I can say without hesitation that John Martin was the single biggest influence in my life.
Not because he published Bukowski—though that was the start—but because of what he built: The Black Sparrow Press. A press with vision, with guts…and a whole lotta style. The first BSP book I ever held was Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, and I bought it minutes after walking out of the movie theater where I’d just seen Barfly.
I didn’t know who Charles Bukowski was. I just knew I liked the movie. And then there it was: a book in bright orange wraps with a title that looked like it had been pulled out of who-knows-where. I didn’t know yet that this book actually collected three of Bukowski’s earlier volumes. I didn’t know it would become, in my opinion, the best single-volume entry point into his poetry. All I knew was: I needed that book.
And then I devoured it.
I didn’t know yet that I was stepping into a whole universe—one built not just by Bukowski, but by a publisher with vision who had a designer with an eye for the extraordinary. And when I got to the end—to the colophon page—something happened. I had never even heard the word colophon. But there it was. Martin’s voice. His care. His note about the design, the typography, the printer, the limitations. It was the first time I realized a book is a made thing—not just a container for content, but a piece of art, crafted start to finish.
Of course, none of those Black Sparrow books would’ve looked or felt the way they did without Barbara Martin, John’s wife and the designer behind the press’s entire visual identity—those were hers. Her aesthetic became Black Sparrow’s signature, and it left a mark on every one of us who ever judged a book by its cover. Who can’t spot a BSP title from a mile away?
And while it would’ve been easy—maybe even profitable—to stick with “sure things” like Bukowski or Fante, John Martin did something braver. He took real financial risks on writers who had little-to-no audience at all: Curtis Zahn, Jack Anderson, Fielding Dawson, John Thomas, Ron Loewinsohn, Michael Gizzi—names few remember, but whose voices were preserved because Martin believed in them. That’s where his heroism lies. That’s what made Black Sparrow more than just another “indie” press.
Bukowski got me to the Beats, to the little mags and Marvin Malone and Gypsy Loy & Jon Webb. Hal Norse. Jack Micheline. Johnny Brewton and his work, too! The Beats got me to “academic” literature, for lack of a better term. And John Martin’s colophons—those little back-page meditations—led me, ultimately, to the founding of the synaesthesia press.
How about that?
All because I walked into a movie theater to see a Mickey Rourke flick. All because I grabbed a book in bright-orange wraps.
Rest in peace, John. And stay strong, Barbara. You made books that mean something. You built a life on championing voices most publishers wouldn’t touch. You made literature cool. And for at least one young man walking out of a movie theater and into the buzz of a mid-1980’s, new-and-used bookstore (when bookstores really buzzed), you changed everything.
Thank you.
