GINGKO PRESS was established in 1985 by Mo Cohen and Julie von der Ropp in Hamburg, Germany. In 1991 we launched Gingko Press Inc. in Santa Rosa, California at the offices and warehouse of John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press.
We moved to new headquarters in Corte Madera, California in 1994, distributing Taschen America to the book trade, and began accepting original manuscripts for publication in 1998. In 2009 we moved to our current facility in Berkeley, California.
In 1999 Gingko Press purchased world rights to iconoclast educator, media pioneer and author Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s writings on culture and technology have given us a new paradigm for understanding history, through our tools and innovations, distilled in his famous phrase “the medium is the message.”
Always on the lookout for shifts in our social order via new media, McLuhan foresaw the ascendancy of software over hardware, the end of privacy, the elevation of pop culture, and claimed that the city’s streets have superseded the universities, museums and galleries as the dominant educational and artistic platform.
We’ve also begun publishing ventures with Juxtapoz Magazine, ObeyGiant, Upper Playground, Victionary, and Kill Your Idols.
In 2005 Gingko Press, Hamburg translated and published Black Sparrow’s Screams from the Balcony: The Letters of Charles Bukowski.
In 2011 we published Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy in German (Die Gutenberg Galaxis) and in October 2018 we will publish a critical edition of McLuhan’s seminal work, Understanding Media, in German (Medien Verstehen).
