You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Good afternoon.

This is Bookworm, and this is Michael Silverblatt to talk about books, writers, publishers

in California and outside.

A thing we'll be beginning to do every Thursday afternoon at 2.

And today in the studio with me, I have Douglas Mezzerly, the editor-in-chief of a small press, Sun and Moon,

that has recently won the prestigious Carrie Thomas Award.

This award is given yearly for the most imaginative publishing venture of the year.

He won it for the year in 1987 with an extremely innovative series of

contemporary American fiction. We're going to begin by talking to John F. Baker, editor-in-chief of

Publishers Weekly, which is the entity that sponsors the yearly award. And I think I have John Baker here.

Hello, Mr. Baker. Hello. Hi. Can you tell me the Cary Thomas Award, what is the criterion for which a

publishing project qualifies?

Well, we figured at Publishers Weekly that there are so many awards for writers,

or even some for editors, but there's absolutely nothing for the publishing act itself.

So the idea behind this was to reward publishers that seem to have gone out of their way to do a particularly fine job in one way or another. It could either be an individual book or a series of books,

but the project had to show great imagination, care beyond the normal, beyond just ordinary commercial considerations.

There had to be a real act of pride and imagination in the preparation and execution of the project.

That's the whole idea.

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