She Built Her Business From the Ground Up

The books that Ann E. Gray publishes bring a rush of deja vu because her images are already part of our visual and cultural landscape--though we’ve never seen them framed quite so poetically before.

There’s “Vacant Eden,” which captures the surreal beauty of half-abandoned desert motels. “Bullocks Wilshire,” a history of the defunct grand dowager of Los Angeles department stores. And “Hollywood Bowl: Tales of Summer Nights,” stuffed with essays, architectural plans and photos spanning the history of the outdoor musical mecca.

In June, Gray’s 3-year-old Balcony Press will publish its sixth art and architecture book--”The Last Remaining Seats: Movie Palaces of Tinseltown”--a photographic homage to the brass doors, marble floors, gold-leafed ceilings, crystal chandeliers and Beaux Arts statues of the city’s celebrated movie palaces.

Ironically, many of the books published by Balcony Press were turned down by the big New York houses as “too regional,” a fact that observers say only highlights the opportunities that exist today in niche publishing.

“The L.A. market [the nation’s largest] is hungering for more material about where they live and what’s happened in the past, and that’s something that Ann does really well,” says Michael Dawson, owner of Dawson’s Bookshop in Larchmont Village, which specializes in rare, out-of-print and Southern California history books.

“She has a real feeling for regional history, and her books tap a nostalgic vein. Plus they’re beautifully designed and printed and published at prices that are competitive.”

Balcony Press reflects the personal aesthetics and interests of Gray, a 39-year-old architect-turned-publisher who runs her one-woman business out of her home on a tree-lined street in Silver Lake.

Sitting in her 9-foot-by-13-foot office, surrounded by books that span the spectrum of Los Angeles arts, history and culture, Gray ruminates on the path that led her to quit a lucrative and challenging architectural job to launch a small and quirky publishing house in an era when the entire industry is in nervous flux.

Gray grew up in Fresno and earned a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and a master’s in architecture, both from UCLA. She worked in architecture for 20 years, the last eight as head studio architect for Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.

During her time there, Paramount built several sound stages, office buildings and parking structures. Then Viacom bought Paramount and slashed capital spending.

“It had been so much fun that it was hard to imagine going in and not having the continuing challenge of major projects,” Gray says.

Inspired by her husband, Peter Shamray, 38, an entrepreneur who owns Navigator Press in Pasadena, Gray took a class from the American Book Assn. that walked her through publishing, from designing book covers to drawing up contracts and finding a distributor.

She also bought computer software for drawing up a business plan, but never even fired it up. “It’s such a major, major guess, and it looks so silly on paper,” she says.

Using $60,000 in savings she had squirreled away as an architect, Gray took the plunge in 1994 and formed Balcony Press. Shamray signed on to help on the manufacturing end doing pre-press work.

“I always knew I wanted to go into publishing,” Gray says. “I have a list of five to 10 fantasy occupations and that was one of them.”

*

Gray figured she had enough to put out two to three books before either going bankrupt or turning a profit. So she sent a press release to the newsletter of the Society of Architectural Historians, announcing the formation of Balcony Press and inviting authors to submit manuscripts.

She got only one reply. Luckily for her, it an 800-page draft of “Los Angeles, the End of the Rainbow,” a history of Los Angeles housing styles by Merry Ovnick that started with Native American tule grass dwellings and ended with the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

It would become Balcony Press’ inaugural offering and an instant classic.

Architectural historian Robert Winter compared it to an earlier classic, Carey McWilliams’ “Southern California: An Island on the Land.” Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jack Miles said the book was “delightful and informative” in analyzing “the archeology of the city’s crazy dreams.”

The original press run of 2,000 copies sold out in nine months and convinced Gray that there was a market for what she was selling. These days, she prints between 3,000 and 5,000 copies and usually goes on to a second printing. Because of her low overhead, she is able to make a small profit as early as the first run, unlike big publishers, who need to sell 10,000 or more copies to recoup expenses.

Many of Balcony’s books--which are often joint efforts by photographers, essayists and graphic artists--have been turned down by corporate giants like Abrams and HarperCollins. The movie palace book was rejected by Rizzoli, co-author Robert Berger says, who took the photos with partner Anne Conser.

“They said it was too regional,” Berger recalls, “but we were thinking that Hollywood isn’t regional, it’s world renowned. So we breathed a sigh of relief when Balcony Press said they’d put it out.”

“I don’t know what’s regional about Hollywood movie palaces,” huffs Gray. “I guess they think it’s a community instead of a state of mind.”

Balcony’s biggest success so far has been the “Bullocks Wilshire” book, which won a Western Book Assn. award for its graphic design.

“It’s so rare when a book, especially one as visual as this, matches your artistic vision, much less exceeds it,” says author Margaret Leslie Davis, a great fan. “But Ann delivered a book exceeding what a Simon & Schuster could do.”

Paddy Calistro, who runs Angel City Press, another L.A.-based small publishing house that specializes in quirky, nostalgic gift books, says Gray succeeds because she brings an architect’s eye to her projects.

“She recognizes the historical significance of places that are unique to L.A.,” Calistro says. “The large houses are only doing bestsellers, but people want more than Michael Crichton, and that’s why we flourish, because we bring variety to the marketplace.”

*

Gray now receives about 40 manuscripts a year, many referred from friends, business contacts and her own peregrinations through the Southwest. While on her honeymoon in Santa Fe, N.M., for instance, Gray and her husband visited a gallery and saw an exhibit of landscape photos of Georgia O’Keeffe’s home, Ghost Ranch.

“The photographers, who had worked on the project for six years and had no idea I was a publisher, mentioned that their dream was to do a book, and my husband and I turned to each other and smiled,” Gray recalls.

The result: “Ghost Ranch,” to be published this fall in conjunction with an exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum of Art that will then travel the country, creating a built-in market for the book.

Gray scrutinizes projects carefully before signing on. First, they have to blow her away. Then, they have to be of wide enough interest that the general public, as well as architects, will buy them. Third, they have to stick to her general themes--art and architecture, heavy on the visuals and oriented toward the Southwest.

“I’m just as interested in the cultural aspects of architecture, in what is happening in society that allows these events to occur,” Gray explains.

Because of her architectural connections, Gray can get her books reviewed in specialty journals, sold at events and displayed in local bookstores, although she is also carried in national chains such as Barnes & Noble. And she can count on a coterie of fiercely devoted fans to buy them.

“She is publishing things that otherwise would remain in obscure archives and inaccessible to the general public,” says Natalie Shivers, an architect who is using Balcony books in her research on the Early Modern movement in Southern California. “It’s an enormous contribution to the study of American culture.”

Adds Linda Delvac, director of preservation issues at the Los Angeles Conservatory: “It’s a wonderful combination to have someone educating the public who has such a strong sense of design, architecture and history. She’s providing a service for Los Angeles.”

Delvac adds that the conservancy plans to sell Balcony’s movie palace book at its film series, “Last Remaining Seats,” which screens classic films in historic theaters for five Wednesdays starting in June.

Thanks to cross-promotional tie-ins such as that, Gray, who lost money her first year, posted a modest profit her second year and a “healthy” one last year--she doesn’t want to give specifics, except to say that she’s still not making as much as she did at Paramount.

She plows all her profits back into the company, which continues to grow. Gray recently expanded into her garage, where she does all her shipping. She stores pallets of inventory at her husband’s print shop. And she works 40-hour-plus weeks on evenings, early mornings and weekends, sandwiched around the schedule of her daughter, Abby, 2, which Gray says suits her psyche better than 9 to 5 anyway.

And business is booming. Balcony Press’ books are distributed throughout the United States and Europe, and Gray is searching for a Japanese distributor.

“I freelance everything. It’s a sort of virtual corporation,” Gray says. “This is actually the perfect life.”