A million happy birthdays to Norton Stillman, publisher, book distributor, bookstore owner and friend to all, who’ll be honored four days before his 90th birthday at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 18, at the University Club, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul. The free program is part of the monthly Readings by Writers series hosted by Tim Nolan, who promises there will be birthday cake.
“It doesn’t seem possible I am 90. I don’t feel like it. My health is good,” Stillman said in a conversation from the Golden Valley home where he’s lived for 54 years with his sister Beverly. “I’m still kind of busy, doing things I did at 60 and 70.”
Ever the unassuming man, Stillman says Tuesday’s event is special because he didn’t want any other birthday parties and because he considers it an honor to be celebrated in the reading series started by his friend Carol Connolly, St. Paul poet laureate. Stillman’s Nodin Press published Connolly’s poetry collection “All This and More” in 2009.
Stillman, known for his calm demeanor and gentle smile, has been a quiet presence in the Twin Cities literary community for more than half a century. In his lifetime he has seen the Twin Cities transformed from flyover land to the vibrant literary community he helped build. Those efforts earned him the 1995 Minnesota Book Awards Kay Sexton Award for outstanding contributions to the local literary community.
In 1995, at the peak of his business career, Stillman owned two St. Paul stores — Micawber’s Books at Como and Carter and Books for Travel on Grand Avenue — as well as Minneapolis-based Nodin Press. He and Ned Waldman also owned the Bookmen, the largest book distributorships between Chicago and the West Coast. (Stillman and Waldman, who died in 2011, were cousins but considered themselves brothers because they were raised together. They were business partners for most of their adult lives.)
An indication of the affection Nodin Press writers have for Stillman is that 16 of them will read at his birthday celebration: Laurie Allman, Philip Bryant, Zach Czaia, Sharon Chmielarz, Emilio De Grazia, Norita Dittberner-Jax, Mary Moore Easter, Margaret Hasse, Janna Knittel, James Lenfestey, Freya Manfred, Michael Kiesow Moore, Tim Nolan, Joyce Sutphen, Cary Waterman and Morgan Grace Willow.
“When you work with a person on a book, it’s very personal to them,” Stillman says. “That’s why some of my closest friends are authors I published.”
Hasse, five of whose poetry books were published by Nodin Press, explains why writers are so devoted to Stillman.
“Little did I know when I first talked with Norton about publishing a book of my poetry that I would come to know him as a uniquely admirable person, and to love him as a dear friend,” she says.
“If I had to name just one of Norton’s qualities as a publisher, I’d say it’s the way he cultivates friendly relationships with his writers that endure over time. He’s truly interested in pleasing us, including with our book’s cover and design. Once he delivered a box of my newly minted books in person so the two of us could share the experience and excitement together. In a seemingly effortless way, with a modest manner, he reads widely and manages his business, stays in touch with friends and family, keeps up with local and world affairs, attends his writers’ readings as well as music, sports, and community events, volunteers as a gardener at his synagogue, and much more. He’s heroic! And he’s been doing many of these things for most of his 90 years!”
It began in grocery stores
A native of Minneapolis, Stillman is a graduate of Washburn High School and the University of Minnesota where he studied liberal arts and business because he thought he’d be going into his family’s food store operations. After he graduated in 1955, he was a nonfood buyer in the grocery business.
Within a few years Stillman and Waldman knew a lot of grocers and they started delivering books to ma-and-pa stores, working out of the trunks of their cars. Norton’s was an old 1960s Chevy with a very big trunk. That was the beginning of the Bookmen, named for their mothers, whose maiden name was Bookman.
By 1962 the partners were distributing books from a little mezzanine above the banana boxes at their uncle’s Minneapolis produce warehouse. Their business was so small that they once worked all night to make the space look bigger by building another stock room, filled with mostly empty boxes, so they could impress Target officials and get distribution rights. They got the account.
The Bookmen was eventually housed in a big Minneapolis warehouse where there was office space for Ned’s Waldman House Press, publisher of the classic “A Cup of Christmas Tea” and other books, and Stillman’s Nodin Press. Among beginning writers who found jobs as “book pickers” (order fulfillment) at the warehouse was award-winning Kate DiCamillo.
A bookstore and publishing
Micawber’s Bookstore came into Stillman’s life in 1972 because of a fruit delivery. He and Waldman were delivering apples and oranges to their customers when they saw a quaint building for rent in a quiet, tree-lined area in St. Anthony Park near the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus. Stillman thought the former post office building was a perfect bookstore setting. He named it Micawber’s because “the building looked sort of English and because we felt sort of Micawber-ish starting a store with little money.” (Micawber is a character with money troubles in Charles Dickens’ novel “David Copperfield.”)
In 2003, after 31 years of owning Micawber’s and making it a staple of the neighborhod, Stillman sold the store. The Bookmen was also sold and is no longer in business.
Stillman said at the time that he wanted to enjoy himself and concentrate on Nodin Press, which he bought in 1967 from American Indian scholar and critic Gerald Vizenor. Stillman kept the Nodin Press name, which means “wind” in Ojibwe, because his younger brother couldn’t say “Norton” and substituted “Nodin.”
One of Nodin Press’ first books was “25 Minnesota Poets,” an anthology that included Robert Bly, Alvin Greenberg, Phebe Hanson, Tom McGrath, Philip Dacey and Patricia Hampl and James Moore, who were among founders of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
Since then Nodin Press has brought out more than 400 books, including poetry, nature, sports and history. Stillman is especially pleased that two of his books are finalists for 2023 Minnesota Book Awards: Mary Moore Easter’s memoir “The Way She Wants to Get There” and Janna Knittel’s poetry collection “Real Work.”
“Some years I had one book nominated but never two,” Stillman says. “I publish four poets a year, most well-known, but I always submit to the Book Awards one like Janna, who hasn’t been published before.”
Stillman moved Nodin Press to his home when Covid struck, although he keeps a small office in Columbia Heights for meetings and receiving mail. But he isn’t slowing down as a publisher. Among forthcoming books are a poetry collection from Freya Manfred and a biography of Archie Bush, a 3M executive who used part of his fortune to establish the Bush Foundation.
In anticipation of Stillman’s birthday celebration, we asked for his thoughts on turning 90. His answer: “It’s good to keep going.”
