YOU KNOW HOW it is. You're running around doing errands all day, eventually winding up in the cozy foyer of Ten Speed Press with horribly low blood sugar. And all around you are those posters. "The Great Chile Poster," which illustrates and names the many sorts of chilies one could eat. "The Cheeses of the World Poster," which brings one into the vast realm of cheese. There's an eggplant poster, a squash poster, a garlic poster. The olive poster is making my mouth water, and I'm dazzled by the tomato poster. By the time Ten Speed Press founder (or, as his business card proclaims, CEO and gator wrestler) Phil Wood comes to fetch me, I'm positively weak with hunger.

Mr. Wood offers to rustle me up some sort of snack. He's that kind of guy. He has a gray beard and wears a sort of fishing cap, so his overall appearance is that of Santa on vacation. He's reserved in a friendly way and says "oh dear" and "oh goodness" a lot. He started Ten Speed Press way back in 1970, to publish a volume his then-employer, Penguin Books, had turned down. The book was Anybody's Bike Book, and it was a massive best seller.

"I named the company Ten Speed Press," Wood explains. "I had only really planned to do one book. But the name seemed to be OK, so I looked around for more books to publish. The next big book I found was What Color Is Your Parachute? Then The Moosewood Cookbook followed soon after."

Wood invites me to peruse the catalog with him. Ten Speed publishes classics, both practical and whimsical: cookbook staples and find-a-job manuals, irreverent masterpieces such as Why Cats Paint, and crucial polemics like How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America.

"Ten Speed Press is really known for those kinds of books," Wood says. "Books that nobody else would publish but sell like crazy."

"That's a naughty book there," he says, pointing to You Say I'm a Bitch like It's a Bad Thing, a gift book that combines retro clip-art with pithy affirmations. Another book deemed "naughty" by Wood is Alexa Joy Sherman and Nicole Tocantins's The Happy Hook-Up: A Single Girl's Guide to Casual Sex, which escorts libertines through the long process of preparing for their fleeting encounter. Once past chapter one, which assures you that you can, in fact, handle a one-night stand, readers move on to chapters concerning herpes, scabies, and crabs; how to ditch losers; and finally, how to celebrate your tawdry night with a stranger. Ten Speed also publishes a dudelier version of this manual: The Modern Lover: A Playbook for Suitors, Spouses and Ringless Carousers, by Phineas Mollod and Jason Tesauro, uses olde-tyme language to discuss postmodern amour. In part one, "The Evolved Bachelor," the authors get right to the business of the one-night stand – "an inimitable, wanton pleasure that curdles quickly when lowbrow motives and squalid settings collide" – and move on down the timeline of hetero-dating for men, with the final chapters taking on fatherhood.

After a tour of the industrial neighborhood in which Ten Speed has staked out not only its offices but also warehouses holding millions of books and a gorgeous private Japanese garden designed by landscape architect Harlan Hand, replete with a wooden teahouse, bonsai trees, succulents, a little pond tangled with lilies, and more than 400 kinds of irises – "It was created by iris freaks," Wood explains – we walk over to the office of publicity director Kristin Casemore to see what titles she's excited about.

"This is going to be an award winner, we think," Casemore says about Foods of the Americas: Native Recipes and Traditions, a beautiful, illustrated volume that offers recipes for a variety of game, amazing sweets, and even beverages, as well as sidebar essays exploring the making of apple butter and the culling of sap from maple trees, reservation foods, and other native culinary narratives.

But it's not all James Beard Awards and zen gardens around Ten Speed: the conservative backlash against the press after its kid's-book imprint, Tricycle Press, published the prince-meets-prince tale King and King was brief but disturbing.

"This parent in North Carolina found it in her daughter's library in school and went nuts," Casemore says. "It was on Bill O'Reilly and CNN. Talk about hate mail! It was sort of scary. We even had a security guard around for a couple of days. We were getting 50 to 100 e-mails a day. There weren't any specific threats, but there was some violent imagery." Whoa, all 'cause some cutesy cartoon princes found true love? But I guess that's what's great about publishing: you stir shit up when you're not even trying to. Wood agrees, nodding his head as he hands over two of his favorites: the lavish, artful Cannabibles volumes one and two, sort of high-end porn for stoners.

"Fan the flames!" he chuckles. "It's just a book, just an idea."