Daniel Akst C’78 has written a number of articles for the Gazette (see “Why We Choose What We Choose” in this issue’s “Gazetteer” for the latest example). We’ve also written about him as the author of We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess
[“A Shelf Full of Resolutions,” Jan|Feb 2011] and War by Other Means: How the Pacifists of WWII Changed America for Good [“Arts,” Jan|Feb 2023], evidence of his wide range of interests. He’s now branched out in a whole new direction.
Akst’s latest venture is as the founder and publisher of Tivoli Books (tivolibooks.com), which aims to put out an annual slate of five or six titles “unjustly forgotten” after first publication as well as new works “overlooked by mainstream publishers,” according to its website. Releases so far, all reissues, have included novels centering on an art-world provocateur, the farcical romance of a struggling poet and a “brainy and seductive food writer,” and a lawyer mixed up with a “hyperkinetic takeover artist.”
The last of these, The Comfort Letter, originally published in 1975, is by Arthur R. G. Solmssen L’53, a Penn Law alumnus who wrote several novels set in the world of old school Philadelphia law firms. Coming this fall are a new collection of essays from the critic Brooke Allen, Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading, and a republication of the “magical true story” Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon by Jim Paul, which first came out in 1991.
In a January 2025 post on Tivoli’s blog, Akst acknowledged that “sensible souls will question the fledgling publisher’s mental health.” But he countered that an abundance of “good material, old and new,” plus the availability of online platforms and tools that have “democratized the process of book publishing,” mean that “someone with strong tastes and varied talents can make a go of this at a reasonably high level.”
To which we say, Amen, and good luck. And note that Tivoli is “wide open to manuscript submissions.” —JP
