Attentive visitors may have noticed that our logo, depicting the "Ideal Worker"–hammer in one hand, knowledge in the other–was appropriated from the now-defunct Vanguard Press, the great New York radical publishing house of the 1920s - 40s. We have long admired the simple symbolism of this design, and hope that, by joining the long tradition of radical bookselling, we go some distance towards earning the right to use it.

We are currently working on a history and bibliography of the Vanguard Press, a project we believe will be of considerable use to collectors and scholars of the American Left. Beginning in 1926, under the guidance of pioneering president Evelyn Shrifte–one of the first American women to head a major publishing house–Vanguard published work by such first-rank leftist writers as John Reed, Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell and Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), as well as much important proletarian fiction by lesser-known writers. Vanguard survived the Depression and the Cold War, but by the 1950s they had abandoned their radical political agenda to publish such major mainstream authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Saul Bellow. Vanguard was sold to Random House in 1985 (primarily, one supposes, for the valuable Dr. Seuss properties); the archives of the press are now held at Columbia University.

Though we're aware that these are later days, we would be grateful for any personal reminiscences of former employees of the press, especially from those who had contact with Shrifte or her co-editor James Henle. We are particularly interested in the role Shrifte and Henle played in advancing the cause of proletarian literature during the Depression, and in the pressures that forced them eventually to move away from their radical roots into mainstream publishing.