//About
The publishing house Ehrhorn-Hummerston is owned by the founders, Morten Ehrhorn and Justin Hummerston – an experi-
enced and creative team, who attach importance to a meticulous editing of the books we publish.
The same idealistic ambition applies to us as the majority of other small publishers: To discover exciting titles, which are translated in the same quantity as the large publishers.
Each year more than 10,000 book titles are published in Den-
mark; which means that someone like a bookworm must be alert when looking amongst bookshelves – because just as you have to see a film at the cinema before its run finishes, there are not many books that remain for a long time on the bookshops’ shel-
ves. This means that a great deal of books that are worth reading – particularly the so-called ‘narrow readership publications’ – do not reach the readers, because they quite simply do not manage to see them.
We also experience that the large publishing houses have be-
come less willing to take risks, as they have become more finan-cially pressured. The giants choose to focus more on commercial books – as well as definite bestsellers like, for instance, celebrity biographies, books about current issues or novels by the ‘big na-
mes’. Cultural, lyrical, historical and/or illustrated books are slowly but surely disappearing.
At the publishing house Ehrhorn-Hummerston it is not muscle power that is crucial. Our overheads are small, but the will to take chances and think differently is great. We are attempting to catch the best in the stream of these smaller quantity publications which the publishing companies no longer think there is a market for.
It is as if the key thing for a book’s value is how much it can sell. We believe that the large publishing companies are shooting themselves in the foot when they, by abandoning this so-called narrow readership literature, overlook quite special gems. Pre-
sumably they win financially in the short term, but in the long term it seems as though they lose ‘culture capital’. Our favourite genre is fiction, and art books with messages and content – there-
fore we live to create cultural capital; even if we know it will not necessarily provide financial profit.
Because we have fixed costs, we have the option to regulate our workforce, and we can therefore restrict ourselves to publishing those books we are really enthusiastic about and believe in.
Other than having published books with, among others, Kristian von Hornsleth, Knud Odde, Tal R and Christian Schmidt-Ras-
mussen, we have also published Denmark’s first Facebook book: ‘Hvad laver du lige nu?’ (‘What are you doing right now?’) by Eddie Michel Azoulay; and right now we are currently involved with a new coffee table book: ‘An Icon in Jewellery Design – Trollbeads’.