On this date in 1961, after a group of 17 pitched in about $10 each, the incorporation papers of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore were accepted. That original group, which included students from the Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago Divinity School, has since grown to more than 55,000 members worldwide. Now, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary, the Co-op includes three Chicago locations housing more than 200,000 titles. Along the way it has earned a reputation for being one of the world’s finest examples of local, independent bookselling.
You can read more about the Co-op and its history in a series of articles from Gapers Block.
Seminary Co-op’s focus on academic books has made general manager Jack Cella and his colleagues some of HUP’s most treasured partners. To celebrate our relationship, we’ve put together a list of one HUP book published in each of the Co-op’s fifty years. It’s not just a list of best sellers or greatest hits, though many continue to sell quite nicely and the legacy of each is secure. Instead, this is a collection of books that have been important for both HUP and Seminary Co-op together. It’s a roster of some of the most important social science, history, and criticism published in the past fifty years, and it’s also reflective of Seminary’s long centrality to the University of Chicago community. These are books we’re very proud of, collected here in honor of a long relationship that we hope is only just beginning.
So, from Harvard University Press to the Seminary Co-op Bookstore: Bravo!
1961 Harry Austryn Wolfson - Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays
1962 J. L. Austin - How to Do Things with Words
1963 Walter Jackson Bate - John Keats
1964 Christopher Alexander - Notes on the Synthesis of Form
1965 Mancur Olson, Jr. - The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
1966 Walter W. Heller - New Dimensions of Political Economy
1967 Bernard Bailyn - The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
1968 Harry Levinson - The Exceptional Executive: A Psychological Conception
1969 Felix Frankfurter - Of Law and Life & Other Things That Matter: Papers and Addresses of Felix Frankfurter, 1956-1963
1970 Jean L. Briggs - Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family
1971 John Rawls - A Theory of Justice
1972 Lionel Trilling - Sincerity and Authenticity
1973 James Mann - Time-Limited Psychotherapy
1974 Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum - Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
1975 Edward O. Wilson - Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
1976 Nathan Glazer & Daniel Patrick Moynihan - Ethnicity: Theory and Experience
1977 Ronald Dworkin - Taking Rights Seriously
1978 David Sudnow - Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct
1979 Urie Bronfenbrenner - The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design
1980 Stanley Fish - Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
1981 Marjorie Shostak - Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman
1982 Carol Gilligan - In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development
1983 Edward W. Said - The World, the Text, and the Critic
1984 Eudora Welty - One Writer’s Beginnings
1985 Arthur C. Inman - The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession
1986 Duncan K. Foley - Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory
1987 Robert Alter & Frank Kermode - The Literary Guide to the Bible
1988 Octavio Paz - Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith
1989 Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
1990 Thomas Laqueur - Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
1991 Albert Hourani - A History of the Arab Peoples
1992 Toni Morrison - Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
1993 Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern
1994 Christopher Jencks - The Homeless
1995 Vivian Gussin Paley - Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher’s Story
1996 Michael J. Sandel - Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
1997 Martha C. Nussbaum - Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education
1998 Ira Berlin - Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
1999 Walter Benjamin - The Arcades Project
2000 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri - Empire
2001 David W. Blight - Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
2002 Stephen Jay Gould - The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
2003 George Steiner - Lessons of the Masters
2004 John W. O’Malley - Four Cultures of the West
2005 Stanley Cavell - Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow
2006 Jonathan Lear - Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
2007 Charles Taylor - A Secular Age
2008 Richard A. Posner - How Judges Think
2009 Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors - A New Literary History of America
2010 Melvin Konner - The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind
2011 William J. Stuntz - The Collapse of American Criminal Justice
