “I don’t think one deals with it. I think you just allow it to be. I don’t know that I’m adapting to it so well.”

Minutes after visiting downstairs with a reporter and his wife, Wood is back in his offices upstairs laughing with Mariah Bear, one of his 35 co-workers. Among other things, she gets first crack at reading the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts.

Though Celestial Arts takes its metaphysical treatises quite seriously, Bear confides she’s still awaiting the day it receives “a channeled manuscript on rolfing your dog.” And she reveals that, since publishing “Flattened Fauna, a Field Guide to Common Animals on Roads, Streets & Highways,” Ten Speed has received “some really disturbing proposals in the dead animal genre.”

“Flattened Fauna,” Wood explains, scrunching his nose as he smiles, was rejected by 25 publishers before Ten Speed published it and sold more than 100,000 copies. “(The other publishers) thought they couldn’t get away with it. It’s about animals who lost their third dimension.”