Tuttle's tales of tantalizing literary trials and triumphs
By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-23 09:23
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The story of how Tuttle - a Tokyo-headquartered pan-Asian publisher of some of the finest pictorial books on Asian history, language and culture - got the exclusive rights to all of martial arts legend Bruce Lee's works, is touching.
"We were one of the very first to publish books about martial arts back in the 1950s and 1960s," says Tuttle's publisher and CEO, Eric Oey, who managed an e-mail interview for China Daily, in between flying across continents. Tuttle has offices in Singapore, Jakarta, Petaling Jaya in Malaysia and North Clarendon in the United States, which keeps its hyperactive CEO on his toes.
"We were approached by his widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, to publish Bruce Lee's works when she found out (soon after Lee's death) that most of the martial arts books in Lee's personal library were published by Tuttle."
Today it is one of the most prolific publishers of martial arts books, whose list includes exotic and highly-specialized martial art forms like kempo (a combination of karate, judo and aikijujutsu) and Wing Chun (a form suitable for close-range combat, based on balance and body structure, in which the person better aligned to the ground wins). Tuttle also publishes an eye-catching range of books on architecture, art, gardening, food, Asian business strategy, games and crafts, Asian classics in translation, health, beauty and wellness.
They publish around 150 titles a year, claiming to be the largest English-language publisher on Asian subjects. While the company's target readership is primarily the non-Asian interested in Asia, its market is steadily expanding.
"Young Asians too are becoming interested in learning more about their own cultures and history," Oey says. At a time when the Internet has become the omniscient repository of all one might want to know, "people still keep coming back to books when they want real information", he says.
And the good news is that books - however lavish, thoroughly-researched and painstakingly-executed they may be - cost pretty much "the same as they did 30 or 40 years ago", Oey says.
At the top of the sales charts are Tuttle's exhaustive assortment of language manuals, dictionaries, travel guides and maps. The key to holding one's own in these competitive genres, Oey says, lies in "being able to find the best authors, understand what readers really want and need from our books, and then working together with the author to make sure that this information is provided".
Books by Laurence J Brahm, for instance, have been very successful, he says. Brahm (The Art of the Deal in China and Doing Business in China the Sun Tzu Way) is a Beijing-based political economist and lawyer who has spent his entire career involved with China, specializing in structuring and negotiating investments on behalf of multinationals.
Author Bruce Dover (Rupert Murdoch's China Adventures) was in charge of News Corp's business development in China from 1992 to 1998. Boye Lafayette De Mente (The Chinese Mind: Understanding Traditional Chinese Beliefs and Their Influence on Contemporary Culture) is an acknowledged authority on Asia and the author of more than 50 books.
It's Tuttle's ever-expanding spectrum of "university-educated", discerning readers who appreciate the effort to get the best in the business to write for them that makes them come back for more, Oey adds.