Mercury House (publishers)
Mercury House, a project of Words Given Wings Literary Arts Project, a 501 nonprofit corporation, is an independent literary publishing house based in San Francisco, California.
The press has published over 170 titles and is distributed by Small Press Distribution. Notable authors include Harold Brodkey, Carol Emshwiller, Shulamith Hareven, William Kittredge, and Leonard Michaels. Literary translations have included work from Alejo Carpentier, George Sand, Pierre Michon, Philippe Forest, and J. Rodolfo Wilcock. In addition, the press has published books of fiction, essay, poetry, and Holocaust and Environmental studies by David Meltzer, Dale Pendell, Philip Daughtry, and Lucille Eichengreen. The press also published a series of neglected literary classics by authors such as I.U. Tarchetti, Lewis Carroll, Henry Handel Richardson, and Horace Walpole. For several years Mercury House was the official publisher of the Nobel Prize Lecture and the National Society of Film Critics' annual compendium of reviews.
The press was founded in 1986 by William M. Brinton and Alev Croutier and granted nonprofit status in 1994. Governed by a Board of Directors and run by an Executive Director, the press has been funded by individual and corporate donations, and by grants from foundations including the California Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
