War Determines Too Much. But Not Everything.
How a Small Independent Publishing House Came Into Being in Wartime Ukraine
A few days ago, I received four ISBNs from the Book Chamber of Ukraine.
They were assigned to four editions of the same book: the Ukrainian translation of P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste in print and EPUB, and the English original, also in print and EPUB.
Four rows of digits. A small administrative milestone.
Yet for me, they meant something much larger. They confirmed that an idea I had been carrying for a long time had finally become real: Taras Ramzes Publishing was no longer merely a personal project or a hopeful name. It had become a publishing house with its own books.
The remarkable part was not only that the ISBNs had arrived.
The people who issued them were working in the Book Chamber, which had damaged windows and unreliable electricity.
They continued answering letters, processing applications, and maintaining the infrastructure of Ukrainian publishing in conditions that should have made ordinary work impossible.
There was no grand speech attached to their email. They simply did their job.
Perhaps that is one of the most accurate descriptions of cultural life in Ukraine today.
It began with a book of my own
The publishing house did not begin with a business plan, an office or a team.
It began with my own novella.
Publishing it taught me that a book is never just a manuscript. Once the writing is finished, another kind of work begins: editing, proofreading, typography, cover design, metadata, printing, distribution, and communication with readers.
Every small decision matters.
Which typeface should be used? How should the text sit on the page? What does the cover promise? How much context does a modern reader need? How do you build a website, connect payments, and make sure that someone who buys an electronic book actually receives it?
At first, I had far more questions than answers. In truth, that has not changed completely. The questions have simply become more specific.
On 17 September 2026, Taras Ramzes Publishing was officially entered into Ukraine’s State Register of Publishing Entities.
It remained a very small publishing house. But it was real.
Why Beau Geste?
For the next book, I wanted to work with a classic adventure novel — not simply because it was old, but because it was still alive.
P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste was first published in 1924. For decades, it was one of the best-known adventure novels in the English-speaking world. It inspired three major Hollywood adaptations and helped shape the popular image of the French Foreign Legion.
Then, as sometimes happens even to famous books, it gradually slipped out of public view.
The premise still works beautifully: three brothers, a stolen sapphire, the French Foreign Legion, and a mysterious desert fort where the dead appear to remain at their posts.
But the novel is more than an exotic adventure. At its heart lies a question about loyalty. How far will people go to protect one another? And what happens when honor demands something that common sense cannot explain?
That was the book I wanted to bring back to Ukrainian readers.
Not as a museum piece. Not as a relic preserved behind glass. I wanted it to read as a novel — with pace, tension, humor, and emotional force.
The fact that a book was written a hundred years ago should not be the main reason to publish it. The real question is whether it still has a hero worth following and an adventure that makes you reluctant to put it down.
For me, Beau Geste passed that test.
The invisible work inside a classic
Translating an older novel involves more than replacing English words with Ukrainian ones.
Wren wrote for readers who recognized references that are no longer immediately familiar. He expected them to understand the social habits of Edwardian Britain, the language of public schools, the mythology surrounding the Foreign Legion, and a considerable number of historical, military, and cultural allusions.
A modern Ukrainian reader should not be left alone with all of that. At the same time, too much explanation can suffocate a story.
Finding the balance became part of the translation.
The Ukrainian edition contains 168 notes. Some explain military terms or geographical names. Others clarify historical references, quotations, and details of everyday life. Their purpose is not to display the translator’s knowledge. They are there to remove small obstacles between the reader and the novel.
Whenever possible, the story must remain the story.
Then came the physical book itself: 526 pages set in Source Serif 4, repeated corrections, layout adjustments and decisions that no reader should ever have to notice.
If the work is done well, the pages simply feel right.
The cover had to carry the same idea. It needed to suggest the Foreign Legion, the bond between the three brothers, the desert, and the sapphire at the center of the mystery — without becoming an overloaded summary of the plot.
This is the strange nature of publishing: months of work are expected to disappear into an object that feels inevitable.
Building the shop one problem at a time
A publishing house also needs a place where its books can be found.
So I built a website and an online shop.
That sentence makes the process sound far simpler than it was.
There were payment settings, product pages, file formats, order emails and download permissions. There were test purchases that behaved differently from real ones. There were coupons that worked in one browser and refused to cooperate in another.
At one point, even a simple promise to give preorder customers a fifteen-percent discount turned into a small technical investigation.
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This was not the romantic side of publishing. But it was necessary.
For an independent publisher, the website is not merely a catalog. It is the shop window, the bookshop counter, and sometimes the entire distribution system.
The electronic edition introduced another set of questions. How should the EPUB be protected? Could it be made reasonably secure without punishing the person who had paid for it? Would conventional DRM create more problems for honest readers than for pirates?
I came to prefer the idea of social DRM: discreet personalization rather than aggressive technical restrictions.
Trust should be part of the transaction.
The first sale
Then the first electronic copy of the Ukrainian Beau Geste was sold through the website.
One sale does not transform the economics of a publishing house. It does not recover the cost of producing a book. It certainly does not guarantee that the next title will succeed.
But the first sale changes something.
Until that moment, the shop is only a mechanism you have assembled. The book is a file you have tested repeatedly. The publishing house is still partly an idea.
Then a real person arrives, chooses the book, and pays for it.
The entire chain works for the first time.
Someone trusted a small, unfamiliar publisher enough to buy its book directly.
I remember that sale because it was modest and important at the same time.
The people behind the numbers
This brings me back to the four ISBNs.
Book infrastructure is mostly invisible. Readers rarely think about cataloging systems, bibliographic records, standard numbers, or the institutions that preserve information about every edition published in a country.
They notice these systems only when they stop working.
The employees of the Book Chamber of Ukraine continue doing this work during the war. They do it amid air-raid alerts, damaged buildings, power cuts, and all the practical uncertainty that has become part of everyday life.
Their work is not dramatic in the conventional sense. It is careful, repetitive, and exact.
That is precisely why it matters.
A country protects its culture not only through great declarations, but also through people who answer an email, correct a record, and assign an ISBN when the windows are broken and the lights are out.
I am deeply grateful to them, especially to the Department of International Standard Numbering of Publications and Electronic Resources.
The four numbers they sent me represent four future books. But they also represent continuity.
What comes next
The Ukrainian print and electronic editions of Beau Geste are only the beginning.
I am now preparing a carefully edited English-language EPUB with historical and cultural notes for modern readers. The English text is in the public domain, but that does not make the work automatic. A useful new edition still needs attentive editing, consistent formatting, and a clear reason to exist.
There will also be another Ukrainian translation in the adventure series.
I am considering books that once had enormous audiences but are now strangely absent from Ukrainian shelves. Some are swashbuckling stories. Some are political adventures. Others combine mystery, travel, and romance.
The choice matters because a small publisher cannot release everything. Every book requires time, money, and a substantial part of one’s life.
So I have begun asking readers what they would choose.
I do not see this as outsourcing editorial responsibility. The final decision remains mine. But Taras Ramzes Publishing is meant to be a publishing house built through dialogue.
Market research matters. Sales forecasts matter. Production costs matter.
Readers matter too.
Sometimes they recognize a book before you publicly name it. Sometimes a casual comment reveals more genuine interest than a polished marketing report. And sometimes a reader reminds you why a forgotten novel deserves another life.
A small act of continuity
I do not want to romanticize publishing during a war.
War does not make creative work more noble. It makes everything more difficult. It interrupts concentration, damages institutions, changes plans, and forces people to spend energy on things that should never have become part of ordinary life.
Nor do I believe that publishing a book is an act of heroism.
It is simply work — cultural, practical, and often unglamorous work.
But continuing to create has its own quiet meaning.
A new translation says that readers still deserve good books. A carefully made edition says that quality still matters. A functioning bookshop says that we are still planning for a future in which people will have the time and freedom to read.
Taras Ramzes Publishing is still very small. There is no large team behind it. There is no warehouse full of titles and no certainty that every decision will be correct.
There is one completed book, a website, four ISBNs, the first direct electronic sale, and several plans that are slowly becoming projects.
That is not much by the standards of the publishing industry.
For me, it is enough to continue.
War determines too much.
But not everything.
