Harvard University Press Blog

In Celebration of Seminary Co-op at 50

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

In Defense of Yesterday's Papers

In her new book, On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks presents the results of her year-long experiment in rereading, undertaken in an attempt to understand what pleasure we gain from indulging in familiar books. Spacks, a past President of The Academy of Arts & Sciences and a National Book Award finalist, was interested in exploring how the particular joys of rereading old books can outweigh the faint guilt that attends the avoidance of all of those new and classic titles we’ve yet to read even once. She learned that the experience of rereading is intensely personal, an occasion to revisit one’s former self or selves, to balance familiar feelings with new realizations:

The dynamic tension between stability and change lies at the heart of rereading. Every renewed exchange between book and reader contains elements of both, and both provide pleasure. Our psychic needs vary, and reread books answer different needs at different times. Seeking solace, we return to a treasured children’s book. A beloved piece of light fiction answers our yearning for pure recreation. We find excitement in a rousing plot even though we already know how it will turn out; we contemplate our past as we reread something first encountered in adolescence.

On Rereading is an intensely personal book that has made many of us here at HUP consider our own rereading experiences and habits. When we sat down to record Spacks talking about the book, we couldn’t resist adding in some thoughts of our own. Take a look:

 

We’ve also been thinking about the rereading experiences of booksellers. They’re surrounded by books all day, the familiar old titles and the never-ending stream of exciting new ones that it’s their job to digest on behalf of the rest of us. If anyone should know the faint guilt of rereading, it’s booksellers. Do they even try to reread? HUP Sales Rep John Eklund, who wrote earlier this year about rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, polled a few booksellers about whether they’ve had memorable experiences rereading.

Here’s Conrad Silverberg of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company:

I first read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy in 1985 and, of course, fell in love with his elevated, almost biblical prose and complex yet readable writing style. I was, however, utterly in ignorance about anything else about the book (its historical setting or the real people he fictionalized). Now, some twenty-six years later, I am better informed (having read Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen, The War of a Thousand Deserts by Brian Delay and Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne) and can safely say that, sometimes you really do not need to be well-informed to love a book. I am loving it again for the same reasons I did the last time.

And here’s Mark Paprocki, also of Boswell Book Company:

Presidential Politics and the Third Testament of the American Bible

In last night’s debate between the Republican candidates for president, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney brushed off the controversy surrounding a Texas pastor’s suggestion that as a Mormon he was a member of a cult. “I’ve heard worse,” he said of the pastor’s comments, before explaining why he found the remarks to be “a very dangerous and enormous departure from the principles of our Constitution”:

What I actually found that was most troubling in what the reverend said in the introduction was he said, in choosing our nominee, we should inspect his religion. And someone who’s a good moral person is not someone who we should select; instead, we should choose someone who subscribes to our religious belief.

That—that idea that we should choose people, based upon their religion, for public office is what I find to be most troubling, because the founders of this country went to great length to make sure, and even put it in the Constitution, that we would not choose people who represent us in government based upon their religion; that this would be a nation that recognized and respected other faiths, where there’s a plurality of faiths, where there was tolerance for other people and faiths. That’s bedrock principle.

(A full transcript of the debate can be found here.)

Despite Romney’s objection to its presence, religion is actually playing a very visible role in these campaigns. One take on that role came earlier this week in the form of a Los Angeles Times op-ed from Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, former military officer, and noted critic of American empire. In the piece, Bacevich highlights the reality that all mainstream presidential candidates, regardless of party affiliation, share a view of American exceptionalism that is rooted in a belief in God’s intentions for the country.

Bacevich quotes a recent speech in which Romney exclaimed that “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers,” and that the United States is a nation with “a unique destiny and role in the world.” To Bacevich, Romney’s comments were both striking and unexceptionable in their reflection of a position widely held by those seeking higher office. Where, Bacevich asks, are candidates learning of these higher plans for their country? From his piece:

The Hebrew Bible provides no evidence to support this proposition. Nor do the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples. Yet the American Bible incorporates a de facto Third Testament, which validates this assertion of American uniqueness. That testament, fashioned from a carefully tailored rendering of the 20th century, recounts the story of a new chosen people serving as God's instrument of salvation, leading humankind onward to the promised land. For anyone aspiring to high office, professing fealty to this Third Testament has become all but obligatory.

The Life of John and George Keats

One gets a clear sense of the direction of Denise Gigante’s new book The Keats Brothers from its subtitle: The Life of John and George. That use of the singular (“life” as opposed to “lives”) is itself an argument against the standard telling of John’s life, in which George is usually cast as a mere bit player, or, worse, something of a villain. With The Keats Brothers, though, Gigante sets out to give us an understanding of a relationship that was absolutely central to John, and to the composition of some of his finest poems. In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey commends Gigante for succeeding “brilliantly.”

George Keats, two years younger than John, was swept up by the emigration fever of 1818, when many ambitious young men left England. Gigante writes of this as a moment when the modern world was coming into being, with the industrial revolution and capitalization propelling a complete reshaping of society. It was John who helped to answer the question of the role of the poet in this new modern society, and it was the entrepreneurial George who was his closest link to it, as he made his way in the U.S. Gigante’s account recreates George’s adventures, and her presentation of the rich correspondence between the brothers shows that their relationship withstood George’s absence.

In addition to being a lively story of the 19th century, The Keats Brothers is an important contribution to our appreciation of John’s poetry. As Gigante explains in an episode of the HUP Podcast (listen here), understanding the relationship between Keats and his brothers helps us to understand the haunting quality of some of the poems for which John is best remembered. His well-known odes, written with such pace in 1819, are colored by John’s sorrow over the new distance between him and George, and also by the recent death of their youngest brother Tom. The new perspective that Gigante offers here also helps readers to grasp the transatlantic context of John’s writing. 

When John died of tuberculosis and a severe pulmonary hemorrhage in 1821, at just twenty-five, George had just been back in England seeking more capital for his American ventures. He’d returned to the U.S. and didn’t learn of John’s demise until months later. John’s death is often projected onto George, and his absence at John’s end is cast as abandonment, but Gigante shows that George’s emigration had been inspired by his desire to provide for his siblings, who’d been orphaned young. Throughout The Keats Brothers, she works to show that George was far from a scoundrel, and that his life was as emblematic of the time as John’s:

However much it might jar with the traditional version of the story to suggest, the Cockney Pioneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism. While the medium of their dreams may have differed, the two eldest Keats brothers—“Man of Genius” and “Man of Power”—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism.

That bit comes from Gigante’s Prologue, where she invites her readers for an adventure on which they’ll join generations in trying to see the world through the eyes of John Keats. 

Robert Morrison on Annotating Austen

Robert Morrison’s take on Persuasion is the second installment in our series of sumptuously illustrated and engagingly annotated editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Persuasion can be the most disorienting of Austen’s works, but, to Morrison, it’s also the most profound, and contains her most compelling and adult love story. In the exchange below, we asked Morrison about the experience of editing Austen.

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Q: An acclaimed biographer of Thomas De Quincey, you’ve also served as editor of De Quincey’s collected works. How many of the techniques you developed in that role carried over to editing Persuasion: An Annotated Edition? Where did you find you needed to develop new approaches?

When I worked on De Quincey, I learned a lot about what kind of information readers are looking for, where to find reliable sources for that information, how to corroborate it effectively and accurately, and so on. Perhaps most importantly, when I edited De Quincey I worked with a large number of his manuscripts, and this proved invaluable when I came to edit Persuasion, for there are two cancelled manuscript chapters from the novel housed in the British Library, and I drew heavily on my experience of working with De Quincey’s manuscripts when I transcribed Austen’s two cancelled chapters.

There are, however, key differences between editing De Quincey and editing Austen. De Quincey is an essayist and immensely erudite. He likes to parade his knowledge, so that editing him often means annotating references to Greek and Roman history, German philosophy, British and French politics, and a wide ranging series of contemporary events. Austen, on the other hand, is a novelist, and the emphasis when editing her is frequently on her immensely insightful views on social structures, sexual politics, economic pressures, and individual obligations and aspirations. Editing her means developing a very clear sense of the difference between riding in a barouche and riding in a curricle, of what it means to command a frigate as opposed to a sloop, of the implications of being the daughter of a baronet rather than the wife of a knight, and so on. Perhaps most memorably for me, there is a moment in Chapter Twelve when Captain Wentworth is speaking to Charles Musgrove about who should remain with Louisa Musgrove after she has fallen on the Cobb. Wentworth speaks of “Mrs. Charles Musgrove,” and he ought to speak with the same formality of “Miss Anne Elliot.” But he does not. Under duress, and with a dawning sense of her worth, he calls her “Anne,” a burst of emotion that reveals how close he still feels to her. I am not even going to tell you how many times I had read the novel before I noticed this wonderful nuance! Editing Persuasion proved to me how remarkably incisive Virginia Woolf was when she observed that Austen “fills every inch of her canvas with observation” and “fashions every sentence into meaning.”

Q: The commentary-in-the-margins format of Persuasion: An Annotated Edition means that you’re sharing a page with Jane Austen. How did you approach going toe-to-toe with one of the foremost stylists in the English language?

Knowing my prose was going to appear right beside Austen’s really did change the way I approached writing my commentary. Endnotes of course mean that you are at the back of the volume. If readers want to consult you they can, but it means they have to stop reading the text, journey to the end of the book, and track down the relevant note. Some readers will choose to do this on some occasions, but many others will consult you only infrequently, if at all. Footnotes are on the same page as the text, but they are still relegated to a decidedly secondary position in relation to it, and readers consult or ignore the notes as they choose. I have to say that, in the past, I found writing endnotes or footnotes quite a comfortable position. In effect, it enables you to say to your reader, “I am here with relevant information if you want me, but I don’t want to intrude on your reading experience, and if you’d rather carry on without me, that is fine.”

In Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, however, the situation is very different. My annotation runs parallel to Austen’s text, meaning that it is a good deal harder for readers to ignore! I have found this very exciting. I have tried to use the commentary to illuminate the text as often as I can, and from as many different angles as I can, and to emphasize both what I believe to be central in Persuasion, and what the finest critics from Austen’s day to ours have written about it. I have attempted to produce a commentary that is in immediate and active dialogue with her text, rather than in a relationship that is more distant and intermittent. I hope this kind of sustained and expansive commentary enables readers to enjoy a more intimate relationship with Persuasion, and to move more seamlessly between text and annotation.

Lucretius, and How the World Became Modern

In his new book, The Swerve, Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt argues that the fifteenth century rediscovery of an ancient Roman poem helped to usher in the modern world. The poem, 7,400 lines of Latin hexameters, was written in the first century B.C. by Lucretius, about whom little is known. Entitled De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the poem was a revelatory and subversive call to dispense with fear of the gods and fear of death, and to strive instead for peace of mind and happiness.

The Swerve (published by W.W. Norton) opens with Greenblatt recalling his first encounter with the poem, as a student at Yale on a hunt for cheap summer reading. He tells of having been struck by the surrealist cover illustration of a bargain bin copy of On the Nature of Things. To his own surprise, he was swept away by the poem, presented in Martin F. Smith’s “clear and unfussy” prose translation. As it happens, Smith is also responsible for the editing of the Loeb Classical Library’s take on Lucretius. Presented as Loeb Volume 181, the LCL’s On the Nature of Things is based on W. H. D. Rouse’s early twentieth century English translation of the poem, but was completely re-edited by Smith in the ‘70s, and updated again in the ‘90s. In its pocket-sized casing, with the original Latin presented alongside the English translation, and Smith’s erudite Introduction, this volume remains the perfect offering of Lucretius, and an ideal companion to Greenblatt’s new study.

From the opening lines of the Loeb translation, one can feel what hooked Greenblatt those years ago:

Mother of Aeneas and his race, darling of men and gods, nurturing Venus, who beneath the smooth-moving heavenly signs fill with yourself the sea full-laden with ships, the earth that bears the crops, since through you every kind of living thing is conceived and rising up looks on the light of the sun: from you, O goddess, from you the winds flee away, the clouds of heaven from you and your coming; for you the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers, for you the wide stretches of ocean laugh, and heaven grown peaceful glows with outpoured light. For as soon as the vernal face of day is made manifest, and the breeze of the teeming west wind blows fresh and free, first the fowls of the air proclaim you, divine one, and your advent, pierced to the heart by your might. Next wild creatures and farm animals dance over the rich pastures and swim across rapid rivers: so greedily does each one follow you, held captive by your charm, whither you go on to lead them. Then throughout seas and mountains and sweeping torrents and the leafy dwellings of birds and verdant plains, striking alluring love into the breasts of all creatures, you cause them greedily to beget their generations after their kind.

Since therefore you alone govern the nature of things, since without you nothing comes forth into the shining borders of light, nothing joyous and lovely is made, you I crave as partner in writing the verses, which I essay to fashion on the Nature of Things, for my friend Memmius, whom you, goddess, have willed at all times to excel, endowed with all gifts. Therefore all the more grant to my speech, goddess, an ever-living charm.

And, while on the subject of Lucretius, we should mention as well our recent publication of Alison Brown’s The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence. Brown’s focus is the attraction that Lucretius held for Florentines in the hundred years after the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura. They were drawn, she writes, by three themes intrinsic to his argument: fear of death, evolutionary primitivism, and atomism. Brown tracks interest in Lucretius through direct quotations of De Rerum Natura itself, disproving the notion, put forth by some scholars, that Lucretius mostly reached Renaissance readers filtered through Cicero or Christian critics.

So, should any time with Stephen Greenblatt’s new book pique your interest in Lucretius, explore the poem in Loeb Volume 181, and consider wading through the Renaissance with Brown, in her short book that Greenblatt calls “an important contribution to a crucial chapter in the history of modern thought.”

Thomas Sargent Shares 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics

Our congratulations to Thomas J. Sargent, who shares this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics with Christopher A. Sims for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy. In 1987 we published Sargent’s Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory, along with its companion volume, Exercises in Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory, which was written with Rodolfo E. Manuelli. Our Lindsay Waters, who acquired those books for HUP, had previously published both Sargent and Sims while at the University of Minnesota Press.

The Nobel press release describes Sargent’s work:

Thomas Sargent has shown how structural macroeconometrics can be used to analyze permanent changes in economic policy. This method can be applied to study macroeconomic relationships when households and firms adjust their expectations concurrently with economic developments. Sargent has examined, for instance, the post-World War II era, when many countries initially tended to implement a high-inflation policy, but eventually introduced systematic changes in economic policy and reverted to a lower inflation rate.

And, further explanation via the Nobel website:

What happens in the macroeconomy when monetary policy systematically follows a Taylor rule, i.e., when the interest rate responds to changes in inflation and the business cycle in a pre-determined pattern? Or what happens if a central bank is instead given a mandate to maintain inflation close to two percent? Sargent’s analysis deals with the effects of such systematic policy rules and the consequences of changes in the rules for policy. Expectations are an integral part of this analytical approach.

Is it possible to determine whether changes in the economy depend on shifts in economic policy? Could such changes instead depend on fluctuations in the overall economy that prompt decision-makers to adopt a different policy? Sargent has examined these issues using a three-step method.

His first step involves developing a structural macroeconomic model, i.e., an accurate mathematical description of the economy. A number of parameters, which determine the relationships among different variables, are introduced into the model. For instance, if we know that consumers’ aggregate demand for goods and services is affected by the expected real interest rate, this relationship should be incorporated in the model. The parameters governing such basic relations should not be affected by the changes in economic policy. This includes preference parameters, which describe how individuals choose between saving and consumption depending on interest rates and income.

A Third Galileo

Works on Galileo have essentially shown us two views of his life and work—Galileo the astronomer and martyr of science, and Galileo the precursor of Newton. Mark Peterson’s new book, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, gives us a third view. Peterson’s is a Galileo with a more expansive understanding of mathematics than the other two familiar Galileos, one who is capable of a synthesis of the artistic and the mathematical in his own person, a Galileo interested in and indebted to Hellenistic culture.

Peterson, a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, explains the book’s origins:

The beginnings of this project were some observations about mathematics and the arts in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. I was especially intrigued by some mathematical ideas that I had noticed in Dante, unexpected mathematical sophistication centuries before Galileo. I also became fascinated with Galileo, and I began to wonder where he had come from. This question seemed to organize my thoughts. What was Galileo’s intellectual inheritance, and how did it form him? Galileo’s education was in the humanities and the arts, so the question is a sprawling one. And even that is not enough, because Galileo’s ultimate enthusiasm was for mathematics, and that is another broad intellectual stream. Where all these streams mixed, that is where Galileo came from, or so I imagined. To understand it, I had to follow the streams back to their sources.

The book summarizes the classical legacy in mathematics and the sciences, and contains chapters on the Renaissance arts of poetry, painting, music, and architecture. We learn, for instance, that Galileo’s favorite poem was Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto’s epic of love, chivalry, and madness. The thread connecting the book’s sections, writes Peterson, is mathematics: “Implicitly I ask, what did mathematics mean for the arts? And what did the arts mean for mathematics?”

The sections come together with Peterson’s reconsideration of Galileo himself, in light of all this background material on the various artistic traditions of which he was a product. What we have in Galileo’s Muse, then, is the surprising and extraordinary claim that it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. And, what’s more, Peterson presents a dramatic and convincing claim that the Oratione de Mathematicae Laudibus, a 1627 book attributed to Galileo’s young protégé Niccolo Aggiunti was actually written by Galileo himself, and should be read as confirmation of this “third” Galileo.

Mark Peterson spoke with us about Galileo’s Muse for an episode of the Harvard Press Podcast. You can listen here.

The Stephen Jay Gould Mosaic

We’ve just released new paperback editions of a collection of Stephen Jay Gould’s most fascinating and introspective essays, with cover designs that reflect the unity of science to which Gould devoted his life and writing. By themselves, each cover contains an element out of context, tough to understand on its own. Together, the covers form an image that makes sense.

Here they are, arranged in order at our warehouse, ready to ship:

And then here, on display at Reiter’s Books in DC:

The books in this collection are some of Gould’s finest, all displaying his typical erudition, warmth, and whimsy. They include Dinosaur in a Haystack, Full House, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and Diet of Worms, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, and I Have Landed.

So much of Gould’s work was dedicated to showing why a more accurate way of understanding our world is to look at a given subject within its own context, and not as the progress of an average value or single thing. These new covers, then, are intended to highlight the complexity of context, to demonstrate how much more we understand when we stop trying to look at things in isolation.

Our thanks to Sam Potts for the great design. And, if you all see a little room to grow in that mosaic, you’re not wrong. More to come!

Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the Schomburg Center

Last  fall, Khalil Gibran Muhammad was named the new Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This Wednesday evening, at a free public event presented in collaboration with the Harlem Arts Alliance, Muhammad will be hosting a kickoff to the new season at the Schomburg. Attendees can meet Dr. Muhammad, engage with Scholars-in-Residence, and tour the exhibitions on Malcolm X and Romare Bearden that are currently on display. In the exchange posted below, we asked Muhammad about his plans for the Schomburg Center and about the Center’s role in his own scholarship. His book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, will be available in paperback next month.

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Q. What was the role of the Schomburg Center in the research that you conducted for The Condemnation of Blackness? What particular sources in the Schomburg’s collections informed your work on the book?

The Schomburg Center has an extensive collection of the papers of social service and community organizations. Many of these organizations were pioneering in their efforts to assist African Americans and Black immigrants in New York during the early 20th century. The ravages of the industrial economy and the tightening vise of segregation created the need for organizations as varied as the YMCA, New York Urban League, Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, and the White Rose Mission and Industrial Association. The ideas and activities of talented black researchers and passionate grassroots activists are captured in the papers of these organizations. When I was a researcher at the Schomburg Center, I found the papers of two Urban League sociologists, George Edmund Haynes (1880-1960) and Ira De Augustine Reid (1901-1968), to be particularly helpful. They were both key voices in early debates about crime and policing in pre-WWII black communities.

Q. A place like the Schomburg is so valuable because it can be a resource for both the general public and for scholars. Can you describe the challenge of balancing the Center’s work on those two fronts?

I think of our mixed audience not as a challenge but as a real advantage in the marketplace of similar institutions. The fact of being the leading repository for black archival material within the New York Public Library, one of the world’s greatest library systems, means that academics and lay scholars will always find their way here. And with 120,000 annual visitors to the Center, we consistently have a broad and diverse public audience for programming, symposia, conferences, book talks, major historical and arts exhibitions, and performing arts. Open access to ideas is fundamental to democracy and to what we do. As a public research library we want as many people as possible to be inspired by and learn from the collection in the infinite number of ways human beings express and communicate knowledge. The challenge isn’t our audience. The challenge is finding the resources to fund our public mission at a time when funding for the humanities and the arts is declining.

Q. In general, what are your plans for the Schomburg Center?