On a brilliant, sun-dappled October afternoon, Adam Parfrey, one of the nation's most provocative publishers, is in his front yard frolicking with his dog Loki—a beast of an animal, half malamute, half King Kong, named for a Norse god connected with fire and magic.
Steven DeWall
"I enjoy having my hands in the soil," says Parfrey of his move to bucolic Port Townsend.
Steven DeWall
Parfrey got into publishing to print "unfit" news and literature.
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As the doggie play continues, a young hiker approaches Parfrey's home, a cavernous grey-painted dwelling with dark-purple shutters and bookshelves that climb toward 14-foot ceilings. Outside, the leaves are a crunchy red and gold, and the moldering scent of fall has fully settled in. It was the bare-knuckled beauty of Port Townsend's windswept outskirts and a romantic impulse to live off the land that persuaded Parfrey to relocate his unconventional, pot-stirring publishing house from Los Angeles three years ago.
The man, wearing tan knickers and toting a satchel he's been using to gather mushrooms, stands near the gate, a stone's throw from the chicken coop, greenhouse, and outdoor garden where Parfrey—when he's not riling the cultural establishment with grisly tomes of unrepentant necrophiles, Satanists, the most explicit pornographers, and insidious murderers—tends to his brussels sprouts, berries, and tomatoes.
"I enjoy having my hands in the soil," Parfrey says—a key reason he left his Silver Lake bungalow in the low-lying Hollywood Hills, not far from the home Howard Hughes built for his girlfriend in the 1930s. "I guess you could say it keeps me grounded—literally."
At last, the blue-eyed, blond forager comes bounding onto Parfrey's spread, four lush acres that unfurl along a bluff overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The scene is straight out of The Sound of Music. One expects any moment that the knickered lad will belt out a chorus of "Edelweiss."
"I am a permaculturalist," he announces. "I tend to the land so the land can grow itself." Then, as if completing a magic trick, he plucks from his bag a matsuki mushroom the size of a catcher's mitt and proudly hands it to Parfrey. The publisher, now an avid farmer as well, takes a knife to the 'shroom and keeps half. He thanks his visitor and bids him farewell.
Encounters like this can happen at the drop of an incense stick in Port Townsend, where ex-hippies, New Agers, and, presumably, young Germanic-looking permaculturalists rule the roost. Situated on a natural harbor, the city, with a present-day population of 8,800, was once known as the "City of Dreams," as hopes ran high that someday Port Townsend would boast the largest harbor on the West Coast. That never happened, but today grand Victorian mansions dot the uptown bluffs that rise above the city's bustling spine, Water Street. The brick warehouses and three- and four-story brownstones that back up to the wharves of Admiralty Inlet have been turned into an eclectic stew of cafes, saloons, and clothing boutiques. There's a delightful eccentricity to the place; as the bumper sticker taped to the storefront window of the PT Shirt Company reads: "We're all here because we're not all here."
For years, Port Townsend was the home of Loompanics Unlimited, a publishing house founded by Mike Hoy. It was known for its rare and weird books, addressing assaultive topics such as drugs and anarchy and putting out how-to guides on, for example, manufacturing counterfeit IDs. It was Loompanics, in fact, that first put this Olympic Peninsula seaport on Parfrey's radar screen. (Loompanics went out of business in 2006.)
"Every other neighbor we have probably was involved in a radical socialist experiment in the 1960s or 1970s," observes Parfrey's wife, Jodi Wille, an accomplished rock-band photographer and documentarian, whose abiding interest in cults and subcultures brought her into Parfrey's curious orbit.
For his part, Parfrey blithely declares: "I'm not here for the scene."
Indeed, Parfrey has more serious fish to fry, though he does find time to attend meetings of the local mycological society, mushroom enthusiast that he is. For more than six years, Parfrey carried on an intense written correspondence with the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, which would culminate in Parfrey's announcement this past June that he would publish a book by him.
Parfrey's decison to reacquaint the Unabomber with the general public comes as no surprise to those who've collaborated with the maverick publisher over the years. His reputation is well known in the industry, running the gamut from dangerous sensationlist to fearless visionary.
There's a reason, after all, that Parfrey calls his relatively small nonfiction publishing concern Feral House. Its apt motto: "Refuses to be domesticated."
Parfrey is a soft-spoken, unassuming man, with a grey-speckled beard and brown tufts that sprout from a receding hairline. He stays fit with a little foraging himself and an occasional round of hot hatha yoga ("I sweat my pants off"). He's polite, bright as hell, and as cautious as a diamond cutter when choosing his words. He was once sonorously described by Salon as "equal parts P.T. Barnum, Rod Serling, and Hegel."
The son of Hollywood character actor Woodrow Parfrey (who played Dr. Maximus, one of the three "See No Evil" orangutan judges in Planet of the Apes), the 53-year-old Parfrey, the iconoclastic force behind Feral House, has long relished putting into print publications that no one else dares touch.
