“It’s not from a personal predilection,” she tells me. She may be a publisher of sex books, but she cautions against reading too much into that. Her office is painted a vivid red, and she sits behind an imposing wooden desk. Schmidt, the mother of two young children, is tall and trim, with a blond bob and a very direct manner. The floor of the waiting area is covered with a white shag rug. (Quiver, in a soap-operatic twist, recently moved into the same complex.) The first thing that strikes you when you step into Hollan’s headquarters is a peculiar spa scent, with notes of lavender and mint. Today, the company is located in a decidedly unsexy office park in Beverly. “We saw an opportunity to combine our strengths,” says Schmidt, who’s been in nonfiction publishing for more than 13 years, “and take over this category.”įor the first three months of its existence, Hollan Publishing operated out of Penn’s Gloucester studio. There’s a market, they’re convinced, that’s too grown-up for Maxim and Cosmo, too modern for the line drawings and excessive body hair in The Joy of Sex, too smart to be talked down to in a sorority-girl manner. They’re leaving behind the books that send readers like my friends into fits of giggles, that people shy away from buying in public. Ravenous will focus on producing what Schmidt and Penn see as the next wave in erotica. That company, Hollan Publishing, will release its first sex books next month under an imprint mischievously named Ravenous (which also happens to be the title of a book the two of them worked on before leaving Quiver). Last fall Schmidt and her business partner, photographer Allan Penn, split from their old firm to head up a publishing company of their own. And Schmidt should know: She used to run the publishing division that put out Position Sex and The Art of the Quickie-an imprint called Quiver, part of the Beverly-based Quayside Publishing Group. Its cofounder, Holly Schmidt, is certain there’s room for a different kind of sex book, one more sensual and alluring than the books that so shocked my group. And now a new North Shore company has come up with a plan to dominate this zesty market. “People do not seriously buy books like this.” “You must be kidding me!” my friend Claire exclaimed. Plus, the models were making these faces that…that…I don’t know, just weren’t the sort of thing we expect to see at our book club. Never mind spontaneously combusting showers: These books featured full-on, full-color pictures of sexual positions like the “randy roulette” and the “lap of luxury,” alongside graphic paragraphs of how-to explanation. If any of us was curious to know how those two volumes happened to come into her possession, no one was brave enough to ask. So nobody knew quite what to do when Chloe, an especially outgoing member of our group, thought it would be funny to pass around Position Sex and The Art of the Quickie earlier this year. “I was just hoping the person next to me wasn’t reading over my shoulder.” We nodded in sympathy as we sipped our tea and crunched our sugar cookies. “I was so embarrassed to be reading it on the T,” my roommate said after that. The most scandalous book we’ve ever discussed is Like Water for Chocolate, which features a scene in which a woman’s loins burn so hot they set a shower stall on fire. We tend to lean more toward the bestselling travel journals and highbrow mysteries you find spread out on the table at the front of the bookstore, with a little Shopaholic thrown in during the beach-going months. We’re not exactly the bodice-ripper types in our book club. This River Quiver comes with the Quick Release Mounts already installed on the unit.ĭesigned to fit two fly rods for you and your best fishing partner, or whoever is paying for gas and beer that day.Publishing entrepreneurs Holly Schmidt and Allan Penn are betting there’s an untapped market for sex books that appeal to the kinds of brainy readers who don’t normally buy sex books. The River Quiver 2-Banger is a premium rooftop fly rod holder designed to be light, durable, and incredibly secure.
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