One stubborn idea
In the summer of 2017, Clifford Miguel — then thirty years into a career editing trade books in New York and Houston — sat down at his kitchen table on Clousson Road and made a list. On one side: the picture books he had loved as a child and still owned. On the other: the picture books he had bought for his grandchildren in the previous five years that had already fallen apart.
The lists were nothing alike. The old books had been built to last; the new ones, almost without exception, had not. Worse, the stories had thinned. Marketing departments had begun writing to formula. The picture book — arguably the first piece of art most people encounter — had been quietly demoted.
That afternoon, Clifford registered a domain, drove to a printer in Dallas, and asked what it would cost to make a thousand copies of a hardcover storybook the old way: Smyth-sewn, acid-free, properly designed. Bobwhite & Bramble Press began three weeks later, in his garage, with two manuscripts and an illustrator he'd worked with for twenty years.
