The name on the spines of the more than 20 books he has written or edited reads “Robert C. Baron,” but he’s known as Bob. Baron looks like a cross between Will Rogers and a polar bear: tall and snowy-haired, ambling and large-pawed. He’s casual, of good cheer and very, very well-read, having consumed on average three books a week since he was a teenager.
Since founding Fulcrum Publishing in Golden in 1984, Bob Baron has had a hand in the literary life of Colorado and the West. Baron recently handed over his publishing-house keys to his son-in-law, Sam Scinta, but don’t assume Baron, age 73, harbors any retirement plans.
“No, no, no,” he declared in a voice calm and confident, soft and slightly raspy. “I’m going off the cliff at 100 miles per hour.”
Baron’s undergraduate degrees in physics and philosophy from St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia indicate a brain firing on all cylinders. Prior to founding Fulcrum, Baron designed the onboard computers that took Mariner II and Mariner IV missions to Venus and Mars, respectively. He served as worldwide manager for Honeywell microcomputer company and went on to found a Fortune 500 company called Prime Computers. Becoming a baron of books seemed to him a natural 360-degree turn.
“I got tired of thinking in terms of nanoseconds and wanted to think in terms of decades,” said Baron. “I saw that we were generating more data, but losing meaning in life. I wanted to spend the next period of my life on helping to present meaning. Books always have been the way to communicate meaning – and even more so now. TV and magazines and even newspapers are sound bites. Some things you want to understand deeper.”
A-to-Z author
A list of things Baron wants to understand deeper reads like an encyclopedia index. The nonfiction books he has authored include works on baseball, birds, computers, the Hudson River, the space program and 20th-century America. In addition, he has edited books on Colorado taverns, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, California mountains and Colorado’s pioneer poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Baron is noodling about writing three books on the topics of leadership, why nature matters and aging in America.
“I used to write books late at night, but those days are long gone.” Now, his circadian rhythms still in sync with the East Coast, Baron starts his writing day between 4 and 5 a.m.
Baron is a member of three book clubs and typically reads about seven volumes concurrently. He’s cracking the covers on titles ranging from Victorian England to sports stories to E.B. White to “The Gnostic Gospels” to a history of slavery. When in 2001 Fulcrum published “The Best American Novels of the Twentieth Century Still Readable Today,” Baron was familiar with fewer than 20. He just checked off his 101st title. Baron packs novels to read on travels – this spring he logged about 29,000 air miles – and leaves the books in hotel rooms.
Born in Los Angeles, as a child Baron attended Shirley Temple’s birthday parties three years in a row when his newspaper reporter father covered the Hollywood beat. He attended a Jesuit high school in New York City and later worked in Boston for 25 years, but Baron gravitated back to the West.
“I made a conscious decision to be a Westerner,” he said. “Why do you think we built the office out here?” he asked with a nod toward North Table Mountain shrouded in low clouds just beyond the wall of glass in a casual conference room at Fulcrum.
“If we were downtown looking into someone else’s office, or if I had started this in New York or Boston, it’d be a whole different story. I wanted to come out and stretch my legs. I don’t want to get in a car and drive four hours to see a tree.”
“America is the West”
Baron, in fact, considers the West the heart of the USA.
“I believe strongly that America is the West – not the South and not the Northeast,” he said. “I’ve got writers from 47 states and six foreign countries, but writers come up with different stories if they’re Westerners.”
Baron maintains an office at Fulcrum, where his personal effects include an assortment of antique clocks, some of which chime the quarter- hours. Framed avian prints and wildlife sculptures attest to his love of the outdoors. Shelves hold books, of course, and also a vase of colorful glass marbles – the kind boys played with back in the day.
For Baron, play remains important, and though he is a serious thinker, he does not take life too seriously.
“I think I’ve worked about six months in my life. The rest has been having fun,” he said. “Life is a game. You better enjoy it every day, and if you’re not – whether because of your job or personal relationships or family – adjust it somehow. If you’re surrounded by and work with creative people, you have fun. You can’t choose all the people in your life, but you can choose a lot of them,” Baron said. Despite widespread panic about the state of publishing, Baron espouses a can-do attitude about books.
“Every other means of communication lives off advertising. Newspapers, television, radio. My father – and he was a great reporter – knew that no matter how great his story was, the next day people were wrapping garbage in it,” said Baron.
“Books are different. Books don’t look at the timely story; in fact, we avoid books unless they have a long shelf life. You’ve got to have patience and be in a position to measure success over years. The best things in life take time. The great thing about books is that you may publish somebody that will still be read when your great-grandchildren are alive.”
As president of Fulcrum, Baron sired more than 600 books.
He shares his Bear Valley home with his wife, Charlotte, and two cats – Boo and Lily, both adopted from Denver Dumb Friends League. He just retired as the chairman of the International Leadership Wilderness (WILD) Foundation, is past chairman of the American Antiquarian Society and is a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the President’s Club and the Explorers Club.
His involvement sustains his contentment, and when he feels less than overjoyed, he has a ready antidote:
“I just head west and look at those mountains, and feel the insignificance of us and the excitement of that.”
