Our mission

A publisher’s note

I am a zoologist. For most of my adult life my work has been to watch animals and write down what they do — Andean bears in the cloud forest of southern Ecuador, mostly, which taught me a great deal more about patience than about bears.

Fieldwork teaches you something that rarely survives the journey into a book. Knowing a species is not the same as knowing where to stand, when to arrive, and how long to wait. The literature holds the first kind of knowledge in abundance. The second kind lives in notebooks, and notebooks get lost.

Editheria began there, in 2025, when Lucero and I admitted that the books we wanted did not exist. Short runs. Specialists as authors. A guide half that holds what is known, and a journal half that holds what you saw — because a field guide you cannot write in is only half a tool.

We are small on purpose. A large publisher needs a subject to sell forty thousand copies before it is worth printing. We can make a book about twenty-three birds because twenty-three birds deserve a book. That is the entire business model, and it works only if the people who care manage to find us.

The bear in our mark is an Andean bear. I have spent years following them through wet forest, mostly seeing nothing, and I chose it because it taught me the discipline every one of these books asks of its reader. Look closer. Stay longer. Write it down.

If you do that with one of our volumes — if a page of yours ends up more useful than a page of ours — then the book worked.

L. Arturo Román

Zoologist, author and designer · Co-director, Editheria Nature Books