PubWest Announces 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award Goes to Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint Press

(Lake Oswego, OR)—PubWest, the leading trade association of small- and medium-sized book publishers, has awarded its 2013 Jack D. Rittenhouse Award to Jack Shoemaker, Co-founder, Editorial Director and Vice President of Counterpoint Press. The PubWest Board of Directors selected Shoemaker in recognition of his extraordinary career and how his lifetime of work has shaped and inspired the book publishing community.
PubWest Board President Dave Trendler said, “The Jack D. Rittenhouse Award was established in 1990 as a way to thank and honor those who have made a real contribution to the Western community of the book. Today, the Rittenhouse Award is truly a lifetime achievement award for those who have made long-lasting contributions to how books are made and sold. I'm truly pleased to welcome him into the company of Rittenhouse Award recipients.”

Shoemaker will accept the Rittenhouse Award during PubWest 2013 scheduled for November 7-9 at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Jack Shoemaker began his literary career as a bookseller in 1963 in Santa Barbara, California. Over the next forty years he owned or managed a number of important literary bookshops, and established several small fine presses.

From 1974 to 1978, Mr. Shoemaker served on the Literature Panel of the National Endowment of the Arts, his last eighteen months as that panel’s chairman. In 1979, Mr. Shoemaker co-founded North Point Press with William Turnbull and served as the company’s editor-in-chief. North Point books and authors won many awards, including MacArthur Fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 1981 he won the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing.

When North Point closed in 1991, Mr. Shoemaker’s served as West Coast editor of the Knopf Publishing Group. Mr. Shoemaker left Pantheon to join Frank H. Pearl in founding Counterpoint Press in 1994 in Washington, D.C. In 2003 Mr. Shoemaker joined the Avalon Publishing Group to establish Shoemaker & Hoard.