Hingston & Olsen Publishing closes after a decade of deluxe literary box sets

Hingston & Olsen Publishing, the Edmonton-based boutique publisher known for the annual Short Story Advent Calendar, announced it would be winding down this May after a decade in business.

Co-founder Michael Hingston, who now runs Porch Light Books, said the numbers no longer made sense, but the philosophy behind print still does. "People love buying beautiful books, and in fact, the philosophy here is that because you can just get the words on a screen if you want to, if it's going to be a book, it should be a nice-looking book," Hingston said. "I think the only way publishers are going to survive is if they lean into what they do differently than ebooks or audiobooks, which is really making a print object that people want to keep and want to look at."

Founded in 2015 with Calgary-based Natalie Olsen, the firm sold 20,000 short story collections over a decade. The Short Story Advent Calendar — inspired by beer and LEGO advent calendars — became the company's flagship. It got a massive break in its second year when American comedian Patton Oswalt, who voiced Remy in Ratatouille, discovered a copy and tweeted daily reviews. That led to a collaboration: the Ghost Box horror collection, which drew attention from major American publications.

Hingston & Olsen specialized in deluxe anthologies and box sets. Collaborators included rare book dealer Rebecca Romney, author Kevin Wilson, and Alberto Manguel, director of the Centre for Research into the History of Reading in Portugal. "We got really ambitious … It didn't really matter if we thought the odds were good, I always start from the top and just work down and see who will say yes," Hingston said. "We had an amazing hit rate."

Ninety percent of sales were direct-to-consumer — bookstores take too large a cut for a small, no-sales-team publisher to survive. But now that he runs his own bookstore, Hingston has more understanding of retail.