Odonian Press was founded in the early 1990s by Arthur Naiman, who was struck by how much more accessible leftist ideas tend to be in speeches and interviews than in books or articles. Using money he made from computer books like The Macintosh Bible, he set out to produce short, readable, radical political books, usually based on spoken sources, that were as well-written and jargon-free as possible.
Because these books aimed to give readers the real story on what was happening in the world, they were called The Real Story Series. The idea was to preach to the congregation rather than to the (already converted) choir.
The first Real Story book, Who Killed JFK?, came out in early 1992; the last, Noam Chomsky's The Common
Good, in late 1998. Odonian published a total of eighteen books, all but three of them in the Real Story series. There are now more than
875,000 copies of these books in print.
Printing and marketing of The Real Story Series is now handled by South End Press of Boston, with distribution through Consortium of Minneapolis.
Where does the name Odonian come from?
Odonian Press gets its name from science fiction author
Ursula Le Guin's
The Dispossessed, which certainly must be the best novel ever written about anarchism. The last story in her collection called The Wind's Twelve Quarters also features the Odonians (and Odo herself).
Why doesn't Odonian still publish books?
Its editor/publisher, Arthur Naiman (that's me), wanted to concentrate on my own writing, and on other aspects of my life I'd been neglecting. For many years, I couldn't even manage to keep this website active (sorry).
Who is Arthur Naiman?
I'm the author or editor of about thirty nonfiction books, in the fields of leftist politics, computers, humor and health. Dissatisfied with how some of my early publishers were handling my books, I began publishing them myself. The first book I self-published, The Macintosh Bible, was for many years the best-selling book ever written about the Macintosh computer (and may still be); it was several times voted Best Computer Book in various contests, despite the fact that there were at least ten times as many PC users as Mac users at the time. I sold the computer book publishing company in the early 1990s to concentrate on editing and publishing political books.
