Pioneer Publisher Donald E. Herdeck Remembered

Matt Schudel published this interesting obituary of Washington, DC publisher Donald E. Herdeck, founder of Three Continents Press, in today's Washington Post:

Donald E. Herdeck, 80, whose small Washington publishing house brought worldwide attention to dozens of Third World writers, including two winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, died April 20 of congestive heart failure at his home in Pueblo, Colo.

A onetime State Department diplomat, Dr. Herdeck was on the faculty of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service when he decided that the easiest way to obtain the books he wanted to teach in his classes would be to publish them himself. He launched Three Continents Press in 1973 and found his greatest acclaim 15 years later when one of his authors, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Donald Herdeck's Three Continents Press published the works of two Nobel Prize winners.

Despite scant critical attention and little commercial demand, Dr. Herdeck had published Mahfouz's works in small editions since the 1970s. But the Nobel proved to be a mixed blessing for Three Continents, which had just one employee beside Dr. Herdeck.

The entire stock of Mahfouz's novels, translated into English from Arabic, sold out in one day, and it took weeks to reprint them. Dr. Herdeck received a call at home from an angry bookseller, who scolded him for being "a terrible businessman."

He recounted the conversation to The Washington Post's David Streitfeld: " 'Here you have this wonderful Nobel Prize winner, this wonderful author, and you don't have copies of his books! What's wrong with you?'

"Herdeck responded with something like this: 'And where have you been for the last 12 years, when we had thousands of these books sitting in our warehouse and they sold only in trickles? What was wrong with you?''"