Portland, Oregon— February 2, 2021. PubWest, the country’s leading trade association of small- to medium-size book publishers, has announced that the 2021 Jack D. Rittenhouse Award will be posthumously presented to Drs. Julian and Raye Richardson, founders of Marcus Books, the nation’s oldest Black-owned bookstore, based in Oakland, California.

The Rittenhouse Award will be presented at 1:30 p.m. PST on Wednesday, February 3, 2021, during a free, open-to-all session at the annual PubWest conference, which begins (online) today. The presentation will begin with a six-minute film about Raye and Julian Richardson and Marcus Books by Oakland-based filmmaker Charlotte Buchen Khadra.

Following the presentation, PubWest will lead a conversation with three Black booksellers about the challenges and opportunities of their profession.

The Rittenhouse Award was established in 1990, in memory of Jack D. Rittenhouse, a legendary bookman, writer, salesman, publisher and historian – in the American West--to thank and honor those who have made important contributions to the book community in the West.

Drs. Raye and Julian Richardson were a husband-and-wife team who moved to San Francisco after completing their studies at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where Julian majored in lithography and Raye in education. In 1960, they opened the Success Book Store in the Fillmore district.

Readers looking for information and community soon found Success Books, a place to meet, organize, and share thoughts and strategies. The Richardsons later changed the name to Marcus Books, because they were followers of Marcus Garvey, and opened a second store in Oakland, which continues to serve their mission of “providing opportunities for Black folks and their allies to celebrate and learn about Black people everywhere.” Dr. Julian Richardson died in 2000. Dr. Raye Richardson died in February 2020 at the age of 99.

“Julian and Raye Richardson paved the way as printers and booksellers and as community leaders who ran a successful small business,” said Brad Lyons, chair of the PubWest Rittenhouse Award committee. “They set an example that helped us understand and appreciate the significance of Black bookstores.”

About PubWest

Publishers Association of the West (PubWest) is a national trade organization of publishers and associated publishing-related members. PubWest offers professional education and publishing-related benefits, provides opportunities for its members to grow their businesses, advocates for its members, recognizes outstanding achievement in publishing, and provides a forum for networking to members from across the United States and Canada. Direct questions to ExecutiveDirector@PubWest.org.

Portland, Oregon, February 3— At #PubWest2021 yesterday, PubWest, the leading association of small and medium-sized book publishers, announced the winners of the 2020 Book Design Awards competition. The PubWest Book Design Awards recognize superior design and outstanding production quality of books in up to 25 categories, as well as an overall Judges’ Choice Award.

The Design Awards winners were judged by professional designers on typography, jacket and cover design, interior design, format, selection of materials used, and printing and binding production quality. PubWest president Colleen Dunn Bates congratulates the winners and says, “The printed book continues to thrive because it is, when done right, a thing of beauty. Celebrating this beauty, while honoring the essential practicality of a bound bunch of pages printed with words and/or images, is the mission of the PubWest Book Design Awards. In championing books that demonstrate exceptional design, layout, paper, binding, and visual creativity, the awards strengthen the community of the book, which is what PubWest is all about.”

The winner of this year’s Judges’ Choice Award is New West, a beautifully designed, printed, and bound photography book from HIRMER Verlag that explores the innovations that shaped this unique landscape throughout the ages of steam, steel, oil and information, through the vibrant and compelling images of the color-saturated early-social-media art form of the Mid-Century Linen Postcard. The Silicon Valley creators’ design journey took them across three continents before they settled on a team that could deliver the quality they envisioned, including a book designer in New York and a printer and paper manufacturer in Southern Germany.

Here’s what the judges had to say: “Stunning in its visual display of information, intuitive in its navigation, and generous in every single way, the design of New West rewards the reader page after page. The printing is absolutely incredible, using the art of vintage linen postcards to create a textured, color-saturated vision of the American West that is both old and new at once. The harmony between the vision for the design and the technical aspects of the production is a beautiful thing to behold.”

See all the Winners.