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--- Now more than 100 titles, still more coming. At R.A. Fountain we specialize in local, state, and regional topics and authors. Check this page often for the latest. --- To International Customers: We'll email shipping charges before processing. You can then cancel or confirm. We hope soon to post precise shipping charges automatically, calculated to individual countries. We appreciate your patience while we figure out the best way to bring eastern North Carolina's best homegrown talents to you, wherever you live on planet Earth. ---

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Leverett T. Smith, its founder, oversaw the production of exquisite books by people the mainstream tended to avoid. There were exceptions -- titles by Allan Gurganus and Reynolds Price, for example -- but these were most often limited editions. Smith's most important work as a publisher was in making public for the first time such exceptional books as Michael Rumaker's To Kill a Cardinal and the Rocky Mount outsider poet William Boyd's Poetic Penguins. But NCWC Press under Smith's guidance also brought back into print Rumaker's fine short story collection Gringos, Charles Boer's Olson in Connecticut, and Fielding Dawson's delightful The Black Mountain Book. Rumaker's and Dawson's re-printings weren't truly such, as both contain substantial additions to the original titles, another innovation Smith's attention to the texts and their authors brought to this very small publishing house.

Using the nom de plume Arthur Mann Kaye Smith, Smith also solicited and edited two marvelous collections of writings about eastern North Carolina: Good Country People and Coastal Plains Review. His dream of subsequent numbers of each of those occasional journals didn't materialize. Those two, incidentally, each contain essays by R.A. Fountain's proprietor, Alex Albright.