Tor House Press
New Book from Tor House Press
Robinson Jeffers Family Travel Diaries
Volume One: British Isles, 1929
Edited by Deborah Whittlesey Sharp
210 pages, including front matter and illustrations
Introductory sale prices for Tor House and RJA members (through February):
Paperback: $16.00, tax and shipping included (regular price, $20.00) use the PayPal buttons below for ordering.
Jacketed clothbound: $28.00, tax and shipping included (regular price, $35.00)
Members can order copies of Volume 1: British Isles, 1929, by emailing your name, mailing address, phone number, number of copies (paperback or cloth cover), and membership status to thf@torhouse.org. A Tor House Administrator will call you to determine your payment method. We will have a PayPal purchasing option here soon. You can also order the book now for full price at Amazon.
In June 1929, the poet Robinson Jeffers—along with his wife Una and their twelve-year-old twin sons Donnan and Garth—set sail for Ireland, their first stop on a seven-month journey throughout the British Isles. During extended stays in Ireland, Scotland, and England, all four members of the family contributed to a remarkable travel diary recording their individual responses to the places and people that they encountered. The descriptions include many vivid observations as well as evidence of Robinson’s and Una’s extensive knowledge of the history, literature, art, music, folklore, and architecture of the places that they explored. Readers of Jeffers will find much that adds to their understanding of the poet and his work.
“The 1929 Travel Diary provides an intimate portrait of four diverse personalities. As we observe the British Isles through Robinson’s, Una’s, Garth’s, and my father Donnan’s eyes, a vanishing world is brought vividly to life, and we see each member of the Jeffers family in a completely new way. This is the first of four extended trips to the British Isles, the only location that prompted them to travel abroad.”
—Lindsay Jeffers
“Published now in its entirety in a handsome and meticulous edition, this first volume of the travel diaries of the Jefferses in Ireland, Scotland, and England is a collective portrait that is our richest single source of the family life of America’s most powerful modern poet.”
—Robert Zaller, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, Drexel University
“This diary is a thoroughly delightful, engaging read that offers a kaleidoscopic view of the family’s sojourn. We see them wander through castles and over haunted fields, have tea with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, hunt for exquisite souvenirs in antique shops, and collect stones to bring back to Tor House. While each voice—Robin, Una, and their boys Garth and Donnan—remains distinct, the overall effect is of a family chorale: a beautiful blend that tells us about this special family as they travel through Ireland, Scotland, and England in the early twentieth century.”
—Geneva Gano, Associate Professor of English, Texas State University
Order the Tor House Member specially-priced paperback edition of Robinson Jeffers Family Travel Diaries, Volume One: British Isles, 1929 using the Buttons below for PayPal, Venmo, or Credit Card. Your address information will be captured for shipping and billing.
The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers
Robert Zaller’s new book—The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers—is the latest book to bear this imprint, thus marking the renewal of its use.
This publishing project arose from a discussion within a group of Tor House trustees in response to Robert Zaller’s worries about finding an appropriate home for his new collection of Jeffers essays. These worries were not without some basis in the increasing difficulties faced by scholarly publishers in the humanities and especially by university presses—difficulties produced by market changes and by increasing pressures on subsidy support and library budgets. (The latter has encouraged many academic libraries to shift their emphasis away from collection development toward facilitating interlibrary loans and online access.)
New digital printing technologies, however, have opened up new possibilities—one of which, printing on demand, has enabled the Tor House Press to undertake this latest project, its most substantial to date. Printing on demand solves a leading problem long experienced by scholarly publishers: the impossibility of accurately predicting sales. It also solves the related problem of tying up substantial capital in book inventory that might not ever sell, a common result of succumbing to the temptation of taking advantage of low run-on costs during an initial printing. With print-on-demand publishing, warehousing costs are eliminated; and no printing or binding costs are incurred until a book is actually ordered by a customer—at which point the unit manufacturing costs are simply deducted from the sales revenue.
This is not a way to make lots of money in publishing, thanks to very narrow margins; and it’s unattractive for major commercial publishers who count on multiple large print runs to meet demand. But it supplies a comparatively risk-free way to undertake intellectually and culturally valuable publishing for relatively specialized audiences—a description that aptly fulfills Tor House’s mission. This kind of publishing works especially well when the start-up costs can be covered or greatly diminished (primarily the costs of copy-editing, design, typesetting, and proofreading). In the case of this book by Robert Zaller, the author’s son designed the cover and dustjacket; the author was largely responsible for proofreading and entirely responsible for providing a text that did not require professional copyediting; and the interior design and conversion of the text files into typeset pages were undertaken by a volunteer. Finally, a kind donation by a trustee covered the costs of paying for review and gratis copies, along with the time spent at Tor House handling various details required by the print-on-demand company.
The Atom To Be Split runs to 562 pages including front-matter and index. It is available from Amazon and can be purchased by visitors at the Tor House giftshop. The clothbound list price is $60, and the paperback list price $25—with a 10-percent discount offered to members for purchases at Tor House.
The next Tor House Press book is likely to be an edition of Una’s lively travel diaries written when she and Robinson were visiting Great Britain.
Apart from broadsides, Tor House publications include:
Alfred E. Smith, The Flight of the Hawk: An Introduction to Robinson Jeffers. Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, 1979. 32 pages.
Anon., The Wings Still: Responses to the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by His Neighbors on the Monterey Peninsula. Tor House Publications, 1982. 12 unnumbered leaves.
Robert Zaller, ed., The Tribute of His Peers: Elegies for Robinson Jeffers. Tor House Press, 1989. 84 pages.
Donnan Jeffers, The Building of Tor House. Tor House Press, 1993. 38 pages.
Garth Jeffers, Memories of Tor House. Tor House Press, 1993. 34 pages.
Anon., Tea at Tor House. Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, 1993. 67 pages.
Melba Berry Bennett, The Stone Mason of Tor House: The Life and Work of Robinson Jeffers. Second Edition. Tor House Foundation, 2007. 230 pages.
Robert Zaller, The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers. Tor House Press, 2018. 562 pages.
