Ian Randle Publishers (IRP), based in Kingston, Jamaica, has entered a partnership with Johns Hopkins University’s Academy of Retired Professors to publish two books a year through the newly named imprint, Homewood Academy Books. The first two books — Franklin Knight’s The History and Connoisseurship of Rum and Jean McGarry’s Herself and Others: A Memoir — will be officially released tomorrow, December 17, 2025. See more information below.
Kingston-based Ian Randle Publishers (IRP) has entered a historic and unique partnership agreement with Johns Hopkins University through its Academy of Retired Professors that will see the publication of two new books each year on an open range of subjects.
The selection of the books to be published will be made by an editorial committee of the Academy and will carry the newly created banner and logo of Homewood Academy Books, named after the Hopkins Homewood campus in Baltimore, Maryland. [. . .]
In The History and Connoisseurship of Rum author, Hopkins Professor Emeritus, Franklin Knight, a Jamaican and UWI Mona graduate, introduces readers to the world of the best rums featuring all the major Caribbean brands of Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Haiti and Martinique and some Latin American countries, their master blenders of
whom no fewer than seven are women led by the doyen of female master blenders Dr Joy Spence. Knight combines world and Caribbean history with the origin of fermentation, distillation and blending processes, and the basic chemistry of rum itself. Although it is not the author’s aim in writing and publishing this book, its appearance will be welcomed by the major producers of the world in their marketing thrust to elevate rum as a spirit of choice to be savoured alongside the finest single malt scotch whisky or cognac.
Herself and Others: A Memoir is being released simultaneously on December 17. The author Jean McGarry, Emerita Professor of Writing, Johns Hopkins University, is herself an accomplished writer of novels and short stories. She tells of a life originally grounded in Catholicism and how she survived, intact if not unscathed. McGarry’s tale of her career as a fiction writer will be of interest to budding writers, revealing how tortuous the journey can be to arrive at the summit of a successful writing career.
In hailing this latest breakthrough in its global publishing thrust, Executive Chairman and Publisher, Ian Randle highlighted the significance of the McGarry memoir as the first among its 400+ published list that is not specifically rooted in the Caribbean. This is likely to be the case for most, if not all, new titles to be published out of this partnership, catapulting IRP from being merely the leading publisher of books on and about the Caribbean to being a global publisher of choice in the non-fiction genre.
For more than a decade, Ian Randle Publishers participated in an annual review of the international state of publishing organised in the USA by the Ford Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, thus reflecting IRP’s established international recognition. This current Agreement provides for active promotion of the books to the worldwide Johns Hopkins alumni numbering tens of thousands, which Randle sees as providing a bridgehead for the expansion of its full range of books to an even wider international readership.
For more information, contact Ian Randle at www.ianrandlepublishers.com, ianlucienrandle@gmail.com, or by phone at (876) 501-2374.
Also see https://ianrandlepublishers.com/product/the-history-and-connoisseurship-of-rum/
Ian Randle Publishers (IRP), based in Kingston, Jamaica, has entered a partnership with Johns Hopkins University’s Academy of Retired Professors to publish two books a year through the newly named imprint, Homewood Academy Books. The first two books — Franklin Knight’s The History and Connoisseurship of Rum and Jean McGarry’s Herself and Others: A Memoir
