Small presses have a long history in Philly. In fact, publishing is one of the city’s oldest industries. Just three years after its founding, the city already had its first printing press. And by the end of the 18th century, Philadelphia had become the center for book printing and publishing in the entire country, surpassing New York and Boston.
Today, centuries later, small and independent presses continue to play a vital role in the city’s literary and intellectual landscape.
Much like publishers back then who helped shape political discourse when ideas like freedom of speech were central in conceiving independence from Britain, today’s publishing houses are increasingly committed to a socially engaged, thought-provoking mission.
To them, the mission does not compromise the quality of content, but rather redefines it, prioritizing voices that have long been unheard and ensuring that publishing remains a space for meaningful encounters and dialogue.
Billy Penn spoke with several small, independent publishers to learn how they are reshaping this legacy, each with their own approach but a shared commitment to promoting diversity, creativity and sustainability.
We will be sharing our conversations with them as a series, over the next few weeks.
This first installment welcomes Josh O’Neill, of Beehive Books.
Start the presses!
Josh O’Neill, publisher and co-founder of Beehive Books
Tell us Beehive Books’ backstory.
We’re a small graphic arts press based here in Philly. We do sort of a mix of art books and monographs, a lot of illustrated fiction. We do some comics and graphic novels. We do a wide variety of things, but it’s all sort of surrounding art.
I used to own a bookstore here in Philadelphia called Locust Moon, which also had a small press element attached to it. The bookstore closed in 2016 and that’s when I started Beehive.
We had done in particular one comics project [“Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream”], that had been like this huge, unexpected success for us and it was such a pleasure to work on. We worked with so many great people and suddenly we actually made real money out of it, which had never really happened before. So Beehive was sort of born out of ‘let’s try to do more of that’. I don’t want to be at a cash register at a store 24 hours a day anymore or however many hours a day it was.
We got 115 artists or something like that to do their own Little Nemo strips and we published it in the full size of the original Little Nemo strips, which were 16 by 21 in broadsheet newspaper pages … So it was this crazy quixotic project. Making a book that’s like too large for any bookstore shelf anywhere. It won all these awards, and it sold a lot of copies. It was this totally wild ride, and it was the most unlikely thing we had ever really tried.
So that got me thinking and it kind of became the brand of Beehive, which is a little bit quixotic, a little bit outside of whatever the normal channels are, strange formats, really ambitious, unusual material that gives us a chance to really try something new.
What else would you include to define Beehive Books?
I think of us as like a small press with big dreams, and I love kind of being small. We’re trying to get bigger, but I don’t have any ambitions to become a huge publisher. What I love about this job is the chance to really care about every single thing that we do. And we only do maybe five books a year. I would love to do maybe 10 books a year, but once you get beyond that, you sort of have to industrialize yourself a little bit.
But the beauty of being small is that everything can be this fascinating creative project. We have this ongoing series of newly illustrated editions of classics. So Mike Mignola, who is the creator of “Hellboy,” did this gorgeous illustrated version of “Pinocchio.” And we often get a great writer to write an introduction … We asked Lemony Snicket [Daniel Handler, author of the children’s book series “A Series of Unfortunate Events”] and he said, “I don’t want to write an introduction. What I would love to do is annotate ‘Pinocchio.’ “ And he had this whole concept that he wanted to annotate it in character, as Lemony Snicket, as he is encountering Pinocchio for the first time and being driven slowly mad by it. So I said, “OK, yeah, I’m in. This is great. It’s such a crazy idea.”
When we publish the edition, each chapter has a little typewritten letter from Lemony Snicket slipped in. There’s 36 of these letters in the book and it’s like he’s madly typing at his typewriter and then shoving the notes into each chapter as he goes. And by the time you get to the end, they’re almost unreadable … And when we told Daniel [Handler], who is Lemony Snicket, that we could do that, he was like, “That’s crazy, because I try to get my publishers to make the cover blue and they tell me blue is too expensive.” So it’s this weird irony that the publishers who have all the money, the big-five-type publishers, can’t actually afford to do anything. We, as people who have no money, can try these crazy experiments. We have this sort of crowd-funded model. We’re not going to break our company because we spent all this money doing something that doesn’t sell, because we pre-sell them.
Tell us more about your business model.
A big part of the core of our business model is crowd funding. Our print runs are very expensive because these books are not at all cheap to produce … Our audience remains small honestly, but we do have a pretty consistent audience that seems willing to follow us from project to project. A lot of our books are kind of expensive. They’re $100 and then we might even do like a signed numbered limited edition version that’s $300 or more. And we have an audience that’s willing to spend on books, which is, you know, rare these days.
It’s a business model that goes all the way back to the early days of publishing and especially back to the 19th century gift book era, which I’m very inspired by. There was a boom in the late 19th century for these gorgeously designed [books]. And they were really sort of collectors’ editions. Most of them were produced by small presses of the time. There was a huge publishing industry in Philadelphia at the time, so a lot of the books that I collect are actually published here in Philly back in the 1800s. There were dozens if not hundreds of these small publishers. They had some kind of subscription service where you could pay by the year and they would send you each of their books.
How has your journey been over the years? Any highs and lows?
Maëlle [Doliveux] and I had been, you know, making our modest living off of Beehive for a few years at that point [before the pandemic]. But we never really had any extra money beyond what we’re able to pay ourselves and hire contractors to do design work, production work, editorial work. Then, all of a sudden, after we did “Botanica,” which is the tarot deck, we had some extra funds in the bank. So now we’ve got a whole staff of fantastic people. Everyone is very part-time except for me and Maëlle. And Maëlle is on an extended sabbatical now.
What has been your most exciting or unexpected project?
Our craziest one is also our latest, our longest-delayed project and it’s still not finished. It’s almost three and a half years late at this point. It is getting close to done. It is this edition of “Dracula.” It’s an epistolary novel. Everything in it is a found document. So it’s in the form of diaries and letters and newspaper articles, and part of it is supposed to be a transcription of the recorded phonograph audio notes of this doctor … So our concept was to create an edition of “Dracula” that is the files. So we’re creating this thing that’s literally like over a hundred documents that includes journals, notes, telegrams, stamped letters, a playable audio record and it comes in this old briefcase.
Where does this interest in doing these kinds of projects come from?
I’ve had this interest my entire life, in books that are a little bit weird, that have some kind of strange physical aspect to them, that the experience is not just the words on the page, it’s also the feel of the book … I grew up loving comic books which are very physical. Comic books are very much about the printed page. My grandma lived in Philly, her dad lived in Philly, and he was a huge book collector during the 1900s. He had this huge library which he had passed down to her, full of these illustrated books from this gift book era, and I used to be so fascinated by them. As a little kid, I would just pull those off her shelf and look at these crazy drawings and these crazy cover designs and just the feel and smell of the paper was so fascinating to me. They felt like they were full of this strange, otherworldly kind of energy, and I was totally obsessed with them.
That’s a big thing I feel about Beehive, these books are an invitation to a physical experience that is slower and more meditative and more thoughtful and more sensory
Do you have any thoughts on the recent efforts to mandate what people should and shouldn’t read.
That’s something I have many feelings about. I think independent publishers are a really vital part. Whether they’re book publishers or they may be online publishers, actual independent small organizations that are able to maintain actual editorial independence are incredibly vital to our human civilization as far as I’m concerned. Maybe that sounds self-aggrandizing, but I really do feel that. I don’t think that Beehive is vital for our civilization, but I think independent publishing is vital.
I do think what the political shift that we’re going through right now shows you [is] how fast things can change and how much we take for granted in terms of the sort of intellectual freedom that we have here.
Is Beehive’s presence in Philly a coincidence, or does it offer unique opportunities compared to other cities?
One of the things I love about Philly is that it’s a little bit outside of the corridors of power. It’s its own strange place that has a little bit of a self-enclosed quality. And then there’s upsides and downsides about that, but I think it is a great place for creative projects and for small groups of people trying to build something … If we were building Beehive in New York, just me and Maëlle, our personal costs would have been higher, we’d be paying more for our general lifestyle, so we would need to get paid more, our office space would have cost more, and all those things like feed into all of the decisions that you make about how much you’re able to pay authors, how many experimental things you’re willing to try.
I think Philly is culturally a very open place to outsiders, to weird people, to weird projects. Philly’s a very underground city in a lot of ways. It can make it a little hard for outsiders discovering the city. It’s not like New York, where it just kind of presents itself to you as this cornucopia of crazy cultural stuff. There’s so much amazing cultural stuff going on here, but like people don’t really talk about it that much.
