An Anniversary for Black Dome Press

By Terry Schwadron

CATSKILL — There will be no parades, but a local cultural landmark company is marking its 35th year.

Black Dome Press, which has produced a stream of cloth and paperback books highlighting the Hudson Valley's rich history and its bountiful outdoor offerings, is marking the year by publishing four new books and rearranging its backlist of publications to offer them anew. They include a mix of nonfiction that trace regional ties to the French and Indian wars, to the prevalence of slavery here until the 1830s, to guides to kayaking and to the waterfalls of the area.

For publisher Steve Hoare of Catskill, it is editing and book design work he's been at since 1993, three years after Deborah Allen started Black Dome in her Hensonville home. Hoare, who grew up in this area, returned after trying a variety of jobs elsewhere and started working part-time for Black Dome and other publishers, as well as for an advertising and real estate agencies, and even restaurants.

An English student, he became editor for Black Dome, and bought the company in 2011. He had tried his own hand at writing screenplays, poetry and radio ads, but found he enjoyed working with writers who knew the local history but might have needed some help in turning their research into coherent storytelling.

In the mid 1990s, the Catskill Mountain Quilters Hall of Fame got some grant money to honor local quilting efforts and turned to Hoare to write "The Unbroken Thread: A History of Quiltmaking in the Catskills." It was the first illustrated history of the art of quilt making from colonial times forward in Ulster, Delaware, Greene, Sullivan and Schoharie Counties.

Many publishers develop a specialty, he explains. For Hoare, that is anything that tells the story of how the Hudson River Valley came to blossom. Doing so distinguishes Black Dome and provides a way for readers to connect in a direct way with its local history and nature.

So, books like "Bloody Mohawk, The French and Indian War and American Revolution on New York's Frontier," seemed more than important. It gave author Richard Berleth a chance to connect a distant point in history with local sites. It has proved to be his best-selling book, with more than 30,000 in circulation over 16 years. "Readers learn that the Revolution in New York State was more than just the Battle of Saratoga, which they may have heard of. Not much has been written about what became a very bloody almost Civil War right in this region."

Even for someone born to the area, book editing -- from working with authors to the detailed work to ready text, images and design -- has made him more aware of regional history. His biggest discovery was the prevalence of slaveholding in New York, a practice that continued legally until 1848, detailed in two of his published books.

Black Dome's "In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York's Hudson River Valley, 1735-1831" allowed historians Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini to share advertising from old newspapers that showed 523 notices placed by Hudson Valley slaveholders offering rewards for the return of escaped slaves, a practice dating back to pre-Revolutionary times. The book dramatically illustrated how widespread slavery was in New York State right up until a couple of decades before the Civil War. A second book called "Bearing Witness: Exploring the Legacy of Enslavement in Ulster County, New York" by a research team including Stessin-Cohn recounted stories of individuals from the period.

In "Elliott and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Story of a Father and His Daughter in the Gilded Age," the first published biography of Teddy Roosevelt’s brother Elliott, author Geraldine Hawkins tells about a special father-daughter relationship that may otherwise have gone untold or unpublished.

Balancing the historical offerings are multiple guidebooks to kayaking and waterfalls, made available through an online catalog, through online book distributors, local bookstores, pharmacies, and through local historical societies and sites including Olana and Upstate New York's military fort museums. This year's biggest effort -- the product of more than a decade of research -- is "From the Hudson to the Taconics: A Cultural and Ecological Field Guide to Columbia County, New York," which examines 36 discreet local natural habitats and includes hundreds of photographs, maps, charts and a heavy dose of both ecological and cultural research by the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program.

As a one-person business, Hoare might be as busy one day boxing books or finding another printer as well as wrestling with language usage.

Though Hoare says he may slow Black Dome new publications as he considers semi-retirement, he also is seeking with a handful of other localized publishers to create a Catskills Association of Publishers to share outlook and ideas on books and trends in publishing.