Our private books are each intended to reach a specific and/or limited audience, typically via noncommercial channels. Usually that audience is identified by the book’s author or sponsor who may distribute the lion’s share of the edition. Nonetheless, some private books reach beyond their initial audience to gain wider circulation and broad public attention. However small a private edition may be, Posterity Press and our associates — editors, designers and printers — pride ourselves on making excellent books in terms of both literary content and physical form. Our private books are edited, designed and printed to as high a standard as our trade books; some of them even to a higher standard such as the elegant volumes printed in letterpress and presented in an embossed slipcase.

PPI’s first "private" title was My Journey, Recollections of the First Seventy Years by Helen Patton Wright, a Washington native and accomplished lady of parts. (During World War II she worked at the American Embassy in London, survived the blitz and married J. Skelly Wright, who became a distinguished federal judge. They raised a son and she became a model of the "volunteer" as she rose to serve on the board of the National Cathedral Association and chair the National Mental Health Association.) Our latest private book, published in 2000, is the second of two volumes of A Carolina-Virginia Genealogy by Minerva Wilson Andrews, a retired attorney and past president of the National Society of Arts and Letters. A book still in the works is George Gardner Herrick’s Ten Years on Roque Island, a natural history and management log that will certainly please its private audience of the island’s extended family and may find a public readership among devotees of Maine islands and life in New England.

PPI’s back list includes volumes of memoirs that are confidential and cannot be described here. However, the publisher is willing and eager to provide references to potential new authors and sponsors who are seriously interested. For more information, please email us at Private_Publishing@posteritypress.com.