PINE TREE ARTS is the creative extension of Pine Tree Press of Penn Valley, California 95946.
For 30 years, the Pine Tree Press and its prior affiliates have been known primarily for publishing community residential and business directories, customized area maps, and promotional brochures and mailers. It has since expanded into national nonfiction and fiction book publishing.
The company was acquired in 1999 by David Emil Henderson, who had started his journalism career in the 1960s by conducting exclusive magazine interviews with Henry Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Robert Preston, Charlton Heston, and various other luminaries. Within a few years he had become a top editor with a Chicago suburban newspaper chain then owned by Time, Inc. Among the five chain newspapers for which he had directed the editorial content, the Evanston Review was winner of the "First in the Nation for General Excellence" award bestowed by the national newspaper publishers association. (That year, it also captured "First in the State for General Excellence" from the Illinois association.)
Leaving Illinois to become editor and publisher of a Rocky Mountain newspaper, Henderson spent the 1970s with the Carbon County News in Red Lodge, Montana. There, he won the state press association's top awards for editorial writing, column writing, feature stories, and general news reporting.
Henderson spent the 1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area, first as general manager of an Oakland newspaper group, then as marketing vice president for a national advertising firm where he developed creative print and video national marketing campaigns for nine Bay Area daily newspapers, including those owned by Gannett, Media News Group, the J. Hart Clinton Family, the (Chicago) Tribune Company, and the New York Times.
In Penn Valley, after nearly 50 years of writing and editing stories of both staff and freelance writers of news and fiction, Henderson began working on his own novels while simultaneously offering publishing services to talented writers in the surrounding area. In 2004, he formed the Pine Tree Arts extension of Pine Tree Press, defining its services as related to "•Words, •Graphics, •Photos, and •Videos" — available to a community of talented professional writers and designers.
This year's books include two of David Emil Henderson's novels, "Escape!" (an extreme makeover of "Deadly Dividends") and "Montana Midnight", and a remarkable nonfiction "anthology of heroes" by Larry T. Bailey, entitled, "So Brave...So Quiet...So Long!" Henderson said there were many times, working on Mr. Bailey's book, when he found himself filled with emotional pride for the unforgettable men and women profiled in the book, who had "helped save our nation... and then went home." Eventually settling in northern California, these extraordinary individuals proved as effective in peace as in war, in business and in service to their neighbors.
Looking ahead, Pine Tree Arts has assayed a "golden vein of talent" residing in the former California Gold Rush communities of Nevada City, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, and Lake Wildwood. Altogether, it is seen as a solid base upon which to build an enterprise.
Pine Tree Arts invites queries. Temporarily, though, it asks that communications be directed via the links of author David Emil Henderson as listed on this page.