Tucked away in an anonymous-looking office in a nondescript Manhattan neighborhood sits industry newcomer Public Square Books. At the moment, it's tiny, with just two full-time employees, but the company is banking on making a big splash with a product unique in the United States: Spanish-language comic books. In the publisher's own words, it's "bringing the fastest growing genre in the book industry to America's fastest growing community," says Public Square's publicity manager, Katelin Trowbridge.

Public Square, exclusive U.S. distributors of Spanish-language comics published by Norma Editorial, was created in 2003 by the National Children's Book Project (NCBP). Less than a year later, the parent company decided to end the experiment; that's when Larry Bennett stepped up. With a professional history of importing Spanish goods (most recently as CEO for online distributor ileon.com), Bennett had been working for the NCBP. He purchased Public Square on September 1, 2004. Together, Bennett, Trowbridge, and contractor Allan Lang, their sales rep, make up the whole business.

Public Square made 75 titles available in its first six months, and plans to add from 50 to 100 titles a year. Its best seller so far, the Spanish edition of The Hobbit, which has sold nearly 2,000 copies in four months. Mike Mignola's Hellboy series has sold in the several thousands, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is also doing well, particularly with libraries.

Norma Editorial from Spain is Public Square's sole supplier at the moment; with 17 years in the trade and around a thousand titles, Norma's inventory is on the "graphic novel" side of the comics continuum. That works well for Public Square; the firm is committed to offering a high-quality product, providing "sex and violence ratings" and steering clear of work that's too graphic. The firm restickers all of its books with new ISBN numbers, allowing the company to provide the U.S. consumer with more information than is traditionally offered with Spanish titles. The distributor maintains about $100,000 worth of inventory at a warehouse in South Hackensack, NJ, and outsources fulfillment.

To date, all of Public Square's sales have been through distributors, so knowing exactly who the end customer is, is a challenge, but Bennett estimates that 60% of the business is trade and 40% is libraries. To illustrate the strength of his partners' concept, Trowbridge points to their success at the 2004 Guadalajara International Book Fair: "In the two days that the librarians were buying, we sold $30,000 of books, a wide assortment of titles. They didn't just buy the marquee titles —they bought everything!"

One challenge that remains is getting Spanish-language manga (Japanese comics) on the shelves. Norma publishes manga in Spanish, but doesn't have the rights to distribute those titles in the United States. "Japanese publishers are reluctant to allow a Spanish publisher to sell outside of Spain," Bennett says. In fact, he's "not aware of any manga being published in Spanish in the United States." Public Square does offer a How to Draw Manga series, but that's as close as the company's gotten to the white-hot genre so far. On the flip side, one advantage of distributing European comics is the occasional win in the first-to-market race. Satrapi's latest, Embroideries (Bordados in Spanish), originally in French, was translated into Spanish before English. Public Square's version will be available in January; Knopf's English translation won't be out until April.

And what does Public Square's future hold? "A year from now, I see us with much broader distribution, with a wider variety of titles and a lot more trade distribution," Bennett says. Expansions plans include partnering with other Spanish-language publishers, not only in Spain but also in Central and South America, "anywhere they publish Spanish-language books, and we can get exclusive rights," Bennett says.