Harvard University Press Blog

“A Masterpiece of Scholarly Production”

In the spring of 2016 we published a major new edition of Emily Dickinson’s verse, the only extant volume of Dickinson’s complete poems that distinguishes between those she delicately preserved in her storied fascicles and those she treated with somewhat less care. Painstakingly edited by Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller, the book is also the first annotated reading edition of Dickinson’s poems, as well as the first edition to include the alternative words and phrases Dickinson wrote on the pages of many of the poems she retained.

To have produced such a lovely and invaluable resource is its own reward, but we’re nonetheless extremely pleased to share that the Modern Language Association of America has named Miller’s volume co-winner of its biennial MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. The prize committee’s citation for the book reads:

Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them is a masterpiece of scholarly production, from layout and design to content. Cristanne Miller demonstrates how engaging with the materiality of the poems leads to new knowledge about the poet and her work. The care and attention given to the intricacies involved in Dickinson’s textual productions are striking. The clean presentation of the poems on the page allows readers to see the alternative phrasings with ease, and the introduction presents a welcome overview of Dickinson’s writing practices and the ways in which her work has been edited in the past. This outstanding edition helps make clear the complexity of Dickinson’s habits and how they have affected our understanding of her poetry.

From the beginning, we recognized the value of placing this edition alongside the open access Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA), on which we’d partnered with Amherst College, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, and a host of other institutions. On our website, we produced an index to Miller’s volume from which one can jump directly to the high-resolution images of the fascicles presented at EDA, allowing readers not only to read Dickinson’s poems “as she preserved them,” but actually to see those preservations themselves.

Our congratulations to Cristanne Miller on this well-deserved recognition for her wonderful work.

What Is a Good Talking Book?

As the first full history of recorded literature from Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph to today’s surging audiobook market, Matthew Rubery’s The Untold Story of the Talking Book documents a vibrant tradition of audiobooks extending back to the late 19th century, as well as the devices, formats, companies, and government entities that ushered them along. In doing so, the book addresses a number of longstanding questions: What difference does it make whether we read a book with our eyes or ears? Is listening to books really “reading,” or is it something else? What accounts for the curious sense of shame people sometimes feel for listening to books instead of reading them in print?

In the excerpt below, Rubery details early efforts by the American Foundation for the Blind, the Library of Congress, and others to define the purpose and parameters of the talking book. The embedded audio player presents the corresponding section of the audiobook edition of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, read by Jim Denison and available from Blackstone Audio.

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“What Is a Good Talking Book?” was the question posed in 1938 by Talking Book Topics, the AFB’s quarterly magazine. Once the talking book library had been established, its studios began to take an interest in quality as well as quantity. William Barbour, a former Broadway actor working for the AFB, singled out three characteristics: clarity, editorial accuracy, and artistic perfection. Above all, a good talking book faithfully reproduced the original book. “We demand that our readers preserve complete fidelity to the text which they are reading,” wrote Barbour. “We want those who listen to our books to feel that they are hearing exactly what the author wrote.” Exactly: the talking book was treated like the printed book in another medium.

For Barbour and many others, ink-print, talking, and embossed books differed only in conveying information via the eyes, ears, or fingers. The AFB’s policy of bibliographic equivalence assured audiences that they were reading the same books as every one else. This policy also sought to uphold the talking book’s legitimacy by aligning it with a familiar format rather than presenting it as something completely new. Listening to books might offer a pleasure all its own, but, if so, that pleasure was a secondary consideration. The goal was to allow blind people to participate in the same activities enjoyed by other people.

Talking books preserved the printed book’s features or at least a sense of “bookishness.” “Page” was often used instead of “side” to describe records, for example. The talking book was not only a spoken version of the book but also a bookish version of speech. The bibliographic emphasis ensured that talking books would be evaluated in terms of printed ones. Such fidelity rendered the experience of listening to a book as much as possible like that of reading one in print. The AFB embraced fidelity to the point that, in a few cases, narrators were asked to reproduce obvious errors (sometimes even spelling mistakes) in order to ensure that blind readers received the exact same treatment as other readers.

Talking books reproduced every word of the original book. The Library of Congress’s “Specifications for Talking Book Records” insisted that the wording be identical: “The Talking Book edition of any work should conform just as closely as possible to the text of the printed edition.” Scripts likely to be known by heart—the Bible, historical documents, favorite poems—had to be word perfect. Accuracy was stressed to ensure that talking books were treated as equivalent to ink-print ones. For instance, they recited verbatim the textual apparatus (front matter, acknowledgments, and so forth) skimmed or skipped altogether by the typical reader. The narrator of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy spent thirteen hours on the fifty-six-page index alone. Chapter headings, epigraphs, and other paratextual features likewise had to be read aloud; manuals instructed narrators to read footnotes at once since records had no page breaks. Educational recordings even cited page numbers in order to convey the source book’s layout.

A Screen of Her Own: Gay Courter’s The Midwife and the Literary History of Word Processing

Over the years that he spent researching and writing his literary history of word processing, Matthew Kirschenbaum was publicly sharing his findings via lecture, hashtag, and blog. The process of discovery that he was documenting doesn’t simply cease when a book goes to press, though, and the publication of Track Changes in May has in fact sparked a whole new round of revelation. Below, Kirschenbaum shares a major new find for this ongoing project.

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In 1977 Gay and Philip Courter purchased an IBM System 6 word processor. The System 6 was brand-new that year: although IBM had first introduced the world to the term word processing, and although competitor products consisting of keyboards and screens had been on the market since 1971, the unprepossessingly named System 6 was the first IBM word processor to have a CRT display. The 9-inch screen had room for eight lines of text, deemed adequate because this was about the same amount of type typically visible on a piece of paper as it came curling out of a typewriter’s rollers, bent under its own weight.

The plan was to use the word processor for routine office work in support of the documentary film company the couple ran. The machine was temperamental, and visits from IBM repair personnel to their home atop a steep hill near the Delaware Water Gap were frequent. Courter didn’t mind, though. She had quickly realized the word processor would allow her to do something that her domestic responsibilities had made otherwise impossible: write and publish her first novel. She began work on it in earnest in early 1977, shortly after the birth of their first child, and sold the rights to Houghton Mifflin two years later; The Midwife was published in February 1981. As a first-time novelist, she knew she had to do what she could to attract notice so she also wrote up a piece for Publishers Weekly that came out at the same time about her and other authors’ experiences using early word processors.

1981 is a pivotal year in my own literary history of word processing. Lots of things had happened that year: the Osborne 1 and IBM PC both debuted; Time magazine had written about writers and word processors (a year sooner than they anointed the personal computer their Machine of the Year); Isaac Asimov had had his first home computer delivered to him as part of a promotional ploy; and the New York Times had written about Jimmy Carter’s travails with his Lanier word processor. All of that is in the book, and much more. But I had missed Gay Courter’s story . . . until she recently wrote to me.

Unflattening Commended for Excellence in Humanities

Earlier this month, the Association of American Publishers announced the recipients of the 40th annual PROSE awards, which recognize the best works in professional and scholarly publishing. The submissions were judged on the noteworthiness and originality of their contributions to the professional and scholarly publishing world. Chosen to share the Award for Excellence in Humanities was Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis, which we published last spring.

As PROSE Awards Chairman John A. Jenkins noted in his address to the audience, “All PROSE Award winners from this year demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing the magnitude of professional and scholarly publishing through their pioneering works,” and Unflattening, an academic study in comic book form, is a testament to that commitment. Sousanis argues that we are taught to think in boxes and perceive ideas in a specific way, and Unflattening represents his effort to situate visual thinking in human experience in order to step outside the confines of thought prompted by written text. Addressing science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, Sousanis’s hand-drawn panels aim to show that perception is an active process of evaluating viewpoints. As editor Sharmila Sen explained to Inside Higher Ed, the book compels our brain to work on two planes, absorbing information sequentially and all at once, “push[ing] us intellectually, cognitively.”

This intellectual urging is representative of our efforts to explore new scholarship and give readers new ways of thinking about intellectual ideas. In an era when university presses seek to reflect the innovation that characterizes contemporary culture while still honoring our mission of disseminating thoughtful, scholarly works to the public, Unflattening represents a synthesis of quality scholarship and inventive thinking. The book has resonated widely, and was recognized by Forbes, The Independent, The New York Observer, Panels, and Print as one of the best books of 2015.

University Press Week 2015

This year’s University Press Week draws to a close today, and as in years past the event has offered a nice chance for AAUP member presses to pipe up about what we do when our heads are down.

One thing we do as much as anyone is think and talk about the future of scholarly publishing, as evidenced by UP Week Blog Tour posts from a number of presses of varying size and focus. The University of Georgia Press sees a future of partnerships and collaboration, in which the resources of a community are brought together to support continued pursuit of projects no commercial publisher would touch. Johns Hopkins UP also highlights collaboration, along with continued innovation and a focus on interactive and multimodal projects. Oxford University Press draws attention to the variety of business models evolving in step, and an increasing need to “serve as a bullhorn for thoughtful, empirical work in an arena of public debate that has become muddled by a rising drone of white noise.” All while Indiana University Press cautions against losing sight of “the human beings behind the monograph, the stories, the designs, the editing, and marketing.”

Along with all the forward looking, the week helps us keep sight of our past, and the University of Minnesota Press—celebrating its 90th anniversary this year—put together a great timeline of founding dates for members of the AAUP along with select other publishers.

For our part we offered a little case study into the design of a book cover, and we had great company in the effort to show how a book’s looks stay true to its contents while attracting the readers who know what they want and also some of those who don’t. MIT Press shows how the presentation of brain books has seen as much change over the decades as the scholarship contained within:

And Princeton UP goes even further, launching a really lovely Tumblr to showcase their always-lovely books.

Fiona Ross Wins Typography Award

Each year at its annual TypeCon conference, the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) presents the SOTA Typography Award to an outstanding member of the type community. We’re delighted to share the news that this year’s award was given to designer, researcher, and teacher Fiona Ross, with whom we’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating on the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI).

The MCLI—the first five volumes of which will see publication this January—makes available original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia. Even aside from the scholarly challenges of translating and editing these works, just preparing the digitally optimized regional typefaces for the vast array of Indian languages included in the library has been as monumental a project as any this Press has undertaken.

From the beginning it was clear that the involvement of Ross, a virtuoso of non-Latin typeface design and a pioneering negotiator of the relationship of technology and typography, would be essential. And so it’s been. To date, Ross and John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks have designed typefaces for Bangla, Hindi, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, all of which will be made available, free of charge, for non-commercial use upon publication of the first books in which each appear.

Tim Jones, HUP’s Director of Design and Production, describes the collaboration:

There is little I can do to truly express or explain how amazing it has been to work with Fiona and John on this incredible project. Fiona has taught me and everyone else here at HUP so much about the complexities and challenges of typeface design, and has shared a great deal of her unmatched knowledge of the history of non-Latin typography. Seeing her and John go from concept to final form has made all of us better designers. Fiona’s dedication to research and fidelity is inspiring, and her artistry seems unparalleled. That she is such a delightful and thoughtful person on top of it all is extraordinary. We feel very lucky indeed to be part of this effort alongside her.

The spread below shows Hudson’s and Ross’s work on the Murty Gurmukhi typeface for Panjabi text, as illustrated by the opening pages of Sufi Lyrics.

 Photo of SOTA Typography Award © Luke Dorny, via flickr

What Is a Scholarly Book?

University and academic presses have long been essential to the sharing of new ideas and challenging of old assumptions, a tradition we’re celebrating during this second annual University Press Week. This year’s focus is on the ways in which AAUP member presses are helping to drive innovation in both format and subject matter, and so today we’re pleased to offer a UP Week Blog Tour post from Harvard professor Jeffrey Schnapp on the future of scholarly communication. Schnapp is Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures, faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and general editor of the metaLABprojects series, the first three titles of which we’ll publish in June.

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What is a scholarly book? The question has an artificial ring to it even today, in the midst of a revolution that is steamrolling just about every sector of publishing, crushing longstanding assumptions but also clearing new spaces for experimentation and conversation.

To nearly anyone who has had the privilege of belonging to a research community over the course of the past century, the scholarly book has long seemed something of a given. And what was given was a set of conventions that, in the course of the twentieth century, gelled into verities that varied only slightly with respect to discipline and field. They encompassed notions regarding the proper scale and scope of a scholarly argument; the units that make such arguments up; the primacy of certain forms of evidence; standards of reference and proof; and a basic toolkit of argumentative units (from words to paragraphs to pages to subchapters to chapters). Bundled up into a discrete, compact, mechanically reproduced unit, nourished and sustained by university publishing, the structure in question has served the cause of learning exceptionally well over the course of the past century.

No wave of any digital magic wand is about to vaporize the scholarly book or the medium of print (any more than readers are about to give up their corporeality in order to evolve into pixels on an LCD). But as knowledge forms migrate to digital platforms along with nearly everything else, from culture and scholarship to archives and social networks, new alignments arise. Revolutions in media are never reducible to the mere substitution of old media by the new. Rather, they are about reshufflings of decks into which new cards have been inserted. This implies the emergence of new genres, norms, and forms. It also implies new hybridities that, in the case of the digital revolution, permit riffing off of convergences and divergences between the online and the offline, the digital and the analog.

The scholarly book was overdue for an overhaul and in my own work along the edges of what is now referred to as the Digital Humanities (but that I usually think of in terms of “knowledge design”), experimentation with new models and modes of bookishness has been a key concern. What could or should books become in the digital age? What medium-specific functions do we now want them to perform or relinquish? What’s the look of new or emerging knowledge forms when they find their way into print?

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. 

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

Many of us at HUP were saddened this week by the death of author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Among those most moved were editor Lindsay Waters and designer Jill Breitbarth, who remain grateful to Sendak for allowing our use of an illustration from his accompaniment to Joel Agee’s translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea on the cover of our 2004 book A New History of German Literature. Below, Waters and Breitbarth recall how we came to use Sendak’s work.

Lindsay Waters:

For me German culture came alive in the drawings and artwork of artists who fled to America before and after World War II, from the artists who made Little Golden Books, Stefan and George Salter, and the book designers and illustrators inspired by them. It was a style, a tone of dark forests where children get lost within seconds of losing sight of their parents, all of a sudden menaced by scary creatures. Maurice Sendak captured and developed this style to and beyond the point of vertigo. He went to the heart of what was scary in German culture, just as he’d journeyed to the heart of American darkness with Herman Melville.

Our New History of German Literature begins with a spell, an account of the very first document consisting of what is recognizably German language, something written on the back of a Latin manuscript which is held in the monastery at Fulda. The German literary tradition is enchanted. Who better to convey that complex history than Maurice Sendak, whose work helped so many to feel that chilling fright for the first time? So we approached him for permission to use one of the illustrations from his edition of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. It was like a dream come true when he decided eventually that our book was a project he was willing to be a part of. The person who’d made German language culture come alive for me was going to help bring our epic, thousand-page account of that culture to the world.

 

Jill Breitbarth:

Lindsay was eager to use one of Sendak’s illustrations from Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist for the jacket of A New History of German Literature, and I was thrilled to make a go of it. Getting permission to use the piece involved lots of phone calls between our camp and Sendak’s assistants. At one point, when a little tweaking was necessary, Sendak wished to speak directly with me. I was nervous thinking I would be talking with Sendak. I was such a fan.

We covered the design issues quickly and went right into politics. Sendak bemoaned the recent re-election of George Bush, that the war in Iraq had ever started, and that so many people close to him were dying. His passions were real and he had no qualms about sharing them with a person he’d never met. Sendak was respectful, and I felt I was talking with an honest man, sensitive to history and emotions.

The Murty Classical Library of India Has Its Design

Designer Andrea Stranger observes that “most designers have a book fetish.”

She came by hers honestly: while a student at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, she worked “less than part time” at the venerable Alexander Book Company. This past fall, her former employer there emailed to alert her to the contest we were holding to design the Murty Classical Library of India. Stranger took up the challenge, and you can see more of her elegant winning design over at the MCLI site. 

Stranger, who has done design work for clients as diverse as Kate Spade, financial services companies, and internet startups, has a broad interest in design—she says, “I’ll take pretty much any project you throw at me”—and relishes the creativity required to work in different arenas. Her primary objective is identifying a client’s needs.

In the case of the MCLI, which will present up-to-date English translations of classical works in languages ranging from Bengali and Kannada and Marathi to Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu, with the text in the appropriate regional script provided on the facing page, Stranger realized that the most important criteria were flexibility—MCLI required a design that could adequately represent diverse texts—and a look that honored both Western and Indian traditions.

She started by doing research on Indian visual culture, and shared some images from those and other inspirations with us to talk about how the design developed. 

 

 

Stranger saw the galley pictured at right while working at the Alexander Book Company. She was so struck by the text-driven cover that she read the book, and hung onto the galley, which she dug out from her parents’ basement for this photo. She says, “The simplicity of the design and materials stuck with me—and influenced the type-driven approach of the Murty design.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stranger says, “I looked at a lot of Indian architecture and found inspiration in the recurring shapes, color and intense use of pattern.” She passed along the image at right as an example.

 

 

 

 

 

When Stranger began researching Indian cultures for the project, she noticed that “the elephant is everywhere,” and realized that powerful cross-cultural associations with the animal, a symbol of wisdom, longevity, and strength in the West, made it “a worthy subject for logo exploration.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Textiles, like architecture, offered a lot of fodder for color usage and patterning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Kannada language,” she told us, “served as inspiration for a concept that did not move forward, but the letterforms (like all Indian languages) reinforced the idea of an organic beauty that seemed present in every aspect of my research of Indian design.”

 

 

 

You can see elements of each of these images in Stranger’s final design:

At the MCLI website you can view a slideshow of additional images of the design, and also read thoughts on Stranger’s work from MCLI General Editor Sheldon Pollock, design contest judges such as Peter Mendelsund, and Rohan Narayana Murty, whose endowment gift to Harvard funded the library’s creation.

We’re looking forward to seeing Stranger’s design in print on the first volumes of the Murty Classical Library of India in 2013, and we’re extremely grateful to her and to all of the other talented designers who submitted their work to the contest.