Best
known for publishing classic African-American nonfiction and for being a former
National Book Foundation board member, Black Classic
Press founder W. Paul Coates can also be described as a tough-love
dad and a former black power revolutionary. This spring Coates, along with his
son, former Time and Village Voice staff writer Ta-Nehisi
Coates, will show off those facets of his life when the younger Coates
publishes a memoir and the elder Coates marks a new era at BCP with an original
work of comic fiction by acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley.
In
May Ta-Nehisi Coates will publish The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two
Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (Spiegel & Grau), an intensely
personal memoir of growing up in a tough Baltimore neighborhood in the 1980s
under an eccentric and hyper-strict urban patriarch. It's the story of the
often difficult relationship among the bookish Ta-Nehisi, his thuggish brother,
Bill, and Coates, a street-tough Afrocentric autodidact and former Black
Panther captain who transformed himself into a distinguished publisher.
Spiegel
& Grau editor Chris Jackson, who acquired the book, described it as a
profile of Coates, “a complicated man who was a black nationalist and a
capitalist; a family man with children by four women; and a Black Panther.” The
initial printing will be 40,000 copies.
This
year is also the 30th anniversary of Black Classic
Press, a small Baltimore press that specializes in historical
African-America nonfiction. Coates just published The Tempest Tales, a
new book by Walter Mosley. It's a work of satirical fiction written in homage
to poet Langston Hughes's classic Harlem character, Jess B. Semple, a comic
everyman who commented on social issues. It's the third Mosley book published
by Coates. In 1996 BCP published Mosley's Easy Rawlins novel Gone Fishin'
and sold 96,000 copies. In 2002 he published Mosley's nonfiction work What
Next: An Memoir Toward World Peace.
Coates
said the first printing for The Tempest Tales will be about 20,000
copies. He described the novel as a “philosophic work” that questions “race and
the nature of sin.” He expects the book will be “the best of the three books
we've done with Walter. The experience we've gained will really help us manage
it.” The book will be featured in upcoming issues of Essence and O
magazines, and it will be a featured title at the National Book Club
Convention, an annual gathering of more than 700 African-American reading
groups held in late summer in Atlanta.
Coates
is also taking on an unusual title for BCP. He's publishing a new edition of
biographer and former National Book Foundation director Neil Baldwin's
out-of-print biography To All Gentleness: William Carlos Williams, the
Doctor Poet, originally published in 1983. The book will be produced by
BCP Digital Printing using in-house print-on-demand and binding technology.
Coates is a pioneer in short-run digital printing and has owned and operated an
in-house POD facility since the early 1990s.
Coates
worked closely with his son on early drafts of The Beautiful Struggle,
and he described his reaction to seeing his family and professional life
dissected in print. “I disagree with some of it, but I can't disagree with the
net result. It's the story of the birth of a responsible black male,” Coates
said, referring to his son as “someone who understands the difference between
street knowledge and real black political consciousness.” Coates even cited the
controversy around presidential candidate Barack Obama and pastor Jeremiah
Wright. “I'm from the Wright generation,” said Coates. “Ta-Nehisi is part of
the Obama generation. He sees more hope in America than I do.”