Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire is the comic and largely true tale of an ambitious young woman and her eccentric brother who quixotically build a book publishing company from scratch during the heyday of small presses in San Francisco in the 1990s.

As part of their optimistic Morgan heritage, the siblings strive to grow Foghorn Press with no capital, 100-hour work weeks, cheap beer, mandatory belly laughs, and no book publishing experience. They assemble a cast of preposterous authors and resistant staff while surviving a drunken ex-husband, a con artist, calculating distributors, terrible cash flow, and their own differing aspirations.

Bob Dylan plays in a continuous loop on the tape deck and the siblings’ failed romances play in a continuous loop in their heads, but books are brought to market and miraculously sell from their offices in the Boiler Room. Foghorn is soon a resounding success with sales, media, acclaim. But does their relationship survive it? What about the company? the family? When it all comes down, who gets the credit and who gets the blame? But then, whose version of the story is true anyway?

This is the never-before-told story of a unique time in San Francisco as well as in book industry history, when Bay Area small presses—armed with arrogance and their personal computers—took the publishing field. At Foghorn Press, Vicki Morgan was a successful woman publisher making her way in this fervent age of good ol’ boys. This is the coming-of-age story of a young woman messily discovering what she’s good at and what she wants in life.