About HBP
House Bound Press was born as a joke.
In my mid-teens, I had a boyfriend who had started to write a novel. We broke up and lost touch way before the Internet was available. He went to California, I went to Colorado. By 1995 I was living in Nova Scotia with my husband, my son, and a telecommuting job I had landed at a software company in the USA, when the Internet was just taking form. To post your resume back then, you needed to be able to write in HTML, a brave new world of its own. Email was barely roughed out, not yet able to send or receive long messages, and attached files were nonexistent; you needed to use FTP to upload them to the network provider’s space, while larger files were still sent on discs via FedEx. Nevertheless, technology was changing fast and communications with long-lost friends was suddenly possible. I found my old boyfriend’s email address online, and we reconnected. I learned that back in California he had developed a telephone networking technology, and when he was bought out by his partners for one million dollars he hurried off to Boston to finish writing that novel he had begun in the early 70s. Having day-traded his one million into two million and counting, he could afford it.
He then hired me to organize his five novels, all of which were in various stages of creation and various pieces of paper throughout his apartment. I worked at his apartment on my way to and from Connecticut, where both my parents and the company I telecommuted for were located. He drank vodka continuously while he wrote. Besides that and day trading, he didn’t do much else. He was afraid to go outside his apartment due to all the what he called “input” from just walking down the street. (It was Boston, after all, and he lived on Charles Street across from the Boston Common.) I couldn’t really get him out of the apartment except to “roll out the door and across the street” (his words) to DeLuca’s Market for food and liquor. Once every few months he would drive to a big grocery store and buy huge amounts of toilet paper, paper towels, and other staples so that he wouldn’t have to go out again any time soon.
It was all business, but we had fun. He was productive. I was organized. I didn’t drink but we laughed a lot. We made up names for our fantasy publishing company. House Bound Press and Couch Bound Press were only two of many possibilities. House Bound Press won. The term “housebound” is defined as “confined to the house” but most dictionaries qualify this as due to illness or age. House Bound Press confinement was due to purely psychological reasons. The theme of House Bound Press was perfectly him and me: people housebound in a hilarious way, with a smidgen of evil truth: cloistered because of telecommuting and generally agoraphobic because the world outside is too big.
The name was also a play on established publishing company names, of course, what with “house” and “press” found frequently, though “bound” not so much. The words “house” and “bound” were kept separate to point out that the books were “bound” from a “house” — though from the get-go, HBP books kept changing homes, and, excepting one, were neither printed on a press nor bound. This is still true for all current and planned offerings.
Today, HBP is being recreated to honor friends and family (including past selves), to whom I made a promise to publish their works.
