Not Your Basic Pretty Pictures : Books: With a stubborn commitment to publish only what interests him, Jack Woody is carving a niche with carefully crafted collections of the erotic and exotic. And they are selling.

SANTA FE, N.M. —  When he was a boy, Jack Woody stumbled across a treasure trove of old photographs and movie stills that had been passed down from his grandmother, 1930s film star Helen Twelvetrees.

Leafing through the sumptuously bound albums, the precocious youngster was consumed with curiosity about the glamorous actress who had taken an overdose when he was only a toddler. He found snapshots of her on an ocean liner with Ruth Etting and camping in the Sierras with Veronica Lake.

“I was left to my own devices, as far as imagining what it was all about,” he muses. “You’re not sure what’s real and what’s not.”

It was then, sorting through what he remembers as “a kind of Pandora’s box,” that Woody learned to dream.

As the head of his own Twin Palms Publishers, Woody, 38, is still preoccupied with dreams--dark, disturbing dreams played out in the more than 50 volumes of photographs he has published in the last dozen years.

Bookstore habitues find a Woody-published book instantly recognizable.

It might be the work of a photographer such as Joel-Peter Witkin, who is both celebrated and reviled for his portraits of severed body parts and masked transsexuals, or a collection of post-mortem photographs taken during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Woody has also published the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals and Herb Ritts, whose use of nudity and homoerotic images have generated controversy.

Although the photographic style varies, each volume is suffused with Woody’s own aesthetic sense, reflecting the fact that he does virtually all the design, editing and production himself.

The books share a spare, elegant design that sometimes borders on the severe, usually featuring black-and-white reproductions rendered in expensive gravure prints. Text, even by a Susan Sontag or Stephen Spender, is always subordinate to image.

“I’m interested in issues of religion and sexuality,” Woody says. “I’m interested in dealing with things other people almost would find offensive. I’m trying to say to them, ‘Maybe you should reconsider. Maybe you should see differently.’ ”

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Woody professes to have no taboos regarding the content of his books, save one: no landscapes.

“Landscapes don’t interest me,” he says. “I can’t stand Ansel Adams. I can’t stand Eliot Porter. I’m really interested in people. Portraits are my favorite form of photography.”

Accordingly, he’s made it his business to publish some of the most influential portrait photographers of the era.

Some early (and commercially successful) books Woody published were collections by Ritts and Bruce Weber, who went on to become household names for their magazine and advertising photography.

He also published mid-1980s work by Mapplethorpe and Witkin, then relative unknowns. In those days, Woody recalls, no one would show up for a Mapplethorpe book signing.

Woody has also assembled photographs taken by artists from other genres, including Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era pictures and Dennis Hopper’s images from the 1960s counterculture.

Last year, Woody brought out director Gus Van Sant’s “108 Portraits,” a collection of large-format Polaroid pictures of actors, directors, writers and other artists. Posed against a wall without makeup or special lighting, these well-known faces begin in a strange way to resemble one another.

Van Sant, who shot the portraits over a four-year period, says he brought his collection to Woody after seeing his books.

“He’s good--he’s got a really great eye,” Van Sant says. “He’s a perfectionist at what he does.”

With a stubborn commitment to publish only what interests him, Woody has earned critical acclaim and garnered design awards while watching his publishing venture grow.

Despite the acclaim, Woody is not tempted to join the publishing establishment.

As he writes in his latest catalogue, “In design and content we have settled on the periphery of American publishing--our books condemned as pornography or celebrated as classics. Obsolete gravure processes and often controversial content let us remain as we intended, outside looking in.”

Woody has been on the outside looking in for most of his life, yet in person he doesn’t fit the image of the bad boy of the book-publishing industry.

Boyish-looking and sandy-haired in his sky-blue baseball cap, gray sweat shirt and faded jeans, Woody’s all-American look belies his sense of alienation.

He is the oldest of four children. His father was a wildlife biologist and his mother a reading teacher. After moving around the West, the family settled in Albuquerque, N.M., where Woody attended high school in the early 1970s.

They lived in Paradise Hills, a west-side neighborhood that was geographically isolated from the rest of the city. A voracious reader from childhood, Woody found few kindred spirits in his overcrowded high school.

“I like to refer to it as the killing fields,” he says. “I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

He did well academically, but found his teachers mediocre and it became his calling in life to goad them whenever possible.

“I ended up being yearbook editor because the woman who ran it didn’t want me to do it,” he says matter-of-factly.

In a characteristically contrary move, he ran the school’s first yearbook cover without a logo or title, featuring instead a photograph of the Sandia Mountains.

“I got taken to the principal’s office for it, I believe,” he marvels.

After he graduated in 1972, Woody hung around Albuquerque for a year or two, taking a few classes at the University of New Mexico before hitchhiking to Los Angeles.

For a while he worked in a Hollywood Boulevard bookstore that was frequented by stars who maintained charge accounts there.

“Orson Welles would come in, and Peter Finch,” Woody says. “I had the art department. It was kind of the end of an era--the last vestige of old-style shopping on Hollywood Boulevard.”

He later worked at the Nicholas Wilder gallery. And along the way he met artists and writers and acquired a taste for expensive, well-made books.

In 1980, he published his first book, “October.” The leather-bound volume combined a daily journal by Christopher Isherwood with drawings by artist Don Bachardy.

Bitten by the publishing bug, Woody founded Twelvetrees Press as a not-for-profit corporation in 1983 and Twin Palms Publishers as a for-profit business in 1987. The Twelvetrees imprint currently is dormant.

Woody says people advised him against publishing photography books and warned that he’d have to relocate to New York. He ignored the advice.

“I do have a very contrary attitude--that things don’t have to be the way people say they are,” Woody allows.

He ran the business out of his home in Pasadena for several years before buying a small commercial building in 1987. He moved to Santa Fe in March, 1992.

With his companion and business partner, Thomas Long, Woody bought a 90-year-old house in downtown Santa Fe to serve as an office. They furnished it with tables and chairs inspired by the 19th-Century English arts and crafts movement. There is no sign out front.

The staff consists of Woody, Long and two employees.

“This is a lean and mean operation,” Woody says. “That’s one of the reasons we can afford to do the books we do. We have the luxury of being able to spend more money and make the book as nice as we can.”

For coffee-table books, they are surprisingly affordable, ranging from $35 to $65.

Woody, who works mostly at home, spreading prints out on the floor of his living room, has no business cards or other trappings of power.

Unlike its small-scale counterparts, Twin Palms has no distribution deal with a major publisher; instead, it sells directly to bookstores and individuals (it sends out 20,000 catalogues a year).

For whatever reason, Twin Palms books have found an audience, Woody says. “Often they’re the most dog-eared, beaten-up books in the bookstore, because so many people look at them.”

He believes that may be because he practices “old-fashioned publishing,” where the product clearly reflects an editor’s personal likes and dislikes.

“I try to do things I think are interesting, and we don’t really worry if we make money,” he says.

Woody recently began publishing what he informally refers to as his “photo noire” series--smaller, more affordable books that adhere to a general theme.

Among them is Diane Keaton’s “Mr. Salesman,” a witty collection of stills from industrial training movies made in the 1940s and 1950s.

Another title in the series is “Ranch,” by little-known photographer Michael Light. Set on one of the last traditional California ranches, it documents the brute realities of the cattle business.

“He was a dream come true for me,” says Light, who sent his work to Woody right out of graduate school. “I sent it to him absolutely cold turkey, knowing that he liked black-and-white books.”

It was some time before Light met Woody. He was surprised by his youth and informality.

“I was expecting somebody who was 55, overweight and in a tweed jacket,” Light says.

Perhaps the most moving of the new small books is “Faces,” by New York photographer Nancy Burson. Her sensitive photographs of children with craniofacial disorders evoke shock and compassion at the same time.

Woody says he doesn’t shy away from using photographs with strong themes because he doesn’t want to censor himself. Yet he concedes, “Maybe for some of these books their time isn’t now.”

Amazingly, he’s avoided most of the backlash against artists like Mapplethorpe, although, he says, “We get letters with those little religious booklets sometimes.”

Even though his success as a designer has others clamoring for his services, Woody says he’s content to continue publishing three or four books a year.

“When I look at these books, I’m constantly disappointed. They don’t look like I wanted. I move on to the next in the hope it’ll get better.”