Talk:Something Else Press

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Jan Herman's response

It is bad manners to speak ill of the dead, but a few factual corrections are necessary.

Dick hired me to be the editor of Something Else Press, not the publisher. It was never my understanding that I was hired to raise funds. The dates of my tenure were September 1972 - November 1974. During that time Dick owned the company. He hired a business manager of his own choice, without consulting me. He also fired him, without consulting me. He remained the de facto publisher until the end, financing books he wanted SEP to publish and choosing not to finance others.

There were several reasons for the company's collapse. The main one, however, as I understood it at the time, was that the Internal Revenue Service came after Dick for back taxes it claimed he owed, due to his filing the company's losses for the previous 10 years on his personal income tax. He told me the IRS wanted a sum that staggered him: $300,000.

The company, I discovered on its collapse, was a "Subchapter S corporation." This means shareholders take the company's profits or losses on their personal income tax. So Dick did nothing wrong in that. But if a Subchapter S corporation does not show a profit over a period of years -- as was the case with Something Else Press from its inception -- the IRS may deem the company a hobby, thus depriving it of its Subchapter S status and the shareholders of their tax entitlement.

I do not know whether Dick was the sole owner of Something Else Press, but I always believed so (until Emmett Williams, who preceded me as editor, told me Dick gave him 5% of the company stock as a "gift"). I also do not know how Dick settled the IRS claim, or whether he ultimately filed for bankruptcy as he told me he would. But I do know that he had lost interest in Something Else Press. He said he was too broke to keep it going, even while financing a new imprint to publish his own poetry. He offered me the company for $1 and professed shock when I turned him down. Given the company's huge liabilities, it was a ludicrous proposition. The sad truth is that the collapse of Something Else Press was Dick's responsibility far more than anyone else's.

-- Jan Herman