A Chat with Jon Eeds of Bruin Books

Bruin Books was founded by Jonathan Eeds in 2009, and has published some thirty-odd works in three main imprints, Bruin Crimeworks, Bruin Asylum, and Bruin Odysseys. The “Crimeworks” imprint focuses, obviously, on works of crime literature, and includes a number of titles by Fredric Brown. The “Odysseys” imprint encompasses “tales of adventure, travel and intrigue.” Presently there is only one title out, Prester John by John Buchan, but Bruin Books has announced for 2020 a major expansion of this imprint.

The “Asylum” imprint is the place where readers of Wormwoodiana will find the most titles of potential interest. I first discovered the imprint through the 2015 reissue of Dr. Mabuse by Norbert Jacques, originally published in German in 1920 and in English translation in 1923. (It was filmed by Fritz Lang in 1922.) There were other titles on the Bruin list that normally would have interested me, but I'd already read them, like G.S. Marlowe's I Am Your Brother from 1935, and the more recent A Garden Lost in Time (2004) by Jonathan Aycliffe, which had its first American edition via Bruin Books. The “Asylum” list now sports around a dozen books. The additional titles include The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, The Unholy Three by Tod Robbins, an omnibus of three novels by Hugh Walpole (Walpole's Fantastic Tales: Volume 1), and W. Somerset Maugham's The Magician and Other Strange Stories which includes the original 1908 text of Maugham's novel, plus eleven shorter stories. (See the various links at the bottom of this post.)

Give us some background on your publishing enterprise. Why did you get started? Tell us some highlight about each of your three main imprints. 

I’ve always been a book lover—since childhood, when we still had those bookmobiles rumbling through the neighborhood. For a shy kid, they were a place to hide and yet be in the middle of a wide wonderful place at the same time. When I was in the Navy, spending so much time at sea, they gave me a break from the tedium and provided comfort during the stressful times. Since my Navy days I’ve always enjoyed reading the most while traveling and set adrift from the work-a-day world. Starting Bruin Books was the natural extension of my love for books. My main motivation was to give something back for all the joy books have given me, and to experience more of what books had to offer in the terms of design and production.

Bruin Books started in late in 2009, while I was still fully occupied in a career in High-Tech. Print-On-Demand (POD) technology was just becoming widely available. I remember being very excited about discovering it. It’s not often that an opportunity lands in your front yard, but that’s exactly what it felt like. To learn the mechanics of book design, I first published my own short comic novel, Cardinal Bishop, Inc. I didn’t want to make a slew of mistakes on somebody else’s book. The three or four people who read the book really liked it, so I was encouraged to continue. I wanted to focus on crime fiction first. I was really impressed with Hard Case Crime and what they were doing with their retro-looking cover art. I wanted to do something like that. My first attempt at a crime book, and only my second book, was a new version of No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase. It was Chase’s first book, and it was a massive bestseller during the war years (WWII), but he felt the need to rewrite in in the early 60’s. The new version did make some significant improvements in character development, but it also dropped some of the best nasty bits from the original and so diminished its shock value. What I did was weave the two books together, while keeping the plot firmly rooted in 1939. My efforts were authorized by the JHC Literary Estate, and I think the results were really quite good. It remains one of the “must read” crime novels: very surreal and brutal in its reimagining of the tough American gangster. I hope to return to Chase’s crime fiction in the coming year.

After publishing a few crime novels, I started our second line: Bruin Asylum. Although I read a lot of science fiction growing up, I’ve been more drawn to the supernatural as an adult. Horror fiction is much more rooted in psychology and better explores the darker regions of the mind. Ever since starting Bruin Asylum I’ve been trying to better define it. Out of the gate, it’s been a bit of a scatter-shot. The books so far have ranged all over the place from classic (and highly respectable) literary tales of the macabre such as the The Magician and Other Strange Stories by Maugham to the really schlocky Bat Woman by Cromwell Gibbons. The first true Asylum novel actually appeared in the Crimeworks line. I hadn’t started Bruin Asylum yet. That book was Deliver Me From Eva—a supremely crazy novel about a legless mad scientist who tools around in a Dalek-like scooter and performs experimental surgery on family members by adjusting their cranium plates. I adorned that book with Renaissance-era anatomy plates by the likes of Albinus and Vesalius. It sounds weird but it works. Cheesy novels like Bat Woman and Eva are really fun to read, but going forward I’m going to swing the ship around to the more literary channel. That’s why Celestial Chess was so important to me. It was a compass-book that helped to reset our direction.

The “Asylum” imprint's most recent title is Celestial Chess by Thomas Bontly. It was originally published in 1979, and the book has been a favorite of Thomas Kent Miller (who provides the introduction to the new edition) for many years. Tell us about it:

Thomas Bontly’s Celestial Chess is a balancing act of sorts: it’s highly entertaining, humorous and humane, with well-drawn characters that resonate with the reader, but it also goes into some pretty scary and sometimes kinky places: satanic cults, ancient ghosts and medieval curses. The novel has an intriguing parallel story that takes place in the 12th century. The medieval narrative sets up the events that transpire in and around Cambridge University in 1962. A cursed manuscript—a poem written be a wicked, befallen monk—links the two timelines and leads anyone who pursues it to disaster. Chess, the game of kings, is of course a central motif of the book. The novel is a homage to the classic ghost stories of M. R. James, who was Chancellor of Kings Church at Cambridge, but it is also a serious nod to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, which Bontly greatly admired and extensively wrote about. Like Celestial Chess’ hero, David Fairchild, Thomas Bontly was an American Professor of Literature and had spent some professional time at Cambridge. No doubt it was a rich time for Bontly, for that first-hand experience gives Celestial Chess a feeling of authenticity and intimacy. It’s an Outsider’s Insider book, if that makes sense.

I consider it a gift that both you and Thomas Kent Miller recommended it to me. Until then it totally escaped my attention. Even though it was originally published forty years ago, not many people know of it. It fell into a hole somewhere. Tom picked up his copy in the early 80’s off a liquor store rack not far from the San Francisco State University campus, where he was attending classes. He bought the book on a lark but never let it go. Ever since then he has been recommending it to small publishers for a revival. Thank goodness it landed with Bruin Books. It was an absolute pleasure to work on. It also gave me a chance to correspond with the author’s wife, Marilyn, and his son Thomas. Tom followed in his father’s professorial footsteps and teaches Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

Yes, Celestial Chess is a horror novel, but my favorite parts were the scenes of humor, romance and comradery. Fairchild is a supremely confident protagonist. You don’t often find that in a horror novel. The characters in a horror novel or movie are generally fried to a frazzle by the middle of the story, but Fairchild rises to the challenge with good cheer. He uses his wits, humor and scholarship to defend against the Dark Powers. I can’t think of any other horror novel that is so buoyant and life affirming.

Sadly, Thomas Bontly is no longer with us, but I take heart in knowing that we were able to bring his wonderful novel back into print so that others can discover it.

I wrote an entry on Bontly on my Lesser-Known Writers blog, which can be accessed here. What do you see for the future of Bruin Books?

We have a third genre line, Bruin Odysseys, that is just sort of dangling out there. I’ve shamefully neglected my original plan for many years by letting the Bruin Odysseys concept collect dust. It’s here that I want explore adventure and travel. Bruin Odysseys has the greatest potential from a decorative and design standpoint, plus adventure and travel books are such a rewarding and eye-opening experience. There are many grand old volumes that are works of art unto themselves due to their fine illustrations. I’m thinking of Verne and Dumas, but also of the real-life adventurers such as Mungo Park. When you pick up an early edition of Verne you find a very detailed steel engraving every few pages. I can’t imagine how long it took an artist to produce such a work of art. The amount of patience required and the need to “think like a mirror” in created the engraving is simply amazing. A Verne novel can contain eighty or ninety of these beautiful illustrations. The same is true of Dumas, and I am sure there are others. These old books are very expensive, but maybe we can do something to make them more available, published in a way that gives a least a hint of their past glory. It will be a challenge but it will give me a great deal of pleasure to pull it off.

I’m starting off small in early 2020 with a new version of J-H Rosny’s La Guerre Du Feu (better known as Quest for Fire). It a small book but we’re handling like a major project. There are many illustrated versions of the short novel in French, and German and even Russian, but only one available in English, plus the English version is very difficult to locate. Forget about finding the illustrated hardback published in 1967. Only the Penguin and Ballantine movie-tie-in versions are available at ridiculous prices—typically ratty copies at that. The quality of the paperbacks is poor due to the hasty effort to cash in on the film release. (Quest for Fire is one of my all-time favorite films, by the way.) I’m sure a newly illustrated version of Quest for Fire would make a quite few people happy, although renaming it Conquest of Fire might be an appropriate change to it. We are going do our best to make it the most beautiful paperback possible, one that is enriched with new illustrations and design values. I’m confident my team is up for the challenge.

What other titles are you interested in?

Actually, I could use a little help in this regard. Without help, I would never have discovered Celestial Chess. I only have so much time to plough through the books I’ve already collected. Chances are if you find something intriguing in somebody’s blog, the book has already been snagged by another publisher. It’s a rich time for readers who are hungry to explore for new discoveries, but it is also highly competitive for small publishers trying sort out people’s interests. Even the big guys, the New York publishers, have adopted Print-On-Demand strategies to keep their back-listed titles under their roof. I know POD still has a stigma with some collectors, but it is often the only way you can acquire a rare title, such as Tiger Girl by Gordon Casserly. So, I guess I am saying that I am very eager for suggestions. Are there some titles that the followers and contributors of Wormwoodiana would really like to see back in print, or see new and innovative versions of? For instance, would anyone be interested in an illustrated version of A Voyage to Arcturus? It’s a crazy thought—it’s such an esoteric book, but why not? What about a heavily illustrated version of the Ingoldsby Legends? So, please, hit me with your recommendations! Sometimes I feel as if I’m standing on a deserted island when it comes to project selection.

September 2020 will mark 100 years since the first publication of A Voyage to Arcturus, and I know of some planned centenary editions. I'm actually working with Centipede Press on a lavish edition of A Voyage to Arcturus, but not for the centenary. It is aimed for 2022.

The main constraint I've often seen about good out-of-print books that need to be reissued is the question of rights. When the book is still under copyright, chasing down the rights owner can entail a lot of detective work, and then the attitude of the rights owner is sometimes very unpredictable.

How would you summarize Bruin Books from a business standpoint?

Most of my professional life has been devoted to manufacturing and operations, environments where you have to continuously improve to succeed. Each new project must make an improvement over the last. You can never be satisfied. You have to be customer focused, to be absolutely devoted to the customer. These are the tenants I’ve brought to Bruin Books. Now that I am retired from High-Tech I can fully devote my attention to the continuous improvement of Bruin Books. Before 2019 it was only a part-time proposition and I could easily (and rightfully) be distracted by my career. I can tell you that Publishing is a lot more fun than the high-wire High-Tech act. I have a very talented team assembled. We are scattered all over the world and hardly ever have the chance to meet in person, be we all share a love of the creative process, and that bonds us. It’s probably better that they are not here with me in Oregon, or else they would expect me to bring in donuts. I’ll be making the rounds to their individual countries in the near future. They can have donuts then.

Thanks, Jon.  Readers of Wormwoodiana can check out the Bruin Books website here.

And here are some links to a number of the Asylum titles.

Amazon.com (US)
Jonathan Aycliffe, A Garden Lost in Time
Thomas Bontly, Celestial Chess
Gordon Casserly, Tiger Girl 
Cromwell Gibbons, Bat Woman
Norbert Jacques, Dr. Mabuse
Jessie Douglas Kerruish, The Undying Monster
G.S. Marlowe, I Am Your Brother
W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician and Other Strange Stories
Tod Robbins, The Unholy Three
Hugh Walpole, Walpole's Fantastic Tales

Amazon.co.uk (UK)
Jonathan Aycliffe, A Garden Lost in Time [US only]
Thomas Bontly, Celestial Chess
Gordon Casserly, Tiger Girl 
Cromwell Gibbons, Bat Woman  [US only]
Norbert Jacques, Dr. Mabuse
Jessie Douglas Kerruish, The Undying Monster
G.S. Marlowe, I Am Your Brother
W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician and Other Strange Stories
Tod Robbins, The Unholy Three
Hugh Walpole, Walpole's Fantastic Tales