Josh O'Neill of Beehive Books
Beehive Books is a Philadelphia-based publisher and collective that creates lavishly illustrated books among a host of other artistic endeavors. Josh O'Neill is one of the cofounders, in charge of the publishing aspects of Beehive, and one of the most passionate and inspiring book creators creating small press books today. Many of you will recognize them from their illuminated editions series where they have reimagined classics like The Great Gatsby, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio along with titles like The Willows and Other Nightmares, Voyage to Arcturus, and The Blazing World. We are delighted to get to share this conversation with Josh and hope that you will all get to experience their wonderful books, they are truly special!
Q: We have been going back and forth for some time now and it is good to finally get to have this chat. Can you share a little bit about your journey with the creation of Beehive Books? What were some of the most memorable stages in the development of the imprint and how have things changed over the last decade for you?
Hello Zach! Thanks for inviting us to participate in this series. Maëlle is currently on a sabbatical year finishing her graphic novel, so all the questions will be answered by me in this interview.
I originally founded Beehive in 2016, after closing Locust Moon, a bookstore and small press that I co-founded with a collective here in Philadelphia. Very shortly after launching the press, I partnered with Maëlle, and Beehive was borne out of the collaboration between the two of us and a couple dozen authors, artists, writers and designers.
We always envisioned Beehive as an exercise in possibility – a publisher of improbable books and objects, things made for a small or select audience, that don’t fit cleanly into the slots and categories of the book trade, or of markets in general. We want to make singular, sui generis publications, labors of love. Work that explores the boundaries of what you can do in print.
Q: There is such a breadth to what Beehive does, it’s clear you don’t shy away from trying new things! You have shared before that you named the imprint Beehive Books because you see it as a collective endeavor between the creator and those who engage with the created work, a hive so to speak. How do you see this intentional connection playing out in the way that you go about choosing what you will publish and the way you operate as an imprint?
I think it speaks to how we see books, and creative projects in general: as communal, social undertakings, as collaborative projects, as part of an ongoing cultural exchange.
A book doesn’t quite exist unless it has a readership – even if that readership is only one person. An author can’t exist without her influences, her support network, and the things and people that shaped her imagination. A publisher cannot exist in a sustainable form without a community of readers and supporters.
So, we consider our readership to be a creative force – our publishing imprint and the directions it’s able to travel, the authors we’re able to support, and the work we’re able to do, are all driven first and foremost by that readership. Their curiosities, their passions, their generosity, their desires – these are the engine of what we do. This is equally true for all publishers, but I like to think we’re unusually explicit about it.
Our name is a reminder that there’s no ivory tower here, no fetishized brand, no lone auteur – every edition springs from a tangled web of worlds and circumstances, the work of many human hands and minds. The sweet and vivid products of a healthy, humming hive.
Q: The two of you have worked together in partnership with you handling writing and editing, while Maëlle led the artistic and design aspects of Beehive. How have you found that collaborative nature of running the company to be additive to what you are doing and have there been any unique challenges working together while in different locations?
Maëlle and I have always had a wonderfully complementary relationship – in that, we both have strengths in some areas where the other person is weak, but also in that we’re close friends who have a shared sensibility. The Beehive aesthetic, which is not something that we devised but sort of something that emerged from our collaboration over time, is very much a manifestation of the tastes and curiosities we share.
Maëlle is just extraordinarily brilliant and talented – I’m always striving to live up to how much she brings to the table creatively and intellectually.
We have always been based in different cities, so while there are a lot of challenges that come from that, it’s the only way we’ve ever known, so we’re very accustomed to it at this point. We have folks working with us in London, China, Turkey, Switzerland, Australia…everywhere really.
Q: Many of our readers will have experience with your illuminated editions, heavily art-driven and stylistic creations of well-known literary works like Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby, Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, and the most recent release, Pinocchio. How did this particular series start and what do you hope your new editions will bring to titles with such a rich history as these?
It started, for me, with my grandmother. She had a collection of antiquarian illustrated fiction, which she had inherited from her father – mostly books published in the second half of the 19th century, many published locally in Philadelphia, where both she and Beehive Books are from. Those books spellbound me when I was young – they seemed like artifacts from a stranger and more vibrant world – and the art by Rackham and Dore and Beardsley and Kent and countless others were a source of deep fascination for me before I could even read the texts they were accompanying.
As I got older, I began to collect books like this myself, and wondered what happened to this era of book publishing – why is there so little illustrated fiction for adults? What is the bias against images in mainstream publishing? We all begin our lives as readers with illustrated books, with art books, with drawings. Why are we expected to move away from a medium that is so beautiful, powerful and versatile?
So, our Illuminated Editions series is, like all our books, an attempt to create something we want to see in the world. We’re not recreating the antiquarian books I loved on my grandmother’s shelves – we’re picking up where they left off, in a contemporary mode. The Illuminated Editions aesthetic is almost anti-antiquarian, in a way, in that the books are very sleek and modern – but inspired by the craft, design, artwork and vision that went into the gift books of a century or two ago.
It’s become a sort of flagship series for us, and it’s nice to see how much it’s resonated with readers.
Q: The scope of what you do at Beehive Books goes well beyond the illuminated editions into comics, art books, tapestries, and more. Is this just a menu of all the things you enjoy and intended to do from the beginning or were some of these areas more spontaneous endeavors that evolved from something you were already doing?
All we do is follow our own impulses and desires, really. We have faith that our taste will align with some portions of our readership, or new readerships we can go out and find. We publish the books that we want on our own shelves.
Things arise unexpectedly. The series of woven blankets we released were an impromptu project when the pandemic supply chain collapse made book publishing almost impossible for a little while. We never specifically intended to publish tarot decks, but when Kevin Jay Stanton showed us his beautiful Botanica paintings we couldn’t resist. Now tarot decks and blankets are some of our most beloved products.
I’ve always felt that by following our own desires, curiosities and impulses we can keep the work alive, engaged, growing and changing. If we can keep ourselves interested, our readership may stay interested too.
Q: With your productions being even more art-centered than the average small press book, it is clear you have a high value on this aspect of your projects. Why is keeping art at the center of everything you do so important and how do you try and get a variety of perspectives through your collaborations?
It really boils down to the fact that we love art, illustration, and design – and that there are only so many publishers that produce beautiful books celebrating these things. We’re just trying to fill the gaps in our own bookshelves.
I think I have a special love of the alchemy that happens when mediums of art and storytelling overlap. I grew up loving comics for how they combine illustration, narrative, storytelling and design into this wonderfully hybridized, novel form of storytelling. I hope that many of our books take the ethic of comics and cartooning, where printing, image-making and the nature of the physical object are all seen as vital to its meaning, into literary realms where those things are often taken for granted, or seen as secondary, only containers or decorations for the text.
We are above all a producer of printed matter – we’re interested in exploring the boundaries of what you can do in print. For that we need language, we need pictures, we need layouts, we need materials, we need bindings, we need technologies. And art, illustration, cartooning and design are at the core of our DNA as a publisher.
Q: Walk us through a day in the life of running a small press. How do you make sure you are moving forward with many different types of projects at various stages and is there anyone else on your team that helps make it happen? Have there been any major differences between what you expected and you experience?
The biggest challenge for me personally is the multiplicity of simultaneous projects. On any given day I may work on 12-15 different books, as we usually have dozens of projects underway at any given time. Just today, I’ve been coordinating the packing and shipping of our Pinocchio Kickstarter in our warehouse, working on getting The Inferno off to print, planning the Myths of Making marketing campaign, sourcing a manufacturer for a cloth bandana for our new Botanica oracle deck, dealing with budget overruns with two of our vendors on DRACULA, and looking at initial design decks for LAAB #3.
I’m writing this at half past noon, the day isn’t even halfway over. We’re very grateful for our wonderful managers of logistics and production Kit Anderson and Elaine Maulucci who do a lot of work to keep all these trains running on time.
The strategy I’ve had to learn – against my own natural inclinations – is to value forward motion above all else. The most vital part of my job is to keep a bird’s eye view on everything, looking out for where the blocks and stoppages and dangers are. That bit of the job doesn’t come naturally – I’m more of a deep-dive person in my soul, and I like to immerse into projects. I try to block out full days or half days for individual projects whenever I can. But the nature of the beast is that in my position you have to keep a 10,000-foot view at all times, even when you’re looking at proofs with a jeweler’s loupe.
Q: We are obviously firmly planted in the collectible book world and we get to see a lot of different presses that sell books at different price points. You seem to be able to bring beautiful productions to your fans in an affordable range when considering everything that goes into these projects. What allows you to continue to produce new books at reasonable price points?
Well, to be totally honest, that’s getting harder and harder. The prices of everything keep going up, from paper to glue to fuel to labor. We’ve managed to keep our prices steady since we launched the company eight years ago, which I’m proud of considering the inflation we’ve seen in the last few years. But it may not be sustainable in the long run.
There are two wolves in us – one loves beautiful things, high-end materials, artisanal craft, gorgeous design, astonishing treasures – and the other values accessibility, wants to share this wonderful work with everyone freely.
Even though Beehive has become something of a luxury book company, we try to keep our standard edition pricing at a place where you don’t have to be a wealthy book collector to afford it. We may have to adjust our prices up soon to keep up with inflation – so right now is a great time to add some Beehive pieces to your library!
Q: You have a really generous program with your illuminated editions where you make a certain number of copies available to libraries through an application process. What excites you about these books being made available to the public and are there any other areas within the company where you try to give back?
There’s not really an application process – we just donate books to any public library that requests one.
We love the books we produce more than anything, but Maëlle and I have genuinely mixed feelings about being makers of such exclusive productions. In our hearts and in our politics we’re democratic-minded, we care about accessibility and openness and sharing economies. A lot of the collectible book world runs on exclusivity and rarity, which is great in the sense that it creates economic models that allow us to pay artists a fair wage and produce these wonderful publications at a high caliber. But not great in the sense that we see art and books as things to be shared, not hoarded.
So, we try to create some mechanisms of accessibility wherever they fit into our business model. We have a pay-what-you-can policy on our digital editions – if anyone wants access to a digital edition of our books, they can just send us an email and we’ll send them a PDF. We are a business and we need to keep the bottom line in mind, but we try to keep generosity and openness in our publishing practices wherever we can, despite the many mandates of the marketplace.
Q: That’s an amazing perspective, particularly with the small margins that exist within this kind of publishing to begin with. If rights acquisition and price were not a barrier, what would be some of the top books/series you would like to give the Beehive Books treatment? Why do you think these would be good fits for your imprint?
Oh God, there are just too many to name. Shirley Jackson, who may be my personal favorite American author. The Lord of the Rings – there’s so much we’d love to do with Tolkien. Kafka, whose books are in the public domain, but whose English translations are not. Would love to do We’ve Always Lived in the Castle. Vonnegut. Cormac McCarthy and Jennifer Egan, if we get more contemporary. Toni Morrison, whew. Borges! Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baldwin, Nabokov. Don’t get me started. Just listing these off, my heart rate is increasing.
I think my favorite authors to take on with books like these are ones whose work is already very visual in a way that opens a door to artistic intervention – like Marquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald or H.G. Wells – or authors who are decidedly UN-visual, cerebral, in a way that leaves a big unknown about how to approach their work visually, like Kafka or Vonnegut or Joyce. A huge part of the fun of this series for us is to create our own weird bespoke canon of books that don’t automatically sit alongside each other. You might see The Great Gatsby with Crime and Punishment and you might see The Willows with The Island of Dr. Moreau, but you don’t expect to see all four as part of the same series. I think genre silos in literature are false and diminishing. To create categories that include elaborate fantasy novels, realist literary fiction, and 14th century Italian vernacular poetry is very pleasing to something in our sensibility.
Q: If there was one word or phrase that came to people’s minds when they think of Beehive Books, what would you hope that it would be?
Inventive? Curious? Implausible? Quixotic? Financially solvent, perhaps? Maybe just paper…
Sorry, that was a bunch of words. I guess “concise” is not going to be an option.
Q: What should we be looking forward to in the future from Beehive Books? We know that you are finishing up Pinocchio with art from Mike Mignola coming next, but are there any new books or areas of expansion that you can talk about for 2024 and beyond?
We’re just wrapping up an edition of THE INFERNO with Sophy Hollington, which we’re all incredibly excited about. We have some major projects with Ronald Wimberly, one of our core authors, which we can’t announce quite yet but I think is going to blow some minds. Illuminated Editions are on the way from artists including Julie Doucet, Lorenzo Mattotti, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Das Pastoras. Plus, another one from Yuko Shimizu! We’ve got the wonderful researcher and artist Justin Duerr working on a follow up to his TEMPLE OF SILENCE monograph about Herbert Crowley with a new tome about the great Sidney Sime. Violet Kitchen is working on a monograph about the Russian illustrator Boris Artzybasheff.
As always, too many books, too little time! Every purchase of a Beehive edition is a vote to put more objects like this into the world. Every little bit of funding grows our capacities, speeds our journey, broadens the scope of what we’re able to do as a publisher and producer. Endlessly grateful for folks like you, Zach, and all who have made our Hive buzz, and any readership out there that supports small presses and art projects of every sort – the countless legions of folks working to make something strange, something new, something that doesn’t exist, in defiance of a world that always seems to be attempting to hypnotize us with more of the same.
This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth between Zach and Josh and we are so grateful that Josh have of his very limited time to share with us. If you want to see more from Beehive Books you can check them out at their website and sign up to get periodic updates. You can also follow Beehive on Facebook and Instagram.
Interview by: Zach Harney, co-founder of the Collectible Book Vault
Congrats to the winners @sophie.breathes.books and Tracey Tell
Thank you everyone for joining in and supporting what we do!
Great interview! These are really striking. Wonderful design.
It's beyond impressive and heartwarming to read about the steps they take for accessibility and equality, both in terms of libraries and their pdf versions 💚 wonderful interview
I can’t wait to read Pinocchio. The Beehive edition looks great. Although I do not own A Voyage to Arcturus, the illustrations look very cool. I would love to see a Beehive version of Lord of the Rings!
A very insightful interview! Beehive consistently impresses me with their thoughtful and creative designs and selections. Making small press books beautiful, distinctive, and exciting is no small feat and truly showcases the Beehive team's passion. Well done and can't wait to see more from them in the future!