And I Never Looked Back

Tracing the California lineage of Charles Bukowski’s publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and its passionate founder, John Martin.

By Joshua BodwellJanuary 16, 2026

• Biography & Autobiography

• History

[Disclosure: The author served as editorial director of Black Sparrow Press from 2019 to 2024]

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JOHN MARTIN NEVER smoked cigarettes. He did not use drugs or drink alcohol. Martin’s vice was book collecting, which he began in earnest in the late 1930s after he dropped out of UCLA. His enrollment was brief: he left when he discovered that his favorite modern authors, such as Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wallace Stevens, were not on the curriculum.

Over the next decade and a half, Martin built a ranging collection of several thousand books—predominantly first editions of British and American fiction and drama, as well as contemporary poetry. In this massive collection, there was not, Martin said, “a single book that I would take out and say ‘No, this isn’t good.’ I had everybody from Henry James to Allen Ginsberg.” He collected pre–World War II books and postmodern literature with equal interest. Work by William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson sat on his shelves alongside a complete run of all 13 issues of poet Ed Sanders’s short-lived and scarce 1960s mimeographed zine Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. Through his friendship with Henry Miller, begun in the 1950s, Martin gathered a unique assortment of the author’s work. Most impressive of all was Martin’s D. H. Lawrence collection, which he believed was one of the finest in private hands. It included not only first editions and special editions but also original manuscripts and paintings by the author.

Martin collected these books while working as the manager of Office Supplies Unlimited in West Los Angeles. One day, he decided quite suddenly to sell his book collection: “I was standing by the books—I remember it was a Sunday afternoon; I was holding Ezra Pound’s Personae, 1909. You know, reading it. I was very relaxed, very comfortable. To this day, I believe a voice said, ‘Sell the books.’”

With the help of a bookdealer, Martin’s collection sold to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965 for $50,000. After commissions and taxes, he kept roughly $35,000—the equivalent of more than $350,000 in today’s economy. John Martin was 35 years old. His windfall would seed the establishment of Black Sparrow Press.

John Martin, who died on June 23, 2025, at the age of 94, founded Black Sparrow Press in the living room of his modest two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Camden Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, at the edge of the Westwood neighborhood in Los Angeles. A few months before his death, he shared memories of the press’s formative early years, and the frenetic period in which the maverick independent publisher became forever culturally connected to the City of Angels. 

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By the mid-1960s, Charles Bukowski had become a sort of king of the underground, the most published poet in the “littles,” as the magazines, alternative newspapers, and small presses that proliferated in the 1960s were known. John Martin read Bukowski’s poems in obscure, poorly printed zines and bought his thin, saddle-stapled chapbooks released in press runs of perhaps a couple hundred copies. Martin believed Bukowski was a genius: “I thought he was the contemporary Walt Whitman, writing right from the street.”

The nascent publisher and the writer with a cult following began to correspond, and shortly after the new year of 1966, Martin visited Bukowski at the poet’s rented 1920s bungalow in East Hollywood. They made an odd pair. Martin was tall, trim, and bespectacled; what hair he had was red-tinged. Bukowski was greasy-haired with a beer paunch, his face pockmarked. Yet their ambitions complimented one another. Martin left with a sheaf of unpublished poems he believed were “immortal.”

At Office Supplies Unlimited, Martin sold not only supplies but also furniture. “We did everything,” he said, “the rugs, the drapes, the desks.” They also offered business printing services. Martin approached the shop’s pressman, Philip Klein, with a personal project. Klein was a man whose experience lay more with letterhead and business cards, but between April and October, he printed, for free, five broadsides of Bukowski’s poetry. Thirty copies of each broadside were produced, all signed by Bukowski. Martin sold some to bookdealers and gave some away to his co-workers. He wrote a few small checks to Bukowski, who was not used to being paid for his writing. “This was not going to be a big thing,” Martin said later. “I wasn’t thinking in terms of making a living off it.” But the broadsides did bear the name he’d chosen for his publishing endeavor.

Martin admired Black Sun Press, founded in Paris in 1927 by Americans Harry Crosby, the nephew of J. P. Morgan Jr., and Caresse, Crosby’s wife. They spared no expense publishing exquisitely designed and printed early works by modernists such as James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. And then there was a William Carlos Williams poem Martin liked entitled “The Sparrow.” It read:

                         his small size,
        keen eyes,
                serviceable beak
                        and general truculence
        assure his survival

Martin appreciated the celebration of an ordinary yet resilient bird. He married Black Sun Press with Williams’s “The Sparrow” to create Black Sparrow Press. “I liked the combination of the elite black and very common sparrow,” he said. The name seems to herald a publishing philosophy that would eventually drive Martin: mix the high and the low.

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At the beginning of 1967, Martin asked Klein to print two sliver-small chapbooks: Not Meaning Not to See by Bernard Forrest and 2 Poems by Bukowski. They were 12 and four pages, respectively. Each was printed in fewer than 100 copies. Martin’s wife, Barbara, hand-stitched the chapbooks at the kitchen table. The couple’s Camden Avenue apartment had become Black Sparrow’s office. But even after the press produced its first full-length trade edition in June 1967—500 copies of San Francisco Renaissance poet Ron Loewinsohn’s 76-page collection L’Autre—there was plenty of room to store inventory: Martin’s bookshelves were still bare since he’d sold his old books to fund making new books.

Martin published several more thin but elegant chapbooks in 1967. The quality of design coupled with heavy, textured paper and letterpress printing set Black Sparrow publications apart from the era’s glut of cheaply produced small press books. There was more work by Bukowski and by Loewinsohn, as well as by the influential poet Robert Duncan. In December 1967, the last Black Sparrow chapbook of the year was An Oyster Is a Wealthy Beast by prickly provocateur James Purdy. It consisted of 11 poems and the short story “Scrap of Paper,” which marked the press’s first foray into fiction.

From his Camden Avenue apartment, Martin published 17 books, chapbooks, and broadsides in two years—a rate of one publication every few months. Even though the press was producing quality work, Black Sparrow was still operating more like a hobby. That began to change in 1968.

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John Martin met William and Aileen Hillman in his teens. The couple were older, but they all shared a faith in Christian Science. They also shared cultural interests in music, film, and, most importantly, books. It was William, born in 1900, who introduced Martin to the work of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, and to Black Mountain poets such as Robert Creeley and Charles Olson—all authors Martin would go on to publish.

“He was the most avant-garde person I’ve ever known,” Martin said of William Hillman. “He had the only completely infallible taste in the arts I’ve ever encountered in my life.” Hillman also filled a paternal absence in Martin’s life. When John Martin was eight years old, his father—a maritime lawyer in San Francisco named Theodore Levy—was killed in a car crash. It came as a bitter relief to Martin: “All my problems began with my father, who was an autocrat with no empathy for anyone—a violent man,” he said. “He just so traumatized me as a child.” A few years after Levy’s death, Martin’s mother changed the family surname from Levy to Martin and moved her three children to Los Angeles.

Martin fell in love with the city. He earned pocket money delivering newspapers and, for a few cents, rode everywhere on the electric red streetcars. He discovered record shops selling jazz albums and used bookshops run by bookmen from a different era. He attended boxing matches at the run-down Grand Olympic Auditorium. Martin began to imagine in Los Angeles “all kinds of possibilities for [his] life.”

But in his late teens, Martin sank into a funk. “I had been sick for a year,” he said. “I couldn’t get well.” A lifelong asthma sufferer at a time before modern inhalers were commonplace, Martin was often forced into bed rest. One day, the Hillmans came calling at his house and insisted he rouse himself and join them for a drive. Martin recalled thinking, “Oh god, I can’t take a drive. Jesus Christ, I feel terrible.” But he went anyway. Aileen Hillman was a practitioner in the Christian Science Church and often provided Martin with guidance. “We drove and talked, and that kind of broke the spell of being really desperately ill. They just talked to me. I suddenly got the idea that this didn’t have to go on. They were very supportive, spiritually. And after a little while, I was well again … and I never looked back.” Whatever inscrutable thing happened that day in the car, Martin was stunned with gratitude. He said of the couple: “They gave me a life, and then they showed me how to live it.”

In the late 1960s, the Hillmans also gave him the use of a small guest cottage behind their home at 10278 Kilrenney Avenue in the affluent Cheviot Hills neighborhood on the Westside of Los Angeles, just three miles from Martin’s apartment. The cottage was about a thousand square feet. Bookcases ran around three walls; Martin had more built. Within the sprawling concrete city, the setting was an oasis. “I loved that backyard,” Martin said. “It was on a slope with eucalyptus trees.” There was a well-established rose garden with gravel paths and a fishpond. It was quiet, bucolic. Cheviot Hills hardly seemed the place from which to lob little bombs of literature into the world. It was perfect. Martin settled in and got to work.

Black Sparrow’s second full-length poetry collection, Finding the Measure by Robert Kelly, a deep image poet, appeared in 1968. Working with Kelly proved fortuitous, as he opened a door to other poets Martin would soon publish: “Kelly was pals with Diane Wakoski. And Wakoski was pals with Clayton Eshleman. And Eshleman was pals with Jerome Rothenberg. And Rothenberg was pals with David Antin.”

Bukowski’s At Terror Street and Agony Way arrived in May 1968 with a print run of fewer than 1,000 copies. At 89 pages, it rated as his first full-length book from Black Sparrow. Martin followed with more by Purdy and Duncan. Already something of an avant-garde elder statesman by the late 1960s, Duncan is said to have enjoyed his occasional visits to the little Black Sparrow office because the Hillmans often took him to eat at a French restaurant he liked on nearby Sunset Boulevard. Duncan loved talking with Will Hillman because the ever-curious retired attorney had such a broad mind and read everything. The year proved to be a turning point for the press: in 1968 alone, Martin published two books by Creeley as well as two by Language poet Larry Eigner; he also published New York School poet Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov (who illustrated her book), Beat legend Michael McClure, objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky, and Edward Dorn’s anti-epic poem Gunslinger: Book I (which ended up inspiring a young college student across the country in Maine named Stephen King).

This period was also a crucial moment in the press’s visual aesthetic. The first 30 Black Sparrow publications were almost all designed by the hired printers: there was Klein, the office supply printer; San Francisco–based Graham Mackintosh, dubbed “the ruffian printer” by a more genteel colleague; the meticulous Saul and Lillian Marks of the famed Plantin Press in Los Angeles; and the team of Alan Brilliant and Noel Young in Santa Barbara. Martin’s wife, Barbara, contributed to designs here and there, and Martin later credited her with “sprucing up the raw designs” of the first Bukowski broadsides. But from May 1968 on—after the publication of The Champ by poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie (with illustrations by his longtime partner Joe Brainard)—Barbara would design nearly every Black Sparrow book’s cover and title page, as well as chapbooks, broadsides, posters, catalogs, and other bits of ephemera. She drew the press’s first sparrow logo in 1967, refined it once in 1969, then again in 1972.

The Martins married in 1959, six months after meeting. “She was working pasteup and design at the May Company department store in Downtown L.A.,” John Martin said. “She was doing their advertising layouts.” Barbara Martin was not a trained artist, but the breadth of her natural talent was clearly wasted on ephemeral adverts. Inspired and influenced by Vorticism, Bauhaus, and Constructivism, she combined a preference for sans serif typefaces, clean geometric forms, and bold colors to create a recognizable visual identity for Black Sparrow. She never designed on a computer. She worked with pencils and an X-Acto knife, preferred fonts from Letraset, a dry-transfer lettering system. Even without the rigid grid design of a Penguin paperback or the diminutive format and black-and-white cover of a City Lights Pocket Poets series, Barbara Martin–designed books became identifiable as Black Sparrow from across a crowded bookstore.

The press’s little office was soon overflowing with cartons of printed books. John Martin needed more storage. He rented space in the garages of his Office Supplies Unlimited co-workers and bought a brown 1968 Ford Fairlane. The muscle car was known for its sleek design and beefy V8 engine, but it also had a massive trunk, and Martin used it to ferry cartons of books from the various garages back to Kilrenney Avenue to be packed and shipped. “I had that Fairlane for 20 years,” Martin recalled. “It never broke down. It was wonderful.”

In 1968, Black Sparrow Press published 32 books and chapbooks from the Hillmans’ guest cottage. It was a remarkable output for a small press—especially given that John Martin was still working full-time at Office Supplies Unlimited.

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Having the Kilrenney Avenue cottage office near his apartment allowed Martin to settle into a routine. Most days, he worked eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening managing Office Supplies Unlimited. After dinner with Barbara and their young daughter, Carrie (named after Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie), Martin drove to the cottage and worked until 12 o’clock at night or as late as two o’clock in the morning. On weekends, he worked 12–14 hours a day to get caught up on shipping orders from the previous week. Martin was a one-man show. After selecting an author and a manuscript, he handled editing and book production; he wrote and produced catalogs and book announcements; he corresponded with bookshop owners and customers; he kept crucial mailing lists up-to-date; and he processed orders, then packed and shipped the books.

These were lean years, but Martin was fervent. His idea of publishing was to make public his personal literary enthusiasms in such a way that they became contagious to readers. He continued the ambitious pace he’d set.

Highlights of the 27 publications in 1969 include Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger: Book II, the heartrending North Percy by Paul Goodman, and stream-of-consciousness stylist Fielding Dawson’s Krazy Kat/The Unveiling and Other Stories from 1951–1968, the press’s first full-length book of fiction. Several books were enlivened with art by some of the most compelling artists of the period: John Ashbery’s Fragment included illustrations by Alex Katz; Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On included illustrations by Larry Rivers; and David Hockney provided a frontispiece for David Posner’s The Dialogues.

This was also the first year with a consistent application of what was quickly becoming Black Sparrow’s distinctive format: six-inch by nine-inch paperbacks (a unique, larger trim size at the time) with uncoated, textured covers and no text or blurbs whatsoever printed on the back cover, not even a price. Hardcovers followed suit. They had cloth spines but no dust jackets, just a clear acetate wrapper. Nearly half of the books Martin released in 1969 followed this format. Martin released an affordable paperback edition simultaneously alongside more expensive signed limited editions aimed at collectors. The approach proved financially savvy. Because of his years as a collector, Martin also understood the value of the documents and materials generated by each book he published. He raised capital in 1969 by selling to the University of Alberta for $23,000 the files—manuscript drafts, typescripts, proofs and galleys, correspondence, production notes, photographs, original art, and various other materials—to Black Sparrow’s first 62 publications. In subsequent months, the university bought the files for 32 more at $200 each.

The press’s most significant publication to date came at the end of the year: Bukowski’s seminal poetry collection The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills. A postcard announcement from the press called the poems “by turns savage, tender, humorous.” The book is a perfect example of how, like Martin’s reliable Ford Fairlane, the press was now firing on all cylinders: Bukowski had written some of his most lyrical, struck-through-with-grief poems; Martin made the final selection of poems and sequenced them (a practice the author and editor repeated throughout their relationship); and Barbara Martin designed a simple yet striking cover by stacking the 10-word title down the right side of the tan cover in green and placing the author’s name below it in orange on one line. The first printing was 1,550 copies, of which 1,250 were paperbacks, 250 were numbered and signed hardcovers, and 50 were numbered and signed hardcovers that included an original illustration by Bukowski. When Martin retired in 2002, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills had been through 27 printings—improbable for a book of poetry, much less one published by a small press.

In 1969, globally and historically, the improbable seemed possible. In June, the Stonewall riots sparked the modern gay rights movement. In July, Apollo 11 delivered mankind to the moon. In August, Woodstock became a once-in-a-generation cultural touchstone. And in Los Angeles, monumental relative to their own lives thus far, both John Martin and Charles Bukowski decided to leave their day jobs to focus fully on their dream jobs: publisher and author, respectively.

After more than a decade of grinding work at the post office, Bukowski was being pushed out for excessive absenteeism. He was desperate to write more but still needed to cover his monthly expenses. In one of the great acts of faith in the history of American publishing, Martin devised a plan. “We sat down one day and [Bukowski] got out a little piece of paper and gave it to me, and I took a pen and he gave me his expenses,” Martin said. “His rent was $35 a month. He had $15-a-month child support. He wanted $15 a month for booze and food. He needed another $10 a month for car insurance and gas. When we added it all up, it came to $100. I said, ‘You can really live on $100?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’” Martin guaranteed Bukowski $100 a month to write full-time exclusively for Black Sparrow.

This story has become literary lore. The dollar amounts and what they accounted for vary slightly with different tellings—sometimes it’s $20 for groceries or $5 for gas or $15 for beer and cigarettes—but the total is always $100, which amounted, depending on the telling, to either one-fifth or one-quarter or one-third of Martin’s personal monthly income. Either way, the promise of $100 a month—combined with several thousand dollars Bukowski inherited after his father’s death, a $3,000 pension he could draw on, and more money coming in from the sale of his papers to the University of California, Santa Barbara (a deal Martin arranged)—allowed the bard of low-life Los Angeles to never again work as anything but a writer.

Bukowski was 49. Martin was 39. “I was obsessed,” Martin said. “I was determined to make it work. I didn’t want to go back to work for somebody else.”

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In 1970, Black Sparrow Press hired its first two employees.

“They were brothers,” John Martin recalled. “They were dopers, but very nice—just marijuana. They would come in the morning—they would float in—calm, happy, undisturbed. I mean, they were really very calming to have around. One of them was my assistant and the other was the shipping person.”

Even though he had part-time help, Martin kept his shoulder to the boulder of building a publishing house. As exhausting and time-consuming as it is to release a new book every few weeks, a small publisher might never become a slightly larger publisher unless it is able to build a backlist—without a catalog of steadily selling older books, survival is unlikely.

In February 1970, Martin published The Magellanic Clouds, the press’s first full-length collection by poet Diane Wakoski. “That was a big book,” Martin said. “I went through printing after printing.” He was moving from releasing chapbooks in print runs of a few hundred copies to publishing longer books in larger print runs and soon reprinting as the books quickly sold out.

Martin began to publish more fiction, such as the short story collection Green Grass, Blue Sky, White House by Wright Morris, a once-revered National Book Award winner from Nebraska who had fallen out of fashion. Fielding Dawson’s Open Road became the first novel published by Black Sparrow.

Martin also worked on projects that appealed to his first love: collecting rare books. He collaborated with James Laughlin at New Directions (who acted as an occasional mentor) to co-publish a bilingual edition of Xenia, the Italian poet Eugenio Montale’s sequence about the death of his wife. The edition was limited to just 326 signed copies printed on handmade paper and handbound into hardcovers with spines of embroidered cloth. Five years later, Montale was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Black Sparrow Press published 21 books in 1970. Martin was beginning to sell more copies of fewer titles—a crucial rung on the ladder to long-term solvency. But publishing is a business of excruciatingly slow cash flow, so money was always tight. Martin’s faith in Bukowski, however, was about to pay off and lift the resilient little sparrow.

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“I was making a bare living, nothing extra,” Martin said. “But I was able to pay all my bills, pay off my printers, and my assistants, and everything … and then, of course, Post Office was published, and we started to make some money.”

On February 8, 1971, the trajectory of the Black Sparrow was altered upward by the release of Post Office, Bukowski’s brisk, funny, and forgivably sloppy debut novel, which introduced readers to the exploits of his antihero alter ego, Henry Chinaski. Bukowski is said to have written the first draft of Post Office over a three-week sprint in which he barely left his bungalow. When Martin asked, “How could you write a novel in just a few weeks?” the author replied, “Fear.” Martin could relate. “There was a time before that when there’d been no mail for about three or four days,” Martin said.

I had all my bills to pay at the end of the month, and I had about $500 in the checking account, and I thought, “Good Lord, what do I do now?” A couple days later, I went to get the mail out of the postbox, and it was just stuffed with orders. All of a sudden I had cash flow … and I never looked back.

Over the next 30 years—from 1971 to Martin’s retirement in 2002—Post Office went through 42 printings and sold at least 5,000 to 10,000 copies per year. If not Bukowski’s best novel, it is his seminal prose work. It was also only the second novel Black Sparrow Press had ever published.

And what did Will Hillman, the seemingly reserved, formally dressed Christian Scientist who owned the cottage from which the transgressive (yet comic) novel was published and distributed, make of the book? “Oh, he was very interested in Bukowski,” Martin said of his benign benefactor. “He thought it was kind of wonderful that this wild man from the post office was actually coming into some kind of fruition.”

The same month Post Office was released, Martin brought out a limited edition of Wakoski’s poem On Barbara’s Shore to mark Black Sparrow’s 100th publication. He also released Green, the press’s first book by Tom Clark, who was then serving, at the suggestion of his former teacher Donald Hall, as poetry editor of The Paris Review. Like Bukowski, Clark and Wakoski would become stalwarts of the press for the rest of Martin’s career; he eventually published 13 and 21 of their books, respectively.

Martin was loyal to his authors. One of his goals was to “start with a writer and then stick with him, more or less, forever.” This was a literary-minded approach, but it was also good business. Why spend years, he thought, building an author’s audience only to watch that author move to a different publisher and take their readers with them? “Publishers try to develop best-sellers, not authors,” Martin said. “I realized I didn’t want to publish books—I wanted to publish authors.”

In September 1971, A Checklist of the First One Hundred Publications of the Black Sparrow Press was released as a handsome pocket-size volume. It was a tangible celebration of the books Martin had worked hard to publish in less than five years, and, the shrewd businessman knew, it was essentially a buying guide for the press’s growing legion of fans and collectors.

With the publication of Post Office and the press’s growing backlist, as well as the establishment of “a built-in group of maybe fifty booksellers all over the world” who ordered everything the press published, Black Sparrow turned its first profit.

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Success snowballed. The doper brothers proved dependable employees. While there are no fixed definitions for these things, Black Sparrow was undoubtedly moving from being a “small press” to being an “independent press.” John Martin had done it without a cent of bank loans or grant money or business partners—a point of pride for the scrappy Christian Scientist with avant-garde tastes who hadn’t gone to college.

In October 1972, Martin launched Sparrow, a slim, staple-bound monthly magazine that featured the work of a single author each issue and served as a teaser of sorts for a forthcoming Black Sparrow book. The journal ran for six years and 72 issues. Another highlight of the year was Flag of Ecstasy by Charles Henri Ford, who was considered the United States’ first surrealist poet.

In 1973, Black Sparrow published a novella by Fielding Dawson about a high school boy losing his virginity. It carried the cheeky title The Greatest Story Ever Told: A Transformation. Years later, Martin chuckled while recalling how many angry requests for refunds he received from “little old ladies who’d ordered the book thinking it was about Jesus.”

More serious that year was the response to Martin’s publication of The Escaped Cock, the first unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s 1929 novel that was later published under the title The Man Who Died. Soon after the book was announced, Martin was swimming in preorders for 2,000 copies—noteworthy for a press that was, a couple years prior, printing only a few hundred copies of its books.

The page counts of Black Sparrow books were growing too. While printing letterpress from metal type was Martin’s preference, it was becoming cost-prohibitive for longer works. He began to have the interior text pages of longer books printed offset and bound by Edward Brothers, Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The covers and multicolor title pages—which had become another hallmark of a first edition from Black Sparrow—were still letterpress-printed in Santa Barbara, then shipped to Ann Arbor.

Martin loved orchestrating a book’s production and bringing together the parts—the covers, multicolor title pages, text pages, and sheets signed by authors to be bound into the finished book. He enjoyed process and systems, things he believed many small publishers of the era considered administrative grind. “Most were totally inefficient as far as taking care of business,” he said. “I suppose I’m type A.” Those who observed Martin as a publisher described him as “energetic, voluble,” and “erudite, eloquent, and expansive” with a “bristling vigor.” When discussing literature, Martin sometimes excitedly cut off and spoke over interviewers, his already high voice raising even higher.

Between 1972 and 1975, Black Sparrow Press published a book, chapbook, or issue of Sparrow every two or three weeks. Martin relished the work. “I’ve seen so many dilettante publishers who don’t develop the business, don’t develop customers, don’t develop distributors,” he said. “You’re licked before you start.” Martin was planning his next big move.

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William Hillman—Martin’s literary guide, mentor, and benefactor—died in 1974. Martin was brokenhearted. At the same time, Black Sparrow had outgrown the Hillmans’ guest cottage and Martin knew it was time to leave the nest. He looked north of Los Angeles. In 1975, the small seaside city of Santa Barbara was still affordable. Martin found a four-bedroom house where he’d have a finished basement for book storage, a two-car garage for shipping and receiving, and a converted pool house for an office. He would also be down the street from his printer. In order to grow, he needed to go.

Fifty years after that move, Martin still sounded pained about leaving Aileen Hillman behind at the Kilrenney Avenue house. “She didn’t want me to leave and move to Santa Barbara,” he said, “but she saw that was the thing I had to do, and she supported it.” Her granddaughter moved in to care for her, and he kept in touch with regular phone calls. Martin said of Will and Aileen Hillman: “There would be no Black Sparrow without them.”

In the less than nine years between the press’s founding in Los Angeles in April 1966 and its move to Santa Barbara in December 1975, working with little to no staff from either the living room of a two-bedroom apartment or a small guest cottage, Martin released 225 publications and established himself as a maverick publisher with adventurous editorial taste and high production standards.

In addition to the core group that would prove to be the press’s dependable stable for decades—including Bukowski, Clark, Dawson, Eshleman, Kelly, Gerard Malanga, and Wakoski—Martin published work by a surprisingly wide range of authors during his years in Los Angeles. His editorial tastes and reach expanded. He published poetry and prose by both Paul Bowles and Joyce Carol Oates, several books of nonfiction by Gertrude Stein and by Richard Grossinger (father of Miranda July). Martin published the first of what would be many books by the underappreciated objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff; Sam Shepard’s first prose collection, Hawk Moon (1975); and even the script of John Cassavetes’s 1971 film Minnie & Moskowitz (which starred Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel). Martin didn’t care what “school” an author was associated with—Black Mountain, New York School, surrealist, Beat, San Francisco Renaissance, objectivist, confessional, concrete, deep image—he only published work he personally liked and believed in. He had remarkable confidence in his taste; of the roughly 1,000 unsolicited manuscripts Martin received each year for more than 30 years, he published four. The other secret to Black Sparrow’s success was simply that John Martin knew what work is. He put in the hours, with passion.

Before founding Black Sparrow, Martin had never worked in publishing, never so much as volunteered for his high school newspaper. But he was an autodidact. As a reader, he knew original writing that took off the top of his head, and as a bibliophile, he knew what he wanted in a book as a physical object. These talents, combined with an innate generosity and contagious enthusiasm, made him an affable editor.

Martin also learned quickly when not to edit an author: “You don’t edit poetry but say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a whole poem,” he said. Another lesson: “There were some authors whose manuscripts you didn’t touch … you just published them as they came in.” Asked for an example, Martin responded softly: “Joyce Carol Oates.” Sometimes he had trouble living up to this self-imposed policy: Bukowski, a writer whose prose is hardly revered for the brilliance of its syntax, could bristle and protest if Martin so much as corrected a bit of grammar in a novel. Even so, Bukowski remained loyal to Martin for life.

The last book Black Sparrow published before its big move was Bukowski’s second novel, Factotum, his ode to menial labor. As of December 1, 1975, the press’s mail was forwarded from their Los Angeles post office box to their new address in Santa Barbara, where the press would remain until 1986, when Black Sparrow moved one last time: to the Northern California town of Santa Rosa.

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When Charles Bukowski died in 1994 his guaranteed check from John Martin for $100 per month had risen to $10,000 per month.

In the years after the death of the author he’d founded Black Sparrow to publish, Martin became convinced that independent publishing and independent bookselling were heading for drastic changes. At Black Sparrow’s peak, Martin said, there were 300 to 400 independent bookstores that made regular purchases from the press every month or two, as well as another thousand or so that bought occasionally. “By 2002,” Martin said, “our market had shrunk drastically. Independent bookstores were going out of business left and right.” He was left selling to perhaps 100 independent bookstores. It also made Martin nervous that between 80 and 85 percent of all Black Sparrow sales were being made to just three buyers: Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram, the wholesale book distribution giant. Martin saw Borders was on the verge of collapse and feared Barnes & Noble would follow. For many years, the press had been grossing in excess of $1 million dollars annually, and some years considerably more than that. Martin was 71 years old. He had been running Black Sparrow for more than half of his life. It was time to retire. He sold the publishing contracts and remaining stock of Bukowski, Bowles, and John Fante—the press’s best-selling authors—to the publisher Daniel Halpern at Ecco in New York City.

Decades after his retirement, John Martin still had one small piece of Black Sparrow Press memorabilia in his home study: a framed letter from Bukowski dated September 1975, just months before the press would leave Los Angeles for Santa Barbara. The letter reads: “You’re the best boss I ever had.”

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Featured image: Photo of Barbara Martin, Charles Bukowski, and John Martin, at the Martins’ home in Santa Barbara. Courtesy of Barbara Martin. Image has been cropped.