Two Publishing Companies: Aunt Lute and Random House Children

This is a grad school paper I wrote in 2009. The links to the two publisher’s mission statements are up to date.

The front window at In Other Words, a feminist bookstore and community center that sold books published by Aunt Lute.

Aunt Lute is the small publishing company I have chosen to research, and Random House Children’s Books is the large one. The two companies, while in basically the same industry, are extremely different. Reading up on them, combined with doing regular volunteer work for nonprofit organizations, has convinced me I’d rather work for an organization like Aunt Lute.

Aunt Lute Books is a not-for-profit intersectional feminist book publisher dedicated to women writers who don’t get much attention elsewhere, particularly minority women. You can still read their mission statement here:

https://www.auntlute.com/about-us

In 1978, a publishing company called Spinsters Ink opened business. In 1982 Sherry Thomas took over the company and moved it from the state of New York all the way to San Francisco, and in the same year Barb Wieser and Joan Pinkvoss founded Aunt Lute in Iowa. In 1986, Aunt Lute ended up in San Francisco also, and the two merged, resulting in a company called Spinsters/Aunt Lute. They split up and the Aunt Lute Foundation started in 1990, while Spinsters Ink moved to Minneapolis (Altbach, p. 134).