Portfolio
Books, Series & Custom Publishing
The key title in the American Battlefields series. I agreed to do this project with the understanding that it would devote space to the people on both sides of the battle and how they ended up in this miserable, unfortunate situation—something typically overlooked in Alamo books.
How do you keep fidgety kids engaged until the foods arrives? Denny’s came to us for a series of interactive comics-style storybooks and they handed them out for years and years.
The first book on the subject written specifically for libraries. It was part of a series that started small and grew quickly after glowing reviews (and big sales numbers).
One of six books I authored on the Garden State, this title looked specifically at the people, places and things that were unparalleled elsewhere in America. Not as hard as I thought it would be. This project spun off the “It Happened In Jersey” Facebook page, which has thousands of followers.
My first book, written after I opened a lab-rat card shop in upstate New York and began interacting with collectors and people in the industry. What I discovered was a business on the brink of collapse—which, indeed, would soon lead to a lot of people squandering their life savings in the early 1990s. I did a lot of sports-talk radio spots for this one—and took more than a few irate calls!
This was part of a series that deconstructed a sport by focusing on its “signature” act—and then rebuilding the narrative from that perspective. We were asked to “write the football book that hadn’t been written” and I think we did that and more.
This was part of a big sports series created specifically for libraries. The goal was to transport the reader back to game day…and then recount the contest as it unfolded.
One of many trade show pieces we have worked on. It included the usual stuff—booth map, exhibitor list, show coupons, convention schedule. Never easy to jam all that stuff into a usable fold-out. As was the case with many of our clients, we worked with this company for more than a decade.
How do you get young sports fans jump-started into the culture and history of a soccer team? That was the aim of the First Touch series. The covers featured an awesome montage of trading cards from the Upper Case Collection.
This one was a bear…our team of 30-plus sportswriters and researchers created more than 700 enormous gatefold “cards” of famous athletes, along with cards on great moments and imaginative themes. It was one of IMP’s most successful subscription series and single cards are still traded on the internet 25 years later.
What a fun project. The popular PBS series “Mummy Road Show” wanted a companion book, so we worked with the hosts to create a book about all the crazy stuff that went on behind the cameras, as well as the unlikely paths they took to become experts in mummy exploration.
My knowledge of the sports licensing industry appealed to NBA Properties and we worked on several projects. I came up with the slogan “I Love This Stuff”—which the merchandise arm of the league used for a few years.
We believe in imaginative (and marketable) ways to repurpose the research we do. This Calendar is a great example—it had an Old-Time Radio fact or two on almost every day. We also produced the 32-page books that were included in the Radio Spirits CD collections.
Here’s the backside of the OTR calendar. Each month featured a rare photo we unearthed from the 1930s & 40s. Working for Radio Spirits was a blast. Every project was like an archaeological expedition.
When Nick Bollettieri decided to formalize his teaching technique, he reached out to me to make it happen. I had a fairly high profile in the tennis industry at the time. Working with Nick and Bill Rompf (future boss at the Tennis Hall of Fame) we knocked out a manual and video in record time…and it only took two trips down to Bradenton!
Among the many athletes with whom I have worked, Flojo was perhaps the most insightful and forthcoming about her journey to greatness. Turning her thoughts into an inspiring book for young readers was difficult because it was hard to know where to start. She died shortly after this book was published.
The Gareth-Stevens “Ultimate 10” imprint was a lot of fun to work on. Mostly we did sports titles, which is kind of our comfort zone, but this one took a lot of research and help from a couple of historians and meteorologists. Going that extra mile produced a killer book.
When Dick’s Sporting Goods wanted to publish a sports magazine to send its customers instead of its quarterly sales flyers, they came to Mike Jacobsen and me. We produced four issues that blew away anything the industry had ever seen. This led to a lot of other custom publishing jobs over the next decade.
Coffee table books can be a major undertaking—especially when the publisher is Major League Soccer. Mike Jacobsen and I turned out this eye-popping commemorative edition that was sent to MLS season ticket holders as a thank you for their support. The first run was so popular that MLS ordered up another 8,000 copies!
How do you get kids to take math and science seriously? You disguise math and science books as a NASCAR series. We worked with a pair of middle-school science teachers to produce six amazing books that jump-started NASCAR’s first educational publishing initiatives. The biggest challenge? PhotoShopping all the booze, tobacco and boner pill logo off the the race cars!
The back cover of one of the NASCAR books. We handled the design work for the series as well as the research and writing but, for some reason, they went ahead and wrote the cover copy.
As Barry Bonds eclipsed Henry Aaron’s career home run record, Mike Kennedy and I decided it would be interesting to look at how Aaron exerted control over his media image over the years. What we found was kind of astonishing, and Globe Pequot agreed.
We produced more than 75 books for the Team Spirit series, including NCAA-licensed books for several college football and basketball teams. Working with university Sports Information Departments—which are often manned by work-study students—often proved to be a challenge. But the folks at Auburn made our lives easy. War Eagle!
My favorite baseball player as a kid was Carl Yastrzemski, so it was a lot of fun writing this book. This is the updated version of the first Red Sox book we did.
I served as managing editor for Racquet Magazine, the #2 tennis magazine, for four years. During that time I forged great relationships with several industry giants, including Arthur Ashe, John Newcombe, Cliff Drysdale, Pam Shriver, Brad Gilbert and Nick Bollettieri.
This book deconstructed the sport of hockey from the standpoint of its seminal statistic: the goal. It covered every angle of hockey history and focused on what made the great goal-scorers unique among their peers.
Another title in the Gareth-Stevens “Ultimate 10” series, it covered fun facts and little-known stories behind the most recognized film characters.
The New Wave sports series focused on up-and-coming athletes and involved heavy research into their development years. Picking bona fide “rising stars” is fraught with peril when shelf life is part of the calculation. We produced more than 20 books in this series and only ONE athlete failed to go on to bigger and better things.
After profiling Peyton Manning it was only a matter of time before got the call to do a book on his brother, Eli—from a completely different publisher!
We developed and executed the Second Nature series for Norwood House Press. Upper Case recruited experts in various fields of environmental science and worked with them to produce books aimed at young adults. This series really demonstrated our strengths as a book packager.
I worked with more than 30 athletes for Grolier’s All-Pro Biography series. None was more fascinating than Dikembe Mutombo. I think he spoke 10 or 11 different languages.
My longtime publishing partner Mike Kennedy was lead author on the Smart About Sports series. The soccer books blended geography with the culture and history of the game—something that had never been done before. The books were aimed at readers in grades 2 thru 4.
The Team Spirt series covered each of the 30 NFL teams—and were successful enough to warrant 30 updates. In 2024, the series went into its third update cycle. Thank you, Tom Brady!
The CONCACAF Champions League tournament needed game programs in a HURRY. We knocked out a fantastic set for all of the US games to keep the sponsors and tournament officials happy. They printed 100s of 1000s of these!
Who doesn’t love Michelle Kwan? This book looked at her early years and gave young readers who knew little about elite-level figure skating a solid foundation to understand and enjoy the sport.
Upper Case produced EDGE Magazine for 15 years. It grew quickly to become the #2 lifestyle magazine in New Jersey. We used our showbiz connections to score incredible cover interviews with some of the entertainment industries biggest stars. Dominic Chianese (aka Junior Soprano) was a fantastic Q&A.
While working on the 32-page book for this CD collection, I was the last person to conduct an interview with Bob Hope, who passed away in the summer of 2003.
What began as a modest custom-publishing job for Radio Spirits grew into a major project that really tested our team-building and research skills. We produced more than 500 pages of content and every page was gold-standard stuff for a slice of entertainment history in danger of being lost forever.
Did you know that short and pudgy William Conrad was the voice of tall, lanky Marshal Dillon in the 1950s Gunsmoke radio series? He pulled it off with his booming voice, but when the TV series began, he was not considered.
Who doesn’t love to be the answer to a sports trivia question? In this case, if my name was your answer to “Who wrote the first book about Tiger Woods?” you would be correct! I received a call from the publisher during the second round of his breakthrough Masters tournament and had a manuscript in their hands three weeks later.
A recent “aw-shucks” moment: I was profiled in this book as one of he leading historians in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Although we don’t live there anymore, I still post NJ history facts and trivia on social media almost every day.
During the mid-1990s, we did a ton of work for the NBA and NBA Properties. Some of it was fun and glamorous, some of it was not. This was the merchandise catalogue sent out to international retailers—a small percentage of their business then, but obviously incredibly important to the NBA’s bottom line today.
How much fun was this project! We were given carte blanche to produce the program for Woodstock 94 and broke new ground in terms of content and design. They printed more than a half-million of these guides and distributed them all over the East Coast. Worked with several of the top bands of the 90s, as well as the original 1960s Woodstock promoter Michael Lang—who passed away in 2022.
We worked with middle-school Social Studies educators to create a first-of-its-kind book series designed to stimulate discussion and debate on some of the trickiest contemporary issues, including Gun Control. The books were accompanied by a Teacher’s Guide that enabled them to outline both sides of some really complex questions. It was hailed as one of the best in the business.
Back in the 1990s, I produced “Mark My Words” a column for Paradigm TSA, a short-lived news source built around well known columnists like Helen Thomas. Throw me a topic and I can produce an original essay in a couple of hours. Sounds a little like social media, doesn’t it?
