Norton is celebrating its 100th anniversary in a variety of ways.
The company is hosting the opening reception of next week's Winter Institute in Seattle, Wash., with all of Norton's field reps and chairman and president Julia Reidhead in attendance. The event is in recognition of the bond between Norton and independent booksellers. "Getting the right books to the right readers is a shared project," Reidhead says. "We recognize and love the work booksellers do. They're independent-minded and interesting and love what they do--and we're the same."
The company's special Norton Centenary publishing program begins with a new edition of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Polly Norton. Reidhead has written an afterword that delves into Polly Norton's role in co-founding the company, which in the past hadn't received as much attention as her husband's. Warder was known for his involvement in progressive causes, particularly in adult education, but Polly, a polymath, had a deep background in music, literature and science, which came in part from being the member of a family closely connected with the intellectual life of Columbia University.
The Norton Shorts program, being introduced in the fall, is, Reidhead says, "an homage to what the Nortons originally published"--the pamphlet lectures from Cooper Union. The series makes its debut with two books and will consist of two or three titles a year, "bringing to the public the knowledge of our time," by scholars who have emerged as some of the most original, incisive voices in their fields. Some of the books will be controversial and they will be beautiful and engaging, Reidhead promises. They'll be 30,000-40,000 words, about 200 pages, written for the general reader but likely appealing to the academic market, too.
The first two Norton Shorts are Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles, professor of history at Harvard and the author of National Book Award-winning All That She Carried, about the formative years of such people as Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott as well as lesser known women; and Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew, associate professor in Science, Technology, and Society and creator of the Technology and Disability course at Virginia Tech, about how tech often marginalizes the experiences of disabled people. Both titles will be published September 23.
Norton is also eager to work with booksellers who would like to celebrate the anniversary.