Harvard University Press Blog

UP Week Blog Tour Round-Up

All this week the Association of American University Presses has been marking its 75th anniversary by highlighting the work of university presses and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and society. One really wonderful element of the celebration was the unveiling of “Fine Print*,” an online gallery presenting a single representative work from each of scores of American university presses. Do go have a look.

The week also featured a tour of university press blogs, with each stop along the way drawing out another element of the importance of the work we do. We were lucky to serve as the tour’s trailhead on Monday, when we heard from Anthony Grafton on the role that UPs have—and will keep—in the process of “dazzling and seducing” new generations of thinkers, scholars, and writers.

Below, we’ve collected short excerpts from just a handful of the many other terrific stops on the tour.

Doug Armato, Director of the University of Minnesota Press:

Over the past decades, university presses have sponsored scholarly work in areas that in many cases were discouraged or actively disparaged by university departments themselves—areas such as feminist studies, Chicano Studies, GLBT Studies, emerging areas of inquiry such as work on tourism, sports, and video games. Literary theory as a method flourished on the lists of university presses long before it had more than a toe-hold in language departments, presses focused on African-American history while vestiges of segregation still existed in universities themselves, even areas of science such as human genetics and cognitive science, once both thought of as marginal, were aided by the recognition provided by the presses at Johns Hopkins and MIT. Sometimes accused of rushing to "trendy" areas of scholarship, university presses at their best provide an alternate locus of accreditation for emerging areas of scholarship and scholarly method and, by working across institutional boundaries, help to correct for localized pockets of conservatism. As universities now address their budget crises by combining departments, shuttering interdisciplinary centers, and tightening tenure opportunities, university press imprints will be even more important to innovative and boundary-challenging scholars.

Judith “Jack” Halberstam, Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at USC, and many-time Duke University Press author:

If we are living at a time of crisis, and we obviously are, a crisis that has been manufactured by the overwhelming emphasis placed in our culture on money, the economy, work and business, then this is not the time to mount an elite defense of learning, genius and expertise, nor is it a time to emphasize a canon or to dig into idealizations of the book and print culture and excoriations of the screen and digital culture. Instead, our current crisis affords an opportunity to rethink the ways in which all of our forms of cultural media—print, visual and digital—work together and are interdependent. As books go electronic and can be carried around as part of a massive archive on a hand held device, new understandings of the library, of reading and of researching emerge. Now is the time for more not less products, more not fewer ideas, more range, more depth, more clarity and higher degrees of difficulty.

R. Bruce Elder, filmmaker, critic, Ryerson University professor, and Wilfrid Laurier University Press author:

Until recently, reality was understood through the model of the book, which provided a template for understanding government, politics, industry, and the academy as integrated, top-down assemblies of isolatable elements, as managerially hierarchical, conceptually compartmentalized, and stable. The model the new technical system has generated is heterogeneous and mutable institution, where meaning is continually novel, created through the interaction between an individual and the protean institution with which he or she has a fleeting relation. Under this model, standards of scholarship that were once universally endorsed (the notion of objectivity and the concomitant separation of facts and values) are abjured in favour of a more ecological conception of learning. In the midst of this transition, history has dispossessed us of the means for finding our bearings, and the resulting alarm has hardly been helpful.

My Blue-Bound Loves

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Association of American University Presses, of which we’re a proud member. To note the occasion we’re joining the rest of AAUP in celebrating university presses all this week with, among other exciting things, a University Press Week blog tour. This morning we’re happy to be serve as the tour’s first stop, and very pleased to offer a post from Anthony Grafton, past president of the American Historical Association and longtime HUP-author. Below, Grafton recalls how university press books introduced him to a world of discovery and argument as a young man, and explains how the importance of UPs in that process of discovery has only grown. After reading of Grafton’s “blue-bound loves,” head on over to the Duke University Press blog for the tour’s next stop, a post from the great Jack Halberstam.

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The first university press whose books I fell in love with was Oxford (the one in Oxford). As a teenager learning Latin and Greek in the 1960s, I used and loved slim, handsome Oxford Classical Texts. They looked like no other books. Their austere Latin title pages and severe dark blue bindings, so plain they were almost ostentatious, surely enclosed mysteries. In fact, they did: Virgil and Catullus, Tacitus and Homer. It wasn’t easy, in those days, to collect OCTs. Amazon was not even a gleam in a science fiction writer’s eye, and Blackwell’s seemed unimaginably distant. But somewhere there must be a realm where these treasures were more commonplace.

When I became an undergraduate, OCTs were suddenly available, in libraries and academic bookshops. But so were the products of dozens of other university presses, American as well as British. They revealed a whole world of discovery and argument. Looks still mattered, to a young reader. Happily, each great press had a visual as well as an intellectual style—from Harvard’s handsome, erudite studies in literature and intellectual history to Chicago’s raucous, generously illustrated investigations of popular culture. Every month, the new books multiplied. The new book table at the Seminary Co-Op in Hyde Park was a sight to make the bibliophile shudder with desire—and with panic, when several of these presses ran into financial crisis around 1970, and it looked as if some of them might close.

Happily, they survived. You can still find me, a couple of times a week, going through the new offerings at our local academic bookshop—and, more often than I should, carrying a pile of them to the cashier. And you can still accuse me, with perfect justice, of taking more interest than I should in their physical beauty. It’s true, I still love university press books for their bodies as well as their minds.

But university presses matter to me now for other, deeper reasons as well. First of all, they play a more distinctive role now than they did back in the day. In the Sixties and Seventies, trade presses took chances on erudition. Pantheon brought demanding, radical thinkers and writers like Michel Foucault and Eric Hobsbawm to the American market. Most of the university press books that I could afford were Torchbooks: paperback reprints, produced by a single commercial press, Harper.

The university presses formed one continent of a larger world of serious publishing. This was financed by the expanding libraries and course enrollments of the sixties, but also driven by ideals. Over the last thirty years or so, the universities have continued to grow, but the ideals seem to have shrunk—or at least migrated. Harvard, Chicago and MIT now print most of the high-risk titles. They bring European and Asian scholars and thinkers to the English-speaking world, and take chances on new writers in English as well. We need university presses because they refresh the wells of learning.

Second, the university presses matter because they keep up the Slow Food methods that make books that will last for generations. Back in the day, editors at every good house did more than acquire manuscripts. They knew their authors, suggested topics, offered criticism, underlined the purple passages that had to go and fought for the footnotes that had to stay. By doing so they kept up a tradition that began hundreds of years before, when Aldus Manutius and Johann Amerbach, the experimental scholar printers of the exciting years around 1500, realized that they had to hire highly educated staffers who could edit texts before they were printed.

Tracking Track Changes

In January, amidst a fairly widespread rush of media interest in the project, we took a look at Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes, a forthcoming study of how word processing software has affected the act and practice of composition. As we noted at the time, it’s a bit out of the ordinary for us to shine a spotlight on a book coming far enough in the future that we’d not yet even announced it in any of the traditional ways that publishers make things official. But this is a project that’s progressing in a more public manner than we’re accustomed to, at least at HUP.

It’s not as if scholarly projects are typically unknown prior to publication. In most cases, the work they present is the product of years of labor and countless discussions, conference papers, articles, seminars, etc. And it’s also not so out of the ordinary for a forthcoming book to be widely and eagerly anticipated well before we—the publisher—have offered details. Walter Johnson’s forthcoming study of Mississippi Valley slavery in the context of the histories of Atlantic capitalism and U.S. imperialism is likely as anticipated as anything we’ve ever had on the docket, for instance, and that’s despite our having made no public statement on the project thus far.

In the case of Johnson, though, the foreknowledge and early anticipation are largely within the academy. What’s different about Kirschenbaum’s book is the very public nature of the awareness, which, while surely a testament to his topic’s broad appeal, is mostly due to the open manner in which he’s conducting his work. In some respects this, too, is a function of the nature of the project, as when you’re seeking to answer questions about early users of word processing software it helps to have a megaphone making those users aware of your interest. But Kirschenbaum’s unveiled approach to scholarly production is also a hallmark of social-media-age academe, particularly within the digital humanities.

And, on that front, you don’t even need much personal interest in Kirschenbaum’s research project in order to benefit from his progress reports. In his latest, which you can read in full on his website, he contrasts the process of researching and writing his first book, 2008’s Mechanisms, with his approach this time through:

The backend of the [Mechanisms] project, meanwhile, was a mess. I wasn’t using citation management software. I kept drafts in bloated Word files with titles like “chapt 3 notes and fragments” that I would occasionally pick through to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything worthwhile. I didn’t use an outliner. I didn’t use Zotero or EverNote. Online sources? PDFs sat in folders alongside of HTML scraped from the Web using my browser’s Save As function. Somehow, though, I found my footing along the way and worked through to completing the text as a manuscript (which subsequently underwent review, revision, and copy-editing). At the last minute I sent frantic emails soliciting permissions for images. Luckily my publisher took care of the index.

For this new book, on the other hand:

Everything went into EverNote: PDFs, images, Web clippings, stray URLS, notes to myself, audio files, interview transcripts, email (which EverNote can ingest automatically upon forwarding to a dedicated address)—everything. The great power of the software is, of course, that it is searchable, and so a simple string search on, say, “Asimov” (he has a particularly interesting word processing story) instantly put dozens of entries at my fingertips. I also made sure to keep up with another resource I had begun early on, a spreadsheet documenting information about individual writers and their first computer or word processing systems. For well over one hundred authors I now have data as to when they got their first computer, what it was, and what was the first thing they wrote and published on it (this will go into the book as an appendix). In LibraryThing I created a dedicated tag for trackchanges, allowing me to browse a virtual bookshelf of titles in my collection related to the project, as well as export a catalog (which subsequently went into EverNote). I started to regularly use the #trackchanges tag on Twitter, and also began a Tumblr blog (which I’ve kept up with in fits and spurts—something I wish I could be more diligent about).

The post in which he shares these details takes off from the observation that “nobody teaches you how to write a book,” even in grad school, where the task is usually presumed to be in your future. So in sharing his process and pointing out what he knows this time that he didn’t know the first—and in encouraging others to do the same—Kirschenbaum is offering a resource that could very well help young scholars plan their own projects. And he goes well beyond the nuts and bolts to also detail the freedom to more fully conceptualize an academic book when not racing against a tenure clock.

And, of course, even as he’s working on this literary history of the earliest generations of writing software, he’s producing the kind of documentation likely to be of great interest to whomever tackles a project on their descendants: the Zoteros, Scriveners, and Evernotes that are revolutionizing the way scholarly books are written.

Tempting Titles for Stylish Academic Writing

We’re at the point now in our twice-yearly publishing cycle when the editorial types sit down with the othertorial types to work with authors on deciding the most appropriate titles for their forthcoming books. There’s much to consider in each case: What’s the book about? How well known is the topic? Who is the audience for the book? What’s the author’s reputation? What’s his or her writing style? And so on. In the following excerpt from Stylish Academic Writing, which we published this Spring, Helen Sword explains the importance of considering “paratext” and “subtext” in academic titling.

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Like a hat on a head or the front door to a house, the title of an academic article offers a powerful first impression. Is the title dry, technical, straightforward? Most likely, the author’s main goal is to transmit research data as efficiently as possible. Does the title contain opaque disciplinary jargon? Perhaps the author unconsciously hopes to impress us, whether by appealing to a shared expertise (“You and I are members of an exclusive club”) or by reminding us of our ignorance (“If you can’t even understand my title, don’t bother reading any further”). Is the title amusing, intriguing, provocative? Here is an author who is working hard to catch our gaze, engage our interest, and draw us in. In many disciplines, however, such a move goes against the academic grain and even contains a significant element of risk: a “catchy” title might well be regarded by colleagues as frivolous and unscholarly.

Several years ago, I attended a higher education research conference at which a presentation titled “Evaluating the E-learning Guidelines Implementation Project: Formative and Process Evaluations” was offered at the same time as one called “ ‘Throwing a Sheep’ at Marshall McLuhan.” Guess which session drew the bigger audience? “Throwing a sheep” is a method of getting someone’s attention on the popular social-networking Web site Facebook; Marshall McLuhan is the educator and media theorist who famously coined the phrases “global village” and “the medium is the message.” A delegate at a conference on higher education research could thus reasonably surmise that a presentation containing the phrases “throwing a sheep” and “Marshall McLuhan” would explore the role of social-networking Web sites in university teaching and learning. That expectation was confirmed in the conference program, in which a lively abstract spelled out the main argument of the presentation, gave further hints of the author’s penchant for quoting colorful student argot (“pinch, moon, drop kick, spank, poke, b#%*! slap, drunk dial”), and asked a series of questions aimed at the expected audience of educators and educational theorists.

AAUP Statement on the University of Missouri Press

In response to the planned closure and proposed reorganization of the University of Missouri Press, the Association of American University Presses yesterday issued the following statement:

In an op-ed article published in the July 15 edition of the Columbia Daily Tribune (“Fit for Print”), author and Missouri native William Least Heat-Moon has made a serious proposal to ensure the future of the University of Missouri Press. He calls on the President of the University of Missouri System, Timothy Wolfe, to rescind his decision, announced on May 24, to close the Press, and pledges that if he does so, Mr. Heat-Moon will give a “five-figure, initial donation for the establishment of an endowment to continue the Press in its present form.” His essay concludes, “I hope other people disturbed by the shuttering will join me with a contribution appropriate to their means. Mr. President, call me.”

In the article, Mr. Heat-Moon criticizes two proposals apparently being considered by the System administration. Under one, another university press would take over all the publishing activities of the University of Missouri Press except acquisitions in exchange for 85% of the sales revenue; it would return 15% to Missouri. Under the other, the Press would come under the management of the Missouri Review, which is published out of the School of Arts and Science on the Columbia campus, and largely staffed by students.

Whatever the merits of these plans, neither seems likely to inspire a renewed sense of intellectual vigor and grand purpose. What they have in common is the dismantling of an enterprise that has served the University and citizens of Missouri with distinction since 1958—and dismantling it, as Mr. Heat-Moon’s article points out, at the very moment it had achieved the financial goals previously approved by the System administration.

Surely the University and the state deserve better. We applaud Mr. Heat-Moon’s willingness, as the saying goes, to put his money where his mouth is. The Association of American University Presses doesn't have the financial resources to contribute to a fundraising campaign for the Press, but we do have other resources, including a wealth of information and professional experience, that we would be more than happy to contribute. Mr. President, call us.

Later in the day yesterday, the University of Missouri administration announced its plan for integrating the Press into a “campuswide model” dependent on student and faculty labor. The Columbia Daily Tribune reports that a number of authors have moved to pull their work from the Press in response.

Flattery Most Sincere

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, by Stephanie McCurry; published by HUP in cloth April 2010 and in paperback May 2012; cover design featuring William Bauly’s 1861 painting Fate of the rebel flag:

A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman; published by Random House in cloth June 2011:

And in paperback June 2012:

We’re blushing. 

The Essence of the Literary Experience?

Earlier this month, The New York Review of Books Blog featured a piece from Tim Parks called “E-books Can’t Burn,” which has since been much tweeted, facebooked, and otherwise shared. It’s a solid, considered defense of the e-book, one that rehearses all of the practical advantages of digital reading (portability, one-handed reading, resizable type, etc), and kindly but firmly dismisses the materiality that people are reluctant to leave behind (the feel of paper, the scribbling of marginalia, the books on our shelves). In his repudiation of the notion that there’s much lost with the transition to e-books, Parks writes directly against those “literary men and women” who are most loathe to see such change.

He notes that e-books are one more stage in the evolution of the material experience of reading:

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

More than just a defense, though, Parks actually argues for the superiority of the experience of literary reading done digitally:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Fetish-free direct engagement with the essence of the literary experience certainly sounds like a great thing. But this nearly-utopian vision overlooks quite a bit of the actual experience of e-reading. The very advantages provided by the e-book surely undercut its ability to fuse us directly with the text: We can read e-books with one hand while the other clutches a strap on a crowded, racing train; We can read e-books on our phones, with calls and text messages breaking in at their whimsy; We can read them on our tablets, where the internet just dares us to call it extraneous; We can read them on our Kindles, with advertisements and crowd-sourced annotations.

We’ll leave aside all the very real concerns about what happens to the quality of the literary experience when we’re all trained to expect books for $9.99 or less, and won’t do much beyond chuckle at the suggestion that our engagement with gadgets (gadgets!) could ever not carry fetishistic gratification. Because we’re not e-book haters, honestly. Some of our best friends are e-books.

But, despite his nods to reading as an evolving experience, what Parks has written feels a bit too much like a declaration of the end of (book) history. It’s a celebration of an apparently friction-free medium whose mediation we can’t yet actually claim to understand. The study of the history of the physical book should make this clear. It’s a discipline that didn’t even exist until recently (the scholar Peter D. McDonald suggests that 1982 perhaps marks its birth, noting the publication that year of Robert Darnton’s classic “What Is the History of Books?”). This field, which has seen so much incredible work in these three decades, surely teaches us that there is much to learn from studying the experience of reading, even if it took us centuries to take note. And the work of scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, who’s studying software’s impact on writing, should suggest that its impact on reading is similarly ripe for examination.

To be sure, this isn’t meant as another attack on e-books, nor a defense of print. But to suggest that we’ve come closer to “the essence of the literary experience” seems to take for granted that such a thing exists, when scholarship suggests that it doesn’t. Mediation is a wonderfully messy thing, even when it comes on sleek screens.

(Word) Clouds Before the Fall

A few of our Fall books have already been making their way out into the world, but it’s hard not to think of Labor Day as the point when autumn’s really here. So, before we get there, let’s take a moment to look back at some highlights from our Spring list, via their word clouds. Each book’s cloud shows the group of words that appear most often in the text; the larger the word’s font size, the more frequently it appears. They’re a nice way in.

Here’s the cloud for Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, by Daniel Richter 

 

Peter Fritzsche’s The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century

Toronto, Week One

This year, after the retirement of David Stimpson, longtime HUP/MIT/Yale sales rep John Eklund has gamely gone international, taking on much of Canada. Eklund, who was named Publisher’s Weekly’s 2011 Rep of the Year, blogs his travels and book industry insights at Paper Over Board. Below is a report on his first week of meetings with buyers at some of Toronto’s many terrific bookstores, and some reflections on the state of bookselling up north.

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I began my first week of appointments in Toronto with more than a bit of trepidation. Though everyone has been extremely cooperative in accommodating my proposed dates, I haven’t met and worked with this many new customers since the day I started this job in 1998.

There were some logistical challenges. Canada Post has gone on strike, but it means my obsession with sending catalogs early paid off. Then Air Canada agents called a strike, but neither of my flights was inconvenienced. Anyway, a country that has a labor movement with gumption, what a great concept!

I took the bus down to O’Hare on Sunday morning. The driver was a trainee - tentative, learning the ropes, a little awkward. But he had an experienced handler hovering over his shoulder, explaining the shortcuts and schedule tricks. “Never skip a stop no matter how far behind you get! You never know when somebody might be waiting.” I thought of this man as his David Stimpson, and took it as a good omen.

Continuing the theme of repping by public transportation, I took the Rocket from Pearson to the Kipling subway station. It was a smooth ride but “the rocket”- really? Still, I was downtown in an hour for $3.00. The train passed through far-flung stations on the Bloor line I’d never been in, and I saw beautiful institutional pastels on the walls - mauve, sea green, and a kind of pale butterscotch - that I hadn’t seen since elementary school.

I daydreamed about my first visit to Toronto in the early eighties. I spent a weekend at the decrepit Selby Hotel on Sherburne, in the room in which (supposedly) Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote for the Toronto Star. Feeling the literary vibe made it a little easier to ignore the roaches and the thumping cheesy disco in the basement.

There are precious few North American cities anymore where one might take a “book vacation,” but Toronto remains one of them. True, when bookselling and publishing elders gather, as they did at David’s happy, bittersweet retirement party at his beloved Pilot Monday night, the inescapable theme is “the good old days.” Stipulating that there were once many more bookstores selling many more interesting books, I’m still skeptical. Moms Mabley used to make fun of people who dwell on the good old days. “What good old days? When? I was there, where were they at?”

Be that as it may, I just spent a wonderful week visiting diverse and wonderful bookstores in a truly wonderful city. It’s the kind of trip I’d gladly make for fun, and I’m being paid for it! I’d been to many of these shops before as a customer, but it’s an entirely different thing to sit down with buyers to sell them the lists.

What were some of these places and personalities?

York University Bookstore, which features the kind of deeply scholarly trade inventory that was once routine in college stores before the sweatshirts took over;

The University of Toronto Bookstore, which is housed in one of the most beautiful rooms in book retailing;

Books for Business, a tidy, bright, smartly selective business specialty store in the financial district;

Marc Glassman, owner of the widely mourned Page’s Bookstore, is now juggling about a dozen book balls, including the Toronto International Film Festival shop and a clever reading series called This is Not a Reading Series. (Toronto is book event crazy. Like film festivals, there seem to be reading festivals of one kind or another every week.)

The wonderfully quirky and old-school charming Book City stores, a collection of local neighborhood shops which reminded me of Milwaukee’s legendary Harry W Schwartz chain, where I learned bookselling;

In Praise of Design, Regional Edition

As publishers, we keep company in various overlapping circles of the book business. One community with which we’ve had a long relationship is the Bookbuilders of Boston organization, which brings together people involved in book publishing and manufacturing throughout New England. Last night the group held its 54th annual New England Book Show, at which we were thrilled to see a number of our books recognized for their excellence in design and production.

In the category of illustrated general trade books, our annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, and the relaunched Image of the Black in Western Art series were both highlighted for their overall design and production, from jacket to layout:

In the reference category, The Classical Tradition got a nod for its overall design:

 

The following were all recognized as outstanding jackets in the general trade category, including a “best in category” award to our old sheepish pal: