As the co-founder of Spinner Publications more than four decades ago, Joe Thomas has seen a lot of change. Communities and industries have evolved and technology has advanced, but one thing has remained the same — there will always be stories to tell.
And Thomas knows that southeastern New England is full of stories. With Spinner Publications, he has spent much of his adult life chronicling the fertile history and culture of the people of this region with words and images.
When this New Bedford-based company issued its first book in 1981, Amazon was still only a jungle and the web was primarily the province of spiders. At the time, Thomas was selling Spinner’s books out of the back of his car, but today the company has a global reach with its catalog of books, magazines and calendars.
A photographer by trade, this 72-year-old New Bedford native has been schooled in the rigors of running a publishing business, but has always taken pride and pleasure in the creative virtues of publishing books about life in this area. Today, Spinner’s downtown offices include a full-time staff of three with a cadre of local writers and photographers who are also on the payroll. To date, Spinner has published 40 books, including educational textbooks, memoirs, cookbooks, poetry, and regional history as well as calendars devoted to the region.
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Recent projects have included a memoir by former New Bedford Mayor John Bullard, a book about Paul Cuffee, and a picture history of New Bedford. Each year Spinner produces calendars that are designed for and distributed by local businesses as well as some that are available for purchase by the general public. This year’s calendars include one featuring New England fishermen, and another devoted to the region of southeastern New England. Current projects in the works are a book about scalloping, a third volume of the history of New Bedford, a book about French-Canadian migration, and a children’s book about Cady Houle, “The Goat Lady of South Dartmouth.”
The youngest of five children, Thomas grew up on Rivet Street in the city’s South End. He worked at his family’s business, “Thomas’s Department Store,” which was owned by his parents, George and Anne. Thomas would go on to earn a degree in photography from the Art Institute of Boston, as well as studying sociology and literature at Providence College and UMass Dartmouth. Today he lives in the city with his wife, Jane.
Thomas started Spinner with Donna Huse, a now-retired sociology professor at UMD who was interested in the preservation of local community history. Their first book was a picture history of New Bedford in a magazine format.
In an interview with the New Bedford Light, Thomas talked about the richness of the region’s culture and history, the changes he has experienced in the publishing industry, the evolution of Spinner Publications, the value of documenting history, and more.
New Bedford Light: In your estimation, how rich is New Bedford and the area when it comes to culture?
Joe Thomas: Well, if you put it like that, it’s obscenely rich. If wealth could be measured in culture, we would be one of the richest places in the country, because our history is so rich. It really is. It’s a lot of things, but it’s really the people who make it. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it has a lot to do with the type of people who have come here. They made it what it is. You have to give credit to the Portuguese, the Irish, the French, the Hispanics, and of course the English. You have to say that we’re really indicative of the whole American melting pot with our diversity and multicultural character of the country. It’s a good strong sample of the whole American experience.
NBL: Why is history important? Why is it important to document things?
JT: It’s important for a lot of reasons.To me, first of all, it’s entertaining. It’s an element of pride, which I think you need to have. You need to have pride in your community and in yourself. And I think that history is an important indicator of that. So we celebrate it and enjoy it. I’ve tried to enjoy history and I’ve made a living off of it at the same time.
NBL: Why has Spinner been successful? What accounts for your longevity?
JT: It’s a couple of things. It’s a deep resource — the wealth of information, the history that we draw from, it’s very rich, it’s very deep, it’s very diverse. But also the people that I’m working with and have worked [who] have all been dedicated, and they’ve all been excited about the community. And I think that’s what you need to keep going. First of all, you need the raw material, meaning the stories and the things to document. But you need a group of people who are interested in it, who enjoy it and who are talented enough and capable of doing it. And the community has supported us.
NBL: You have more than a million and a half photographic images in your holdings. How do you accumulate the images that you use?
JT: In different ways. First of all, we have several photographers over the years who have worked for Spinner, and their collections are part of our collection. We’ve collected several thousand images from The Standard-Times when they were moving from Pleasant Street about 20 years ago. They threw out a lot of pictures that we salvaged. Then we have people who donate, like Milt Silvia, who was a Standard-Times photographer. He’s passed away now, but he was a photographer from the late 1940s into the ’90s. His work is tremendous because it spanned local history for such a long period, and he donated his whole negative collection to Spinner and that was over 100,000 negatives right there. We’re also curating a lot of The Standard-Times’ current collection. We depend a large part on people donating pictures to us and buying collections.
NBL: What are the challenges of documenting a story through a camera?
JT: In some ways, to me it’s more natural to document visually. The camera is an instrument of documentation by its very invention. The great photographers of the 20th century, even going back to the immigrants, such as Jacob Reis and Lewis Hine, and then through the World Wars, the war photographers. Then the WPA and the Farm Security Administration. Documentary photographers were profound contributors to the historical expression of America. Especially the Depression Era, when they documented American life with that intent. Roosevelt, when he came up with his Farm Security Plan, the whole recovery act that was instituted during his administration was a collection of different government agencies that put people to work, and one of them was taking pictures. The whole idea was to give artists work documenting American life during the Depression Era. Walker Evans, Dorothy Lang, Gordon Parks … These were all WPA photographers who became the most well-known American documenting artists of the time, of that century.
I was sort of weaned on that. I studied a lot of that when I was in school. I was enamored of those photographers and I wanted to do the same thing and I wanted to do it on a community level. My background in sociology made me very interested in the human condition, working people, farms and factories. But also immigrants, fishing, textiles, all these different industries we had here and all of the people and the families. These things to me were very interesting, and I felt that they needed to be documented and told and given back to the community. So that’s what we did.
NBL: Where did the name Spinner come from?
JT: There’s an interesting story behind that. We were trying to find a word that was rooted in history as well as contemporary life, and also somehow indicated what we do. With Spinner we thought, well, the spinner of tales. But it’s also the spinning of cloth, which had the textiles connotation, but it also had a nautical connotation. But it was also the telling of stories. It had a storytelling association. So we just went with it. But we felt like it needed to have a subtitle, and that’s where “The People and Culture of Southeastern Massachusetts” came from. We incorporated that long subtitle. In some ways it may be a little cumbersome. When you try to create a brand and you want to sell a book in different venues, the simpler it is the better it is in the marketplace.
NBL: How do you come up with the projects you take on? Where do the ideas come from?
JT: Well, the ideas for each individual book, of course, belong to the authors in the community from which we draw, the people in the area. Many of our books are ideas that come from within our staff and our membership and supporters, a lot of folks that we’re connected with — our writers and historians. So the ideas are drawn from the community and from within, that’s really what it’s all about. I think we’ve published four or five poetry books by local people who want to get their poems published, and although poetry is not a largely lucrative field, those books are fun to publish. They’re excellent works of art and they’re relatively easy to put together.
Book publishing stems from anything simple like an essay or a poem to anything much more visual and complicated in terms of the design. And of course the editorial process is complex. So a book can be simple or it can be very complex.
NBL: How much time and effort go into creating and producing a book?
JT: So a book like “The Picture History of New Bedford” there’s a tremendous amount of work — a lot of research, a lot of reading and a lot of editing, and then illustrating. We just have a team of people who, while it’s a lot of work, many of the books can take over a year to get out. But we have such a great team of people — Al Saulniers, Natalie White, Jay Avila and myself, we work very, very hard on it. It took close to a year to put [“The Picture History of New Bedford”] together. And then, of course, the fundraising part. To publish these books is a very expensive process, so we have to raise money. So all of these things go into the making of a book.
Some books the author has already written before they’ve approached us and those obviously will go by quickly, where it’s more of an editorial process in the design and illustration. It’s a lot of work, but at least we’re working from a manuscript. So those books might take four to eight months. Some books, like the poetry books, can be published in a matter of weeks or months at the most, because it’s just setting type and organizing and promoting.
There’s a promotional aspect to all the books that are published. They have to be put on the market, so they have to be prepared for the market. Sometimes it’s electronic books, working with Amazon, working with schools, and in some cases, the people who want to promote the product are commercial groups like banks, unions, organizations or associations. Anybody can be involved in the books in terms of producing and financing.
It’s almost like a film. There’s a producer and there’s a director. The producer gets behind the product, finds the director and picks who manages and decides the content. We’re the directors and producers in the sense that, as the publishers, we decide the direction, what it’s going to look like and where the market is going to be. And the people who raise the money, they’re akin to producers. They’re supporting the project.
Sometimes with some of our projects we can get private enterprise to invest, sometimes banks. Often it’s just grants, government or private grants that support the books. I guess to break it down and simplify it you have the content, the editorial, and then you have the financial backing. And that’s really where the work is. And then of course you have to sell the product, and that involves a marketing group or individuals. That’s where Sue (Grace, marketing director) comes in — she’s involved in trying to find markets for the books.
An interesting thing about publishing is that it’s creative, but it’s almost more about business than anything — it’s about finding people to buy them, read them, to appreciate your work. It’s like any form of art or media for that matter. You need an audience. You need to look at all the aspects.
NBL: How did you originally get your books out there? How did you sell them?
JT: In the trunk of my car (laughs). I went to every bookstore in Boston — Harvard Square, Kendall Square, and Kenmore Square. All over the city. Right downtown there was Globe Corner Books, a beautiful historic bookstore that sold Massachusetts books. They had a great selection of books. Harvard Square had the Harvard Coop and Harvard Bookstore itself in Central Square. That’s initially how we got out.
Sue’s job is sales and marketing and she’ll try to sell books to smaller stores all over the country. It’s usually the unconventional spots that sell the best. Benny’s, for example, used to sell tons of our books. Big Value Outlet, Bourassa Hardware, JCPenney, places you wouldn’t think of.
There were more bookstores in the 1980s and ’90s. They’re gone now. In downtown New Bedford I sold them at the Star Store, Saltmarsh’s, and up and down Union Street. There were all kinds of stores that we sold them at — gift shops and novelty stores. A lot of those are gone, and big department stores are gone.
Our website can’t compete with Amazon because they offer free shipping. In the end, we’re paying for it because they take so much of our profit. There are gift shops in New Bedford and Fairhaven … but not the abundance there were at one time.
The fun part of publishing is the creative part, making books. It’s never been fun distributing, it’s never been a lot of fun selling. It’s very competitive out there. It changes. It’s dynamic. But where we’re going to sell educational books, where we’re going to sell picture books, and where we’re going to sell cookbooks, it’s all different. The classic bookstore of yesterday is not as prominent as it once was. We’ve seen all the distributors collapse and now Amazon is the marketplace. Even Barnes & Noble isn’t much of a player anymore. They’re so big but they deal mostly on demand. They have to request the book from their New York offices before we get the order.
NBL: What are you most proud of when it comes to Spinner?
JT: I’m most proud of my nephew Jay (Avila, associate publisher). I’m proud of how he started as this little kid coming here after school to do the shipping to now basically running the place. He’s really gotten so knowledgeable about the community and the history of New Bedford, that it’s just phenomenal. It gives me pleasure to see that.
It would be nice if we had more people participating. This is the kind of thing where people could get involved with and get some reward in terms of local history. And people are involved in local history — The Historical Society, the Whaling Museum. These institutions are phenomenal, they do phenomenal work, they’re guided by people who are brilliant and do great work, and we just want to be part of that community. It gives me satisfaction knowing that we are part of that community, part of a community that preserves history, that celebrates diversity and multiculturalism.
I grew up in New Bedford, on Rivet Street, and it was a very dense Portuguese neighborhood, and it still is. I went to a French grammar school at the bottom of Rivet Street, and then I went to an Irish Catholic high school (Holy Family), and my family is Middle Eastern, and so I always had this tie to them. I was always juggling around this cultural baggage. Even as an altar boy I had to serve a mass in Latin and French, and then I had to be an altar boy at a Lebanese church and serve Mass in Aramaic. On Saturday morning I had to go to Arabic school, it was part of my culture. But during the day I had to learn French and read French at the French school, St. Hyacinthe.
Because my family had a business in a Portuguese neighborhood, I had to wait on Portuguese customers. As an adolescent, I communicated with Portuguese-speaking people. On Saturday I had to go to Arabic school at the Our Lady of Purgatory Church, and in the basement of that church the priest taught Arabic. I never did a very good job of learning anything, but the greatest thing I got out of it was being exposed to this great diversity and great collection of people.
I can remember delivering a trunk to a house on Briggs Street, the third floor on a hot summer day when I was maybe 16 or 17. I went up that staircase to deliver that trunk, sweating like a dog, and when I finally got to the third floor, there was an old man there with a glass of lemonade waiting for me, and we started talking. We sat down and he started telling me stories about my grandfather who died many years before I was born that no one ever talked about before. It was important family history from somebody who knew who I was, just by chance. So that kind of stuff is the kind of thing I think is important about a community, when you have that personal history.
Spinner is all about storytelling. We’re a spinner of tales.
Sean McCarthy is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New Bedford Light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Kudos to Joe Thomas and his crew at Spinner. As time passes, his work will be more and more appreciated. He has weaved a roadmap for future historians of our area and of America.
What a wonderful story! Thank you Sean. I deeply admire and appreciate Joe Thomas and celebrate the co-founder of Spinner, Donna Huse, too. Donna did such an extraordinary job engaging her students at UMass Dartmouth in exploring the people and culture of the region. She and her husband, Jim Sears, a UMass Dartmouth professor of botany, are also artists and expert gardeners. Their research on beautiful Portuguese urban gardens in New Bedford is captured in a Spinner publication with many photographs. Check it out.
I remember the Thomas Boys at Holy Family High. Nice family and great kids. We lived in the south end and knew Rivet St and Ashley park very well. Thanks for all your good work documenting the history of New Bedford. I live in Western Mass now, but still enjoy visits to NB to enjoy the seafood.
Bob Pariseau