Harvard University Press Blog

The Year in Blogging - 2010

The University kills the lights around here for the next ten days or so, and most of us hunker down at home with the books that we’ve piled up over the course of the year. To tide you over until we're back we’ve put together this little list of highlights from the HUP Blog in 2010, just in case you missed anything.

In January, we posted some thoughts on The Condemnation of Blackness, a terrific new book from Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who this fall was named the new Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

In March, we offered an interview with Amir Alexander, author of Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs, and the Rise of Modern Mathematics, in which we explored culture’s influence on math and mathematicians.

In April, we announced the creation of the Murty Classical Library of India, a new series dedicated to making the literary heritage of India available to English-language readers, scheduled to launch in 2013.

Also in April, we presented a two-part remembrance of the French philosopher Piere Hadot, from his one-time student and long-time collaborator Michael Chase.

In May, we posted an interview with Karen Daubmann of the New York Botanical Garden, in which we discussed the NYBG’s wonderful reconstruction of Emily Dickinson’s gardens.

Also in May, we shared a one, two, three, four, five part presentation of Greil Marcus’s notes on the making of A New Literary History of America, which we published last autumn.

In July, we conducted an interview with former HUP Art Director Marianne Perlak, who left us to return to the fine arts, where physical books remain her medium.

In August, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters shared his memories of the legendary literary critic Frank Kermode.

In September, we offered an interview with Brandon L. Garrett, author of the forthcoming Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, and also a post in which David Garland explained the approach of his new book, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Both Garrett and Garland later were involved in retired United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Steven’s denunciation of the American death penalty. Garrett’s article “Judging Innocence” was cited in Justice Stevens’ landmark opinion in Baze v. Rees, and a review of Garland’s book this fall was the vehicle for Justice Stevens’ deeper remarks on Baze v. Rees and on the evolution of his own thoughts on capital punishment.

In October, we presented the first in a new series of audio slideshows highlighting the work of our in-house book designers.

Also in October, we posted an adaptation of an address by Susan Wallace Boehmer, our Editor-in-Chief, on what’s changing and what’s staying the same at HUP as we embrace our digital future.

November was busy:

We gave our somewhat blustery take on the value of physical books, on the occasion of our relaunching of The Image of the Black in Western Art.

We shared HUP Humanities Editor Sharmila Sen’s essay on translation, “The Beautiful Infidel,” as we presented the first volumes of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

And, in response to n+1’s What Was the Hipster?, we took a look in the mirror at Hipster University Press.

Finally, this month we told a fun little story about old books and spelling.

We covered a lot of ground here in 2010, and we hope that some of it has been of interest to you. We’ll be back in January to do it all again.  

Until then: happy holidays and best wishes for the new year from all of us at Harvard University Press.

HUP On the Air - David Garland and Suzanne E. Smith

On this vaguely snowy morning in Cambridge, we have a couple of public radio interviews with HUP authors to share.

Yesterday, David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, took part in an extended conversation about the death penalty with Leonard Lopate on his WNYC show. The two covered a lot of ground in their discussion of the peculiarities of America’s history with capital punishment, including the roles of religion and race. You can listen to their conversation here.

And this morning, Suzanne E. Smith, author of To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death was interviewed by Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. As part of a series called “American Lives,” they discussed A.G. Gaston, an African American entrepreneur who made funeral homes the cornerstone of what became a wide-ranging portfolio of business interests. Gaston played a behind-the-scenes role in the Civil Rights movement in Alabama, and Smith and Inskeep discussed the general lack of historical attention to the role of entrepreneurship in the Civil Rights era. You can hear their conversation and read an excerpt from To Serve the Living here.

The Walmart Mom Goes to Washington

Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart, new in paperback this season, is a deeply and creatively researched study of the world’s largest corporation. The book traces how the company’s meteoric rise was enabled by its thorough integration of the values of the Sun Belt communities from which it sprung. By invoking the fundamentalist Christian principles of its workers and customers, Moreton argues, Walmart has created an environment in which its low wages, paltry benefits, and rigidly gender-based hierarchy are readily tolerated, if not embraced. In 2010 the book received both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book from the Organization of American Historians and the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for best-published book in American Studies from the American Studies Association. Below, Moreton reflects on the role of the “Walmart Mom” in last month’s historic midterm elections.

(Note: Since the publication of To Serve God and Wal-Mart, the company has dropped the hyphen and rechristened itself “Walmart.”)

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Earlier this month the Supreme Court agreed to a limited review of Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., to determine whether the largest class action suit in history can proceed. Named for Betty Dukes, a Walmart greeter in Pittsburg, California, the nine-year-old case asserts only what internal Walmart sources acknowledge: that despite lower turnover rates and better performance evaluations, women within the company were for decades passed over for promotion and paid less than men for the same jobs. A 1995 memo from the company’s own lawyers, reported the New York Times, warned management that “men in salaried jobs [were] earning 19 percent more than women. By one measure, the law firm found, men were five and a half times as likely as women to be promoted into salaried, management positions.” The Supreme Court will not rule on the discrimination itself, but rather will air Walmart’s challenge that the class of 1.5 million women itself is too big to be meaningful. According to the company that determines the temperatures in each of its stores from its Arkansas headquarters, the women should sue their individual managers one by one.

Few legal observers expect much for these Walmart Moms from the Roberts Court: five of these justices, after all, unleashed the flood of corporate campaign cash via Citizens United and protected the Goodyear corporation’s right to discriminate against Lilly Ledbetter as long as it managed to keep her in the dark for more than six months. But the bigger story is a challenge to our national moral imagination, and can be addressed in fora beyond the reach of pro-corporate judicial activists. The simple fact is that the nation’s wealth, like Walmart’s, has all too often been built for some by systematically undervaluing the work of vast classes of people. Putting those constituents at the center of our economic thinking—treating the majority as the majority—is the change of heart that would remake the “kitchen-table conversation.” This case presents another opportunity, then, for the left to listen to the concerns of Walmart Moms, something at which progressives failed miserably in this fall’s midterm elections.

You remember the Walmart Mom: In the 2008 election cycle, she was the swing voter to watch, but her identity changed radically depending on just who was watching. For Democrats, she was one of Obama’s strongest supporters—the white woman without a four-year degree making under $60,000, regardless of where she shopped. But defined as a woman who shopped at Walmart at least once a week, she was typically a religious, conservative, older white woman, struggling in or retired from a Walmart-type job herself. In this latter incarnation, she represented that persistent American political enigma, the Reagan Democrat who promoted conservative positions on so-called social issues like abortion and gay marriage but showed strong support for classic progressive goals like universal health coverage and an increased minimum wage. The Republican ticket ultimately carried Walmart, and the company itself launched an aggressive effort to brand the electorate as broadly as possible. By identifying the multinational with its customers rather than its public subsidies, labor violations, and sex discrimination, Walmart hoped to deflect the criticism that had steadily mounted: who’s going to attack Walmart if by some measures seventeen percent of voters embraced the moniker for themselves?

On the Perils of a Deep Backlist - And Spelling

One of our lovely and brilliant sales reps, Ms. Briana Ross, recently received an order from an account in Korea. She went to our in-house database to check stock levels and confirm prices for the included titles, but couldn’t find a listing for one of them: Relative Frequency of English Speech Sounds. Could they have included a book that wasn't actually ours?  Happens all the time.  But, just to be sure, she checked our distributor’s database, and, sure enough, there it was, in database shorthand: RELATIVE FREQ ENGL SPEECH SOUNDS. Published 1950. Stock available.

Recent book world developments have made it more important than ever for publishers to have complete, accurate data on even their oldest titles. Ebooks provide the opportunity to renew wide access to long out-of-print titles. Efforts by Google and others to digitize enormous amounts of books plucked from the world's libraries put the onus on publishers to loudly and accurately plant flags over all of their deep backlists. Given our focus on updating and maintaining our database, a missing record is a pretty rare thing for us these days. So, Briana of course understood that we’d need this title added to our system right away.

She sent a note to our database developer letting him know of the need. He created the record and then, out of curiosity, did a web search for the title. He found it listed via an online seller as Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds. “Relativ?” Weird. We hoped they hadn’t gotten that bad data from us.

Once the record was created, we could put the book on our website, a job for me. Wanting a little more information than just the raw data, I hoofed up two flights to our library and found the book, right where it was supposed to be, filed under the name of the author, Godfrey Dewey. Except, on the spine and the title page: Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds. “Relativ?” Weird. Publisht Under the Direction of the Graduate School of Education. “Publisht?” What’s happening? I know we’re dusty, but has HUP actually been around longer than spelling?

I skimmed some pages. “The procedure of the fourth stage, analisis by sounds, which required in all about 720 hours, was similar to that above described for the sillable analisis.” Getting weirder.

“Tables 3 and 4 of words in order of frequency ar immediately followed by Tables 5 and 6 of the same words in alfabetic order, also in parallel columns and showing frequencies.” Not even sure this Dewey chap knew the alphabet, let alone its order.

But, finally, an explanation, from the book’s front matter:

And so, ashamed of our prejudice, and ever toward a rational orthografy, we giv you: Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds, Second Edition. In print and available.

Journey Through the Afterlife

In partnership with the British Museum, we've just published a North American edition of John H. Taylor’s Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. The book is the companion to a major exhibition of the same name, curated by Taylor and running at the British Museum through early March 2011. As Taylor explains in a British Museum blog post, “Book of the Dead” is a term we use now for “a collection of magical spells that the Egyptians used to help them get into the afterlife. They imagined the afterlife as a kind of journey you had to make to get to paradise – but it was quite a hazardous journey so you’d need magical help along the way.”

The video below explains the exhibition:

 

There was no one standard Book of the Dead. Rather, countless customized variations existed, elaborately decorated and filled with different spells. Though the British Museum has one of the world’s largest collections of artifacts related to the Book of the Dead, many of the items included in this exhibition have actually never before been displayed. “This is an extremely ambitious exhibition because we've never been able to look at this subject in such a comprehensive way,” Taylor told the Guardian. “We've wanted to, but so much of this material is so light-sensitive. It's also a question of space – you do need a lot of it to do it properly.”

The exhibition has been a very hot ticket since opening in early November, but a couple of representatives of HUP managed to gain entry while in town for meetings at our London office last month. HUP Director William Sisler was among those visiting the exhibition, and he reports that it drew him into a world unfamiliar to most of us in the West: “In a way, both the exhibit and the book demonstrate that there was in ancient Egypt a continuity between life on earth and life ‘after death.’ The spells inscribed in the Book of the Dead represent maps to guide the departed along the path toward eternal joy and happiness, and away from the risk posed by having one’s heart weighed in the balance and possibly found wanting, subject to destruction by the Devourer, a beast composed of elements from the lion, crocodile, and hippopotamus.”

Our book, like the exhibition, affords a greater understanding of ancient Egyptian belief systems and reveals the hopes and fears of mortal man about the world beyond death. Journey Through the Afterlife contains contributions from leading scholars and detailed catalog entries that interpret the spells and painted scenes of these ancient treasures.  It’s illustrated in full color throughout, with specially commissioned photographs of these exceptional papyri and an array of contextual funerary objects—painted coffins, gilded masks, amulets, jewelry, tomb figurines, and mummy trappings.

To accompany the exhibition, and as a fitting teaser for the book, the British Museum has even produced an app on the Book of the Dead, available for free from the Apple App Store. In the app you are led by Anubis, ancient Egyptian god of embalming, through the netherworld, and asked 7 questions. Answer correctly and you'll reach paradise, but get them wrong and you'll meet the Devourer, who’ll gladly eat your soul.  Rest easy, though: Journey Through the Afterlife has the answers.  

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on The Image of the Black in Western Art

Yesterday, December 12, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., hosted a panel discussion on The Image of the Black in Western Art. Participants included series co-editor David Bindman and HUP General Editor for the Humanities Sharmila Sen. Though Bindman’s co-editor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was unable to attend in person, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute contributed the following video, in which Professor Gates explains the project’s history and his own excitement for its future.  

 

 

 

You can view a slideshow of images from The Image of the Black in Western Art at The Root.

Everything After Amazon

The last couple of weeks have been not so hot for Amazon.com. The online retailer got heat from both sides of the political spectrum when it dumped WikiLeaks from its servers, right on the heels of its own tepid reliance on a first amendment defense for the sale of a “pedophile's guide to love and pleasure.” The Washington Post reported that Amazon has been charging its customers for Kindle versions of ebooks developed and distributed for free by Project Gutenberg. Google has finally launched its long-awaited ebookstore, which is seen by many as a major challenge to Amazon’s ebook dominance. And, maybe most damaging from a PR perspective, the company’s bullying methods were the subject of a long, thorough cover story for the Boston Review by Onnesha Roychoudhuri.

In the story, titled “Books After Amazon,” Roychoudhuri describes the company’s principal interest as simply “capturing market share,” and she details how they do it by ruthlessly underselling their competitors. They do that by extracting greater and greater discounts from publishers, through a variety of not-so-gentlemanly tactics. In laying out the story, Roychoudhuri offers a pretty effective narrative of the last few decades of bookselling, from when the indies were thriving, to when the big chains came to town, to Amazon’s impact. That history gives the article a bit of perspective that some of the anti-Amazon efforts these days lack – it’s easy to forget that just 12 years ago there were Tom Hanks movies about how the chain stores were ruining everything. Rather than letting off the heat, though, the long view lends a level-headedness that actually serves to make Roychoudhuri’s report on Amazon even more damning.

Amidst all of the tales of small publishers being literally threatened by representatives of Amazon, and of the questionable algorithms behind the company’s misleading recommendations and selective pricing, a single line in Roychoudhuri‘s story really stood out for me. She states matter-of-factly that Amazon has become the world’s largest retailer of books, and then, in emphasizing the company’s lack of interest in book culture, adds that: “it has done so as a software company that offers great deals on Vienna sausages as well as hardbacks.”

I saw that statement and wondered for the first time why we in the book world seem to act as if we’re the only ones being bullied. Maybe because we’re nerdy sorts, used to being picked on? Roychoudhuri’s thorough portrait of Amazon shouldn’t leave any room for doubt: the Vienna sausage makers are being bullied, too. As must be the appliance makers, the video game makers, the tool companies, the toothpaste guys, the sporting good manufacturers, the toymakers, and everyone else who produces the things that Amazon sells. Right? Could publishers REALLY be the only ones? Amazon must be putting the squeeze on the producers of everything that it sells, tightening the screws in ways that likely pose the same existential threats to aspects of those industries as they do to that of the book. Do we really think that Amazon smacks us around for better terms but just grins and bears the prices and discounts set by everyone else? Not a chance.

I did some searches to check out pricing on various non-book products, and routinely found that prices were actually unlisted, with the following explanation:

Gift Ideas For Very Particular People

As connectors of readers and scholarship, we spend a fair amount of time thinking about the intended audience for our books. It’s actually a question that we ask very early in our consideration of any project: “Who is this book for? What person will want or need this book?”  During this gift-giving time of year, many of you may be asking yourselves the reverse of that question: “What book will this person want or need?” By some transitive property of books to people, we may have answers. So, herewith, a collection of suggestions of books for persons. You’re bound to know a few of these folks.

Readers and Writers of Fiction – The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, by Orhan Pamuk

Devourers of Biographies – Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, by Abigail Green

Poetry People – Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, by Helen Vendler

Civil War Buffs – Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, by Stephanie McCurry

Lovers of Dreams from My Father – A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama, by Robert B. Stepto

Fans of Rollicking Tales of Victorian Identity Theft – A Swindler's Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty, by Kirsten McKenzie

Historians of Religion – Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam, by Fred M. Donner

Armchair Travelers and Amateur Archaeologists – The Parthenon, by Mary Beard

Philosophers – The Consolation of Philosophy, translation by David R. Slavitt

Big Thinkers – Justice for Hedgehogs, by Ronald Dworkin

Austenites – Pride and Prejudice, annotated by Patricia Meyer Spacks

Political Movers – Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party, by Susan Dunn

Classicists – The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis

Fans of Yiddish Theatre – Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky, by Gabriella Safran

Art Historians – The Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Revolutionary Sweethearts – My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, edited by Margaret A. Hogan and James C. Taylor

Science Buffs of Nearly any Age – The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System, by David Baker and Todd Ratcliff

Darwin Fish Bumper Sticker-ers – How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks, by Robin Dunbar

Shakespeare Lovers – Prefaces to Shakespeare, by Tony Tanner

Mythbusters – Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, by Ronald L. Numbers

Mummy Enthusiasts – Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, by John H. Taylor

Bostonians – Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, by Michael Rawson

Romantics – La Vita Nuova, translated by David R. Slavitt

Provocative Musical Eroticists – Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, by Laurence Dreyfus

Burgeoning Academics – Promotion and Tenure Confidential, by David D. Perlmutter

Blade Runner Deconstructionists – Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation, by Seo-Young Chu

Foodies – Fresh: A Perishable History, by Susanne Freidberg

Audubon Fever

In this late age of print, headlines tell us nearly daily how little value there is left in physical books. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for instance, famously remarked that he’s made grumpy by books and the way that they’re always “flopping” themselves shut. Get rid of ‘em! Useless, heavy, ugly relics, we’re told.

Not so fast.  Yesterday Sotheby’s sold an original edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America at auction for $11.5 million, setting a record for the sale of printed books at auction. Maybe the modern war on print has triggered feelings of nostalgia toward physical books, or maybe this is another sign that the war is just silly marketing-speak from those who sell devices. Or maybe it just means that a wealthy British “art dealer and bird enthusiast” has spent a pretty sum on a beautiful and rare edition of one of the world’s most famous books. And congratulations to him.

If you’ve got Audubon fever but couldn’t possibly wait for the next chance to spend millions when Christies auctions off another original set in 2012, let me humbly suggest an alternative. In 2008 we published a slip-cased edition collecting Audubon’s early drawings, those on which he honed the skills he’d later use to produce Birds of America. The book includes full-color reproductions in large format of a collection of early works (in pastel, watercolor, and other media) of American and European birds. It also includes biographical, scientific, and bibliographic essays, ornithological commentary, and an index of the species depicted. And at just one 92,000th of the cost of Michael Tollemache’s score at auction, it’s a holiday steal.

On its release, our Audubon: Early Drawings was lauded for the insight it offered into Audubon’s development. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Rosen praised the book’s “lavish reproductions and scientific notes” for how they document “the naturalist turning into the artist, laboring not merely to give his birds scientific accuracy but an almost uncanny life force.”

The images of the Passenger Pigeon up top and the Osprey below it each come from our edition. You can view a slideshow of a dozen others and read more about the book here.  Happy birding!  

"In Search of Holy Dirt" - Gary Vikan on Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art

Since 2006 the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection has been a publishing partner of Harvard University Press. The publications of Dumbarton Oaks present the scholarship in Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian studies to which the Washington, D. C. institute is dedicated. This fall, as part of its Byzantine Collection Publications series, Dumbarton Oaks has released a revised edition of Gary Vikan’s Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. By day, Gary Vikan is the Director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where he stewards an internationally renowned collection and works to promote the city’s art scene.  Below, he describes how his work at the Walters and his own scholarship relate.

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My invitation to Dumbarton Oaks came by way of a telegram to the US Embassy in Bucharest on Valentine’s Day, 1975. I was spending that academic year in Romania, under Ceausescu, with a stipend from the International Research and Exchanges Board to do research on my Byzance après Byzance dissertation topic, for Kurt Weitzmann and Princeton University. That telegram offered me a two-year contract position at DO; my job would be to research and write a catalogue of the sculpture in the collection – everything from Ptolemaic Egypt to Renaissance Germany. What luck! Not only had I always wanted to be at Dumbarton Oaks (I was turned down for a Junior Fellowship two years earlier), but also because my post-Romania job prospects were very dim.

As it turned out, I would spend the next ten years of my life occupying a variety of staff positions at DO, all the while lapping up the heavy cream of Byzantium in the company of some of the most wonderful Byzantinists the world then had to offer. This was an enormous privilege for me, and I loved it.

Though from the beginning, I felt a certain tension. I was born a Midwestern populist, and while I enjoyed the lunchtime conversation at DO that would typically wander from such arcane topics as Byzantine epithets for the Virgin Mary to regional etymologies for the orange (portocale, in Romanian, reflecting the fruit’s origin in Portugal), I craved connection with the real world – with things that were meaningful to those ordinary folks who walked past the brick walls of Dumbarton Oaks without a care for what was going on inside. Moreover, I was married and had a small child, and I could barely afford to pay my rent. So by night I began a second career, in adult education, with the Smithsonian Residents Associate Program. This was as close to Byzantium for the masses as I then thought was possible, and it felt right.

As I taught, I sought out topics that would get my students’ attention. Imperial porphyry sculpture of the Tetrarchy was a tough sell, and for most, icons were just too abstract. But what nearly all my grownups seemed to relate to pretty easily was Byzantine pilgrimage: traveling to holy places, leaving votives behind, and taking away something sacred and powerful. What they all got especially excited about was “holy dirt,” the sanctified soil form loca sancta that pilgrims took home with them to use, when needed, to cure their ailments. When I called these pilgrim tokens the “Aspirin of the Middle Ages,” faces would light up, and I knew that I had connected. And it was this sense of connection that drew me to do a small exhibition at DO in 1982 with curators Susan Boyd and Carol Moon called Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. And with that exhibition, to write a booklet of the same title that I typed, pasted together, and drove to the printer myself.

I could not then have guessed that this homemade publication would sell out, and help to nourish what was becoming a cottage industry of pilgrimage studies among Byzantinists of my generation. And I certainly could not then have dreamed that nearly three decades later the tables would be turned. I left DO for the Walters Art Museum in 1985 because I felt I needed more fully to engage with the public, through art, and because I wanted to be part of a real city, its on-going struggles and its occasional triumphs. This, for sure, was and remains the Walters, and Baltimore. So now, my day job is art and people, and my night job is scholarship, as I revisit my DO life of the ‘80s in the form of this new, expanded edition of that pilgrimage booklet. The tension is still there, though now I welcome it, since it has drawn me to two great institutions that have, each in their own way, nourished a different part of who I am.

What’s next? SAINT ELVIS: From the Holy Land to Graceland – a book-length study almost completed. After all, what could be a more logical sequel to Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art for a populist like me?