The name
 
教師 — kyōshi — is the Japanese word for teacher.
 
It is made of two characters. The first, 教, means to teach: to hand something across. The second, 師, means a master of a craft — the same character that sits inside the Japanese words for doctor, for engineer, for the lecturer at the front of a hall. A 師 is someone who has done the work, and who is therefore able to show it to another.
 
We chose the name because it holds the two halves of what a book is. Someone has done the work. Someone else would like to learn it. Everything we publish lives in the distance between those two people, and our whole job is to make that distance shorter.
 
Publishing is a form of teaching
 
We think a book is a lesson that outlasts the room it was first taught in.
 
That belief has consequences. It means we are not indifferent to whether a reader arrives at the end of a chapter with something they did not have at the start. It means we ask of a manuscript the questions a good teacher asks of a lesson: what is this for, who is it for, and what has to be true by page thirty for page ninety to land?
 
It also means we take the reader's time seriously. Attention is the scarcest resource anyone brings to a page, and it is borrowed, not owned. A book that wastes it has failed, however elegant its sentences.
 
What we believe
 
That difficulty is not the same as obscurity. Ideas worth having are often hard. Prose that is hard for no reason is a failure of nerve, not a sign of rigour. We will always push an author towards clarity, and we will never push them towards shallowness.
 
That the writer is a practitioner first. The books we want are written by people with dust on their hands — teachers, makers, researchers, designers, people who have tried the thing and can say honestly what happened. Expertise earned in the doing has a texture that cannot be faked.
 
That the reader is an equal. We do not write down. We assume intelligence, curiosity, and the willingness to be changed by an argument. We assume, too, that a reader may disagree — and that a book strong enough to be argued with is worth more than one designed to be agreed with.
 
That small is a choice, not a limitation. We are independent. We answer to no shareholder and no quarterly target. That freedom buys us the only thing that matters in publishing: the ability to say yes to a book because it should exist, and to give it the years it needs.
 
How we work
 
We publish a small list, slowly, and we stay with each book long after the launch week is over. Every author we take on gets an editor who reads with a pencil and argues in the margins. We would rather publish six books we can defend than sixty we cannot remember.
 
We are interested in education, craft, technology, and the places where they meet — in how people learn to make things, and how making things teaches people. If that is the territory you are working in, we would like to hear from you.
 
An open door
 
The teacher, in the sense the character 師 intends, is not a person who has finished learning. They are a person who has learned enough to be useful to someone still on the road, and who knows the road continues.
 
That is the posture we try to publish from.