From the Herbert Jenkins’ seasonal catalogue for Spring, 1958. Having written in the last Greenhill Military Book News about going to America, it is natural to think of some of the long-standing relationships established there and only briefly mentioned. I cannot find a round figure anniversary date for my relationship with Stackpole Books, but it has been a long one of now just over forty years. The relationship has been in three portions: first 1958-1965 when I was with Herbert Jenkins then 1968-1985 with Arms & Armour Press and now from 1991 with Greenhill. Herbert Jenkins had a modest list of books on sporting subjects, including shooting and, while I was working for them in the Spring of 1958, we started importing and distributing the books on firearms published by Stackpole. These included classic works such as Hatcher’s Notebook by Major General Julian S. Hatcher, Firearms Investigations, Identification and Evidence by Hatcher, Jury and Weller, and Gas, Air and Spring Guns of the World by W. H. B. Smith, which continued to sell for many years. Herbert Jenkins progressed with building quite a list of books on shooting as a sport, including those from Stackpole Books, then publications by DBI Books (such as Gun Digest), and, in 1960, started publishing new books on antique firearms. Then in 1965 Herbert Jenkins was taken over, and I departed. Shortly after I founded Arms & Armour Press I was in touch with Stackpole Books, and this led to a co-edition relationship, with them taking many valuable new books for US publication, beginning with: 1968 Rapiers by Eric Valentine 1969 Flintlock Pistols by F. J. Wilkinson Japanese Armour by John Anderson German Tanks of World War II by F. M. von Senger und Etterlin 1970 Scottish Swords and Dirks by John Wallace Naval Swords by P. G. W. Annis 1971 German Pistols and Revolvers by Ian V. Hogg 1972 Pictorial History of Tanks of the World by Peter Chamberlain and Chris Ellis It was our work together on these books which helped to establish Arms & Armour Press and our collaboration continued in this way for about a decade, until I decided not to supply books to the United States as co-editions, but to keep the whole Arms & Armour Press list together and work on a distribution basis. This decision came gradually over a period of time because of the problems of having to break up one’s publishing list across a number of U.S. publishing houses in order to get books on sale over there, and there was always a residue which was not sold at all in the United States. I decided it would be better to have the whole list kept together, to preserve identity and also to ensure that all of our authors had their books on sale in this important market. As this decision evolved, one year, in the latter half of the 1970s, my wife and I were on vacation in Southern California enjoying touring, and we visited a quiet little place called La Jolla. We day-dreamed as to how nice it would be if we were able to create a relationship on a distribution basis with a publisher who was in a place of a similar nature, and we might even be able to take an apartment and spend time there in order to work more closely with them. Apartments didn’t seem that expensive. A little time passed, and a distribution relationship between Arms & Armour Press and Stackpole Books was formed. A few years later my wife was again with me when we were visiting publishers, and having a brief break, in the United States. We were in New York and she looked at my schedule and saw that we had a busy, long day ahead of us. We were to go out to Newark at about 7 am, catch a commuter flight to Harrisburg in central Pennsylvania, work there until the early afternoon, and then rent a car and drive south for about four hours to West Virginia where we were to have our break. ‘This seems to be a long day, Lionel’, Elizabeth said to me. ‘Isn’t Harrisburg the La Jolla of the East Coast?’ I told her to wait and see and after our visit she understood why, notwithstanding the nice people who were there, I had chosen that we should go somewhere else for a vacation. The Stackpole team at BookExpo America, Chicago, 2001. Back row David Ritter and Pat Moran. Front row, from left to right: Leigh-Ann Berry, Donna Pope, Mark Allison, Judith Schnell and Peter Rossi. Arms & Armour Press also distributed a number of books from Stackpole, including their monumental Small Arms of the World, and we reprinted in a British edition Gas, Air and Spring Guns. It was when we were advised that Small Arms of the World, of which we had sold a remarkable number, was not going to be published in a revised edition that we undertook its British counterpart Military Small Arms of the 20th Century by Ian V. Hogg and John Weeks, first published in 1973 and which has been continually in print, in successive new editions, since then (a seventh edition of this work has just been published by Krause). The relationship with Stackpole was a close one, and I would visit Harrisburg every time I was in the United States. Depending upon my tour I was sometimes faced with a ‘you can’t get there from here’ situation, combined with problems of timescale. A pattern evolved and I would find myself having to travel between Annapolis and Harrisburg, which you can’t do by train or a scheduled flight. But Tom Epley, the Press Director of the Naval Institute, would use his Cessna 172 to fly me up from a nearby airport to Harrisburg, or vice versa, this giving me a direct and very speedy route. A friend from Stackpole Books would then pick me up from the private hangar area at Harrisburg. It was, however, on a commuter jet from Newark that I learned the hard lesson that one should not fly with a cold, without taking a decongestant. I had excrutiating pain in my ears, and came off the plane totally deaf. Awaiting me were the two executives from Stackpole Books, and I had to gesture to them my problem, and they took me to a neighbouring coffee shop where they got me something to drink. We started looking at papers, but it was an hour or two before we could actually converse. Since then whenever I have been speaking to somebody who seems to have a cold and who I know is going to be taking a flight I always warn them about the problems that can be experienced in one’s ears and advise that they should take a decongestant. That stage of the relationship lasted until my sale of Arms & Armour Press in October 1984, when Link House Books switched the agency to another US publisher. A side beneficiary of this was Osprey, for Stackpole had gained experience selling pictorial paperbacks with the several A&AP series such as Warbirds Illustrated, Tanks Illustrated, Uniforms Illustrated etc., and as Osprey were seeking US distribution for their books of a similar format (10” x 7.5”) they filled the gap that A&AP moving on left there, until quite recently. After I departed from A&AP the several series were dropped, but the Osprey series expanded (and cloned). Osprey have recently moved from Stackpole, and my Greenhill Books imprint has just two new illustrated series in this format - the Luftwaffe At War Series and the G.I. Series. The G.I. Series now has twenty-four volumes, and is continuing, which presents more images of the American soldier than any publication from any publisher anywhere (including America) with 2,800 photographs (just over 300 of which are in full colour). Although I didn’t work directly with Stackpole after the switch, the contact certainly continued. One very friendly means of maintaining contact has been, and is, Judith Schnell, their Editorial Director, always staying in the same hotel as the Greenhill team in Kronberg, during the Frankfurt Book Fair. We had been through a patch of having to change hotels, and although we had identified that the Hotel Schutzenhof had been refurbished and reopened we did not stay in it in its first year, but recommended it instead to Judith for her first visit to Kronberg and Frankfurt. We unfortunately chose a different hotel that year, which was deservedly in its last year, as we discovered to our enormous discomfort, and switched the following year to the Schutzenhof. By then Judith had established occupancy of the best room in the hotel that had been our find, and this continues until today! As Greenhill Books grew we bought a number of books on a co-edition basis from Stackpole, notably the fine series on American Army uniforms by Shelby Stanton. Again, as the new Greenhill Books list grew, it was distributed in the United States through our friends at Presidio, but at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1992 Judith discussed with us certain books of theirs which we might undertake on a co-edition basis, looked at the Greenhill books and said that if we ever chose to depart from Presidio we should bear Stackpole in mind. This was almost a case of precognition because shortly after that Presidio advised that they were changing their sales and distribution, and hence we could no longer be under their wing. I was immediately in touch with Marianne Baier, the Vice-President in charge of sales, at Stackpole Books, visited the offices for the first time in a number of years (driving up from DC in a dangerous snow storm) and as from mid-Spring of 1993 Greenhill undertook the international sale of Stackpole Books on military history, and in June 1993 they reciprocated by becoming Greenhill’s US distributors and this relationship continues. Over the years I have worked with a number of different people at Stackpole Books, rather depending upon whether I was dealing with the sales or the editorial side. In the key period of initial A&AP work, Jim Reitmulder was in overall charge until he died suddenly in 1972. As Stackpole expanded Glenn Johns came in during the late 1970s, and created new roles for three who have since had long careers at Stackpole: Judith Schnell, Marianne Baier and Donna Pope. After Glenn, and his Chief Executive Hank Hamill, David Detweiler got more involved with the management, and Judith Schnell took over the editorial side with Marianne Baier on sales and marketing. Marianne retired in 1997. Stackpole have always had specific managers to sell to the specialist markets, and the manager in charge of military book accounts is Peter Rossi, who has long experience of the book trade. I visit Stackpole every year, meet with the sales team at BookExpo America (a.k.a. ABA) and continue to get together with Judith Schnell in Frankfurt. The team at Stackpole with whom we at Greenhill liaise includes: David Detweiler - Chairman David Ritter - President and Chief Operating Executive Judith Schnell - Vice-President and Editorial Director Leigh Ann Berry - Rights and Permissions and Associate Editor History Pat Moran - Director of Sales and Marketing Peter Rossi - Sales Manager (History, Library) Donna Pope - Specialty Accounts Manager Colonel Edward Skender, USA (Ret.) - Military Reference William C. Davis - History Editor Susan Drexler - Manager, Order Entry, Customer Service and Shipping and others with whom we work include Vicki Brewer (marketing), Barbara Malkowicz (autographing events) and Adrian Fleming (warehouse). Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 108 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com