Harvard University Press Blog

A New Chapter for Harvard Book Store

Starting in the summer of 2023, for the first time in almost thirty years, Harvard Book Store will have two locations: their flagship store in Harvard Square, and a large new store in the Prudential Center in Boston.  For University Press Week, we wanted to show some bookseller love, so we reached out to Rachel Cass, General Manager of the Harvard Book Store to see what's planned for their exciting new location.  

Among the many challenges of opening a second location, a central question has been identifying what exactly makes us Harvard Book Store. In Cambridge, we sit directly across the street from Harvard’s Widener Library, with Harvard students and faculty walking by on their way to and from classes and tourists wandering in as part of their visit to one of the world’s most prestigious universities. While we are a general-interest, independent bookstore, unaffiliated with Harvard, the university is central to our neighborhood, our customer base, and our identity as booksellers.

In Boston, we will sit at the edge of the Prudential Center mall, at the base of one of the city’s most recognizable buildings and just up the escalator from the Prudential Center stop on the Green Line. It will see a different customer base than we have in Harvard Square. The readers who visit us in Boston will no doubt love books just as much, but from a perspective that is less directly academic: residents and office tenants of the Prudential Center Tower, tourists awaiting their scheduled Duck Boat tours, and shoppers exploring the mall and the surrounding Back Bay neighborhood. So what does it mean to be Harvard Book Store in that space?

What I have always loved about independent bookselling, and bookselling at Harvard Book Store in particular, is that it is the ultimate liberal arts profession, if we consider liberal arts to mean a commitment to well-roundedness and the pursuit of ideas. A bookseller gets to be interested in anything and everything, regularly giving recommendations for history books to one customer and romance novels to the next. It reminds me of my freshman year, when I took courses in mathematics, English, sociology, political science, French, and art history and danced at 80s Night to unwind. While trade publishers encompass much of that range, it is university presses that add the variety and rigor to truly capture the ideals of the liberal arts and run with them.

At Harvard Book Store, university presses are an important part of how we set ourselves apart and add depth to our shelves. We feature scholarly titles in our New Releases email each week, we have a display of Academic New Arrivals near the front of the store, our Publisher Focus window often features academic presses, and it’s not uncommon to find stacks of important Harvard, MIT, and Princeton University Press books on our featured displays. To be sure, the scope of our university press selection reflects the academic community around us, but it also speaks to the ways we strive to make our inventory well-rounded. Our Romance section, which has expanded significantly in recent years, sits in the same room as our large Philosophy and Cultural & Critical Theory sections. It is this juxtaposition that I keep coming back to when I think about what makes us Harvard Book Store.

In addition to the ways that university press books are featured in our store, they add nuance to nearly every section. For example, in our U.S. History section, we carry a wide selection of titles across all aspects of American history, but it is local university presses that bring us books on the history of innovation in Cambridge or a topographical history of the city of Boston. Beyond local interest, university presses are not afraid to explore the tiniest corners of a subject, or the big ideas that can change a person’s thinking. They unearth obscure history, ask about the implications of the latest technology, analyze political movements, and follow the threads of the most challenging questions. Even in our genre fiction sections, university presses add variety with once-forgotten backlist titles and works in translation.

In many ways, university presses embody what it means to be independent. Committed to intellectual freedom, they are also as varied as the universities that sponsor them. Much like independent bookstores, each university press has its own voice and perspective. That combination—booksellers and customers curating a selection from among highly refined and idiosyncratic catalogues—can be magic. You will not walk into any other bookstore and see the exact inventory of books that you will see at Harvard Book Store. And the books that we carry in Boston will not be identical to those we carry in Cambridge. But the method and philosophy and ideals that put them there will be the same.

Of course, a bookstore is much more than just the books within it. It is the booksellers and the customers and the conversations that happen over books and awards and current events. But the selection of books does tell a big part of our story, and this year’s University Press Week theme, #NextUP, is a fitting one for us, as we look toward the next chapter in Harvard Book Store’s story. It is my hope that, with the help of our university press partners, we will be able to find ways to continue our commitment to ideas and a spirit of constant learning, and make a home for Harvard Book Store and for readers at the Pru. 

Publishing (and Promoting) a Book during a Pandemic

This year challenged the way people do many things. For Justin Reich that meant rethinking how to promote his new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, published in September. With bookstore tours and readings out of the question, Reich came up with an idea to get the word out about his book.

On March 24, I submitted the final copyedits for my new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Schools across the country had begun to shut down, and many parts of the country would follow into lockdown soon after. The book release was planned for September, right in the midst of back-to-school season, and over the course of the spring it became very clear that I wouldn’t be doing any kind of traditional academic book tour.

While planes were grounded, I came up with the alternative of conducting an online book club. We would meet for one hour every Monday afternoon for ten weeks of discussion, one session for every chapter in the book. The goal was to create a format where interested readers could have some structure for reading the book with a community, get some expert commentary, and have a place for discussion and reflection. Each session had a one hour live conversation that we edited down and then released as a podcast episode.

I hired my dear colleague Audrey Watters to serve as a co-host for the series, alternatively joining as subject matter expert or co-host for the discussions. Each session had one or two guests, sometimes joining as experts on the topics and sometimes joining as subjects from the chapter of the book. I encouraged guests to bring a sense of “friendly pugilism” to the discussion; I was worried that folks might be too friendly as guests, so I actively encouraged them to find points of disagreement that could make for lively discussion.

Each episode had a basic run of show, at least to give us something to deviate from. We did introductions by asking guests to tell their “edtech story,” a memorable experience from their teacher or student days encounter with education technology. Then either a guest or Audrey would give a short rundown of the main idea of the chapter, both to help orient people who didn’t read the book in time and to provoke some thinking among listeners. The next section was “Stump the Chump,” borrowed from the great Car Talk segment, where I asked guests to reflect on what I missed or got wrong in the book. Usually by this point, some good questions or lively dialogue would have gotten underway in the chat, and so at some point we could often continue the conversation using questions from the audience. Typically, that plan was enough to fill an hour of conversation.

I was grateful for the terrific group of participants that came together. We had about 600 people sign up for the book club, and the early chapters got 100+ live attendees, dwindling to about 50 or so by the end (there is a MOOC attrition joke in here somewhere). The participants were educators, education researchers, and technology designers; I was particularly pleased that we recruited several folks with titles like “Director of Learning Science and Research” from some prominent edtech companies. The group included many of the kinds of people from industry who I hoped the book would be in dialogue with. I suspect that I would have spoken with more people on a ten city/university book tour, but I had a much deeper engagement in this format.

Most of the mechanics of hosting and recording the book club were handled through Zoom. I used the Zoom webinar feature to create a recurring 10-session series, and then participants could just sign up once for every session.

Other than Zoom, we had two websites for the project. A book website (failuretodisrupt.com) advertised the book club, and we set up a simple Discourse discussion forum site where people could discuss the book in advance of the sessions.

In my lab at MIT, the Teaching Systems Lab, we conduct design research on online learning, so we have a talented production team on call, who remixed all of the episodes and are in the process of publishing the refined versions on our podcast, TeachLab.

Throughout the fall, I settled into a familiar routine for communicating with all of the stakeholders. On Friday, I emailed a run of show to the following weeks guests and added them as panelists to the Zoom webinar. On Sunday, Zoom sent an automated reminder to registrants. On Monday, myself, guests, and Audrey showed up about 30 minutes early for some chitchat and a soundcheck, and then we chatted with everyone for an hour. On Tuesday, I sent an email to registrants with a Zoom link to the recorded webinar and a preview of the next week’s discussion.

When everyone gets vaccinated, I still hope I have a chance to travel around and discuss ideas from the book with colleagues in person. But in the future, if you have to release a book in the midst of a global pandemic, I can recommend online book clubs as an enjoyable way to generate interest, connect with readers, and build community.

Benjamin’s Arcades at 20 Years

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the English translation of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at HUP, reflects on its publication history.

I was asked to join with Howard Eiland, David Rodowick, and Bill Brown at events at Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago and at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge last month to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the HUP publication of the translation of the book by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Here, now, it might seem easy to imagine the decision to publish not just The Arcades Project but also the Selected Writings was an easy decision. It was not. HUP has by now published 3,000 pages of the writings of Benjamin. He has become very famous in certain households, a secular saint, the most venerated literary critic in the Western world. But let’s not get carried away. Perhaps you saw Carrie Brownstein try to talk up Benjamin to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show recently, and she drew a blank from him. Benjamin is not a household name yet. People still keep using the Sprockets accent to pronounce his name: Valter Benyamin. But I still have a job, although I can easily imagine that my effort to publish Benjamin, the four volumes of the Selected Writings and The Arcades Project, might have turned out to be Lindsay’s Folly. People might have said: Waters seemed to have a promising career publishing books in economics, philosophy, and literary theory at the University of Minnesota Press. With almost no resources at his disposal, Waters, at his Little House on the Prairie, in a cinder block building hard by the wellspring of the Mississippi River, beside the bleachers where the Golden Gophers played football, did well enough. And then he came to Harvard where there were serious resources for publishing. He wasted them trying to revive a forgotten schlemihl who’d failed his PhD qualifying exams. Lindsay’s Folly and his ending, RIP.

Didn’t turn out that way. The twentieth anniversary of the publication of this huge tome might be a moment to stop and catch a breath. There is still more of his work that needs translating and editing. The hunger for his writing has only grown and grown, as Eric Banks’s essay “Walter Benjamin’s Afterlife” in the Chronicle of Higher Education of March 21, 2014, lays out how Benjamin’s name has grown since the time he died until today—grown from nearly no references for forty years to a high of 775 references in 2007. His close friends, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, had worked hard to keep his name alive after his death in 1940. Adorno had arranged for the publication in 1950 of perhaps his most appealing work, his masterpiece in fact, his Berlin Childhood around 1900, in a deluxe slipcase edition with the case covered with a watercolor of the River Spree coursing through Berlin in the early twentieth century. It did not sell.

But a two-volume selection of his essays appeared in Frankfurt in 1955, the Schriften, and two volumes appeared in English from Harcourt Brace, and that led to a major essay by Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker, which won him additional readers. However, another essay by Arendt published in Der Merkur for January/February 1968, along with an essay by Helmut Heissenbüttel, reviewed the volumes Schriften and Briefe so critically that it caused Adorno to protest for himself and Scholem that “she would make us who alone kept him above water into his murderers.” But the two volumes of Schriften found readers in Europe, including Paul de Man, who was teaching at Zurich in the ’60s and who was the person from whom I learned decisively that people should begin to learn more about Benjamin’s writings. DeMan influenced me primarily by how much he changed his critical practice after he turned against Heidegger and Benjamin replaced him as his critical lodestar. I think primarily of the way de Man seized upon what Benjamin wrote about the facies hippocratica in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. But then I explored more and realized there was much, much more to Benjamin.

He was a veritable critical Atlantis, a buried island, a buried civilization under water in need of recovery, which it became my job to resurrect with help. When we began to talk with Siegfried Unseld of Suhrkamp Verlag about seriously publishing Benjamin in English at Harvard, just after I moved to Harvard from Minnesota in 1984, he wrote me on September 20, 1984, and gave me a proposition for a plan. In that plan, he suggested almost as an afterthought that we publish “a selection of the Passagen-Werk, which reduces the text to less than half.”

When we took the plan of Unseld for the Selected Writings and developed it, we presented it to the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics with numerous letters of support. At the Syndics discussion, sociologist Daniel Bell became its champion and fended off objections about why we should publish the writings of a homeless man who’d never finished his dissertation and never wrote a proper book. The series of the Selected Writings began to appear in 1996. There were two critical issues to solve: should we publish the entire Passagen-Werk and how should we talk about it when we presented it to the world, as an unfinished and incomplete work or as a complete work?

Since we are celebrating The Arcades—Das Passagen-Werk in English—at twenty, let me recall its inception. I can see from the HUP records that the Press made a distinct decision to publish the PW in its entirety after we got the Selected Writings moving. I cannot remember exactly how this happened, but it makes sense that it did, because doing so meant going beyond what was suggested to the Press by Siegfried Unseld, and to do so was going to take a special effort. I presented the project to the Syndics in June 1988. We had presented to them in March 1985 the preliminary plans for an edition of the selected writings of Walter Benjamin. At that time Syndic Daniel Bell had “advocated a fuller selection, one that would give a better sense of the man and all the facets of his thought.”

The discussion of the PW translation with the Syndics led the Press to commit to translate the complete book as originally published in German in 1982, and the scholarly reports provided the guidance for how to talk about the book in publishing it. The then Harvard professor T.J. Clark argued that the Press should decide to publish the book, because this decision was on the same order as Penguin’s decision, “a decade or so ago, to do Marx’s Grundrisse in English.” He added, “The comparison is not frivolous, it’s very close. In both cases we have to do with a long, unfinished piece of writing, obviously in some sense ‘work in progress,’ and difficult to translate. In both cases it is the sheer stature of the writer, and the crucial place of the text in his work, that makes it essential that the text enter the English language. In one sense, the case is even stronger with Benjamin, since the Passagen-Werk is his Capital—for better or worse.”

Tim Clark’s advice to the Press was prescient. The book turned out to be not a white elephant, a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness. That this publication would not turn out to be Lindsay’s Folly was testified to by the appearance in the New York Times for January 16, 2000, of a front-page story in the “Arts & Leisure” section by Hubert Muschamp that began this way: “Some of us don’t read fiction. We live on history, biography, criticism, reporting and what used to be called belles-lettres. We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects for years to come.” Our book was on its way to being recognized as a modernist masterpiece, like Eliot’s The Wasteland, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Dylan’s The Basement Tapes—all these “unfinished” works that were as finished as their composers could make them before they died.  The debate Mike Jennings, Howard Eiland, and I had among ourselves was how to handle the unfinished nature of The Arcades. Once we published our edition, Mike argued that we should republish the book in the order that some researchers had discovered, but we decided not to do that. Stanley Cavell seems to me to have captured the truth of the matter when he declared inArtforumof the book Suhrkamp and we published: its incompleteness “strikes me as constituting its aura of modernity.” In this book, Benjamin wrote that in shopping malls he had discovered the secret history of the bourgeoisie and liberated the suppressed history that lays underneath the ideological masks. The greatest single testimony to the effectiveness of the book is a book that mimics it in its essentials, right down to duplicating the Parisian arcades with the Parisian Palais-Royal, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch. We did not know what we had on our hands when we began to publish Benjamin, but it turned out to be something great.

Remembering Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, the literary critic who championed the Western canon, died at age 89 last month. Lindsay Waters, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities, looks back on their publishing history, their friendship, and Bloom’s great contributions to the literary community.

Harold always lived at 179 Linden, New Haven. Always. “Send the book to my home address. Do you have it? Are you sure? I really need that book.” “Yes. Have it. Will do.” So it’s hard, almost impossible, to remember that he and Jeannie almost moved to Cambridge, Mass. For years no name said Yale as forcefully and clearly as Harold Bloom. I first met Harold when he and nearly the whole Yale School of Critics picked me up at the New Haven Amtrak station in 1981 so I could have lunch—not with all of them, dear God!—but with Paul de Man. Paul could drive, but he did not drive so well, as all the dents and nicks in his car made clear. Harold could not drive at all; Jeannie did. Even then it felt a lot like I was being picked up by all the Marx Brothers, everyone doing their own schtick; looking back to that moment feels funny, fills me with nostalgia.

But back to that moment: I’d been picked up by Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, and Groucho, but my lunch date was with de Man. Still, there they all were—Paul, Harold, Geoffrey Hartman, the heart of the group, missing only Hillis Miller—in a car driven by Renee, Geoffrey’s wife. So they picked me up and drove Paul and me to lunch, not at cozy Naples Pizza, a favorite of Yale Comp Lit, but at Mory’s, a place that might have been as comfortable as Naples when it originated in 1849. Was de Man trying to impress me by taking me to “the tables down at Mory’s”? That was not like him, but who knows? Maybe. The rest of them disappeared. How perfect! I’d already published the new edition of Paul’s Blindness and Insight. Paul and I were in business together. We’d met in Chicago and Minneapolis before. I remember during our lunch at Mory’s asking him about Hans Robert Jauss, for whose book he had just written the introduction for the THL series. I asked him if he thought Jauss, whom I was about to publish, was the equivalent of Erich Auerbach. He tried gently to lower my expectations. In fact, de Man’s introduction had itself been a subtle skewering of Jauss. I did not know Paul so well, as well as I’d come to know him. And I had no idea how close de Man was to Bloom.

Harold’s name was synonymous with Yale for me as a humanities editor from the University of Minnesota Press—Harold, as I said, not a member of the Bush family or William F. Buckley, Jr., author of once-famous God and Man at Yale and then famous for his TV show Firing Line, and a hero to my mother, a conservative Catholic. A few years later, after Paul had died in 1983, I had business with Harold. This would have been 1987, the year Harold gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and dallied in false surmise, to use a Miltonism, the false surmise being that he might move to Harvard. He negotiated for months with Derek Bok, Harvard’s president, and then decided against moving. I would experience the complications of negotiating with Harold several times. Nothing was too small to fuss over. But the very chance that he might move and the fact that he was delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard helped make the year 1987–1988 a very exciting one for many of us in Cambridge. Those lectures, after touch-and-go negotiations with Harvard University Press director Arthur J. Rosenthal, a publisher as exciting in his own behavior as Professor Bloom, became the book Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (HUP, 1989). What we did not know when Bloom delivered the lectures, and what he probably did not know himself then, was that the book would be the trial run, the off-Broadway tryouts, for what would become his most famous book of the more than fifty books he wrote: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994).

When he accepted the commission to deliver the six Norton Lectures, Harold told Derek Bok that he would not take up the residency at Harvard normally required of the Norton lecturer. “I told them I’d come up for one day only for each lecture over the course of six weeks.” But, having bargained Bok into an arrangement that would see him at Harvard for only six days, Harold in effect moved up to Cambridge for the entire academic year! He was everywhere. We could not get rid of Harold. If the mountain would not move to Bloom, Bloom moved his mountainous self and enterprises with him for a year.

Why is The Western Canon so like Ruin the Sacred Truths? “I write only one book,” before lapsing into deli talk from the Lower East Side: “It is like a very long sausage. I cut off so much here and so much there.” This was, as I said, the trial run for the Broadway show. Harold delivered his pre-Broadway performance at Harvard’s great Memorial Hall, the building constructed to honor the Harvard grads who had died in the Civil War. Think of The Western Canon as Paradise Lost and Ruin the Sacred Truths as the “brief epic” Paradise Regained.

Keep in mind that picture of the Yale Critics crammed into a car—making room for one another to fit—because, although Harold Bloom might seem like the ultimate lone literary superstar, he was, I’d contend, and that is the point of this remembrance of him, always a team player, someone who thrived best when he struck up alliances with others, and those others did not need to be like-minded to become enlisted in his work. Michael Dirda wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Bloom has always been, to echo Kipling, a cat that walks by himself” (Oct. 11, 2019), but I beg to differ. In fact, he ground out much more sausage, if you will, when he had others around him to spice it up.

For all his weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth—all his kvetching about the ruination of the American academy—he kept at his lectern until the end, until just before he died, in fact. Inside the university he had lifelong relations with many, and especially with some. I bring as evidence for what I am contending information about two special people in particular, Paul de Man and Angus Fletcher. He loved John Hollander and Richard Rorty, and he admired Mark Edmundson and David Bromwich. He did not have much use for some famous colleagues. Some had no use for him. I have somewhere a list of the people in the department who voted to deny him tenure. He was unusual, and he had a taste for the unusual. For example, he was inspired by Victoria Nelson, someone whose work I introduced him to, and he was devoted to her books and supported my publishing two of them, one of which, The Secret Life of Puppets (2002), won the MLA prize for best book in comp lit despite the author’s lack of professional credentials.

He would have been categorized by many as a literary theorist, especially since helping to develop the books Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) and Romanticism and Consciousness (1970). But he was not, I’d contend, a theorist like his great friends de Man and Fletcher, and he acknowledged this repeatedly. He was a lover of poetry with a photographic memory. He was also a critic, one who could say what he loved and why, like Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. He was what Nelson George calls “a hanging critic,” someone who would condemn what he did not like, as he did Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, Jorie Graham, and J. K. Rowling, to name some of those he strongly criticized.

But his connections with Paul and Angus were deeper, abiding, and loving. Harold writes in The Western Canon about how the “long, frequently irascible relationship between Quixote and Sancho is the greatness of the book” (131). This captures the relationships between Bloom and de Man and Bloom and Fletcher. Bloom was hardly a solitary. He was not Hamlet, standing alone on the battlement. As he said, he was Falstaff at loving war with Hal.

Harold always maintained that there was one person superior to him in his generation, and that was Angus. They’d met when they were each starting graduate school in English at Yale in September 1951. As he tells the story, Harold wandered disconsolately into the lounge of the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale, where he heard a “vigorous performance of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Piano. Sitting down, I listened to its percussive splendor being played by a yellow cowlick bobbing up and down behind the piano.” Beneath that cowlick was “a splendid Scottish youth,” as he wrote in a foreword to the Princeton edition of Fletcher’s Allegory (2012). In one of the two books Bloom published in 2019, he gave repeated testimonials to Angus’s friendship and mind. He wrote, “Of all the literary critics of my own generation, I was always most allied to Angus. I cannot accept that he is gone” (Possessed by Memory, 343). In this book he praised Angus for being in tune with the natural world. There is truth to this. But I believe the deeper reason for their ongoing friendship was that Angus was much more of a thinker than Harold ever was, and that in their nearly daily phone calls to discuss each other’s writing, Angus pushed and probed and forced the fanciful Bloom to make his writing walk on the earth and engage in argument. Harold wrote a stunning blurb to describe Angus for the cover of his HUP book Colors of the Mind: “He is an Orphic seer, a curious universal scholar of Renaissance vintage, a fusion of the best traits of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, his true peers.” This tribute sounds great and stirring, but it misses the way Angus continually sliced through Harold’s verbiage. No wonder Angus loved Harry Frankfurt’s book on bullshit! I, too, had the experience of Angus’s continually and sharply cutting through my waffling. I am sure he tried to cut through Harold’s, too. And if those books of Harold’s speak to general readers, as it is clear many of them do, it is, I’d contend, because of how Angus in effect edited them working over the phone with Harold.

If Harold argued with Angus, he argued just as much with Paul de Man. De Man loved Walter Benjamin; Harold did not—he loved Walter Pater. In a story Harold told me in 1996, he recounted how once upon a time he ran into Paul at the Yale Coop. Harold was teaching Freud that day and was carrying five or six books by Freud to his class. Paul laughed at him when he saw him juggling the stack of books, and asked: “Why are you carrying the contents of the Sterling Library to your class?” Paul was carrying one slim book of Walter Benjamin’s essays! Paul laughed at Harold for being so devoted to Freud, not that he disbelieved Freud, but he thought all Freud said was common sense. What really upset Harold about Paul was the way he taught and how he created magic circles of acolytes around himself. There was something mystical and mystifying about his teaching style that caused students to grant him some inexplicable control over them. He complained to me that he loved Paul but did not love his effect upon me: for too long I did not understand that I was too devoted to him.

When people rose against de Man after the discovery that he had written for a collaborationist newspaper in 1942, and then others kept coming forward to attack him with more sensational charges, Harold never disowned him. He remembered Derrida calling him to tell him dramatically that “we must fight” to save our friend’s reputation. What Bloom said to me was that he’d have nothing to do with such fights. “What happened is between the soul of our late friend and God, if there is a God. I consider the attacks on him to be an offense and obnoxious. My thought is that nothing in the attacks is untrue and none of it matters. The wild publications reveal a certain astonishing lack of responsibility.”

I remember that when Adam Begley wrote a profile of Harold for the New York Times Magazine and I was quoted as having a favorable opinion of Harold, a Harvard colleague wrote to tell me he was surprised to read that. I knew that many people were suspicious of Harold. I had my own questions about some of his work, but in the battle about literature and politics that emerged in the 1980s and has continued unabated, I was always on his side. He remained a true friend to my best friends de Man and Fletcher, and he revered and supported other friends and authors Miriam Hansen and Victoria Nelson. He was a champion of literature. I will miss him.

Social Media and Scholarship (and Impeachment)

On November 10th 2016, it was reported that Google searches for “How to impeach a president” had increased by 4,850%. Fast forward a year, and impeachment is still frequently discussed—and still widely misunderstood. And so last week we published Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, by Harvard’s Cass Sunstein. An urgent addition to our fall list, the book provides an essential guide to what every American should know, and answers important questions like “who impeaches the President?”, “does impeachment mean the president has to leave office?”, and “is impeachment a criminal proceeding?”

This University Press Week we’re joining our sister presses in considering how our publications can cut through the noise and provide the facts. And, just as discussion of impeachment has swirled on social media, social media can help spread word of an important work of scholarship intended to ensure that the swirl’s better informed. Below, alongside a video of Sunstein produced by the virally-minded Big Think, Sunstein’s editor Thomas LeBien writes of the necessity of publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

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For the purposes of this post, you could translate the subtitle of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, as follows: Social Media Doesn’t Contribute to Anything—You Do. Probably there is no one better than a university press editor to remind everyone that, in sentences, subjects and objects matter. Just as it does for citizens in a republic, it matters a great deal if you imagine that social media acts on you and not the other way around. Put differently, I am less focused on whether social media has contributed to the success of a university press initiative than I am on whether thousands upon thousands of individuals have used social media to help spread word of important new scholarship. And that has very much been our hope in publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Here’s a useful irony. Sunstein has done more than his share of scholarly work to focus the world’s attention on nudges, choice architecture, and the dangers of Internet cyber cascades that encourage each of us to live in a news bubble of the like-minded. Here again, the subtitle to Sunstein’s current book is important. Impeachment isn’t a book aimed at just some citizens—for subsets of people who spend time on Twitter and Facebook loathing or lauding a president or political party. It hopes to inform citizens collectively. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein wrote the book without so much as mentioning the current president. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein did not write a book pitched at impeaching someone, but rather wrote a book pitched at guiding American citizens through the Constitutional impeachment mechanism and how it works.

This means, when it comes to social media, that this book should serve as a useful guide for anyone, on any point of the opinion spectrum, thinking about whether and how (and how not) to impeach a president. And therein lies the most vaunted hope. Commercial publishers have become ever more skilled at using social media to toss chum to the like-minded. University press publishers, guided by their non-profit mission, aim to allow readers to use social media for a different purpose. Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide came to be because there was a crying need for authoritative expertise on impeachment. If, as some of Sunstein’s prior scholarship suggests, social media is a vast echo chamber of divisive opinion, then it matters—especially for those of us working to disseminate scholarly insights—that some of those opinions are better informed.

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Head on over to the blogs of Johns Hopkins University Press, Athabasca University Press, and Beacon Press for a few more thoughts on social media and scholarship, or check out a list of everything offered up on the 2017 University Press Week Blog Tour.

Recognition for Translators

Since 1986, the French-American Foundation has awarded annual translation prizes for the best translation from French to English in fiction and nonfiction. We’re extremely pleased to see the translators of three HUP projects among the five nonfiction finalists for the 2017 prize: Nicholas Elliott, for his translation of Michel Winock’s Flaubert; Catherine Porter, for her translation of Élizabeth Roudinesco’s Freud: In His Time and Ours; and Jane Marie Todd, for her translation of Olivier Wieviorka’s The French Resistance.

The Foundation conducted interviews with each of the finalists about the path that brought them to translation, their process for translating, and the life of the translator. Elliott, who shared the 2013 Translation Prize with Alison Dundy for their work on another HUP book, Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, spoke of the “lonely business” of translation:

The translator works alone and must aim to be invisible. Some of the books I translated have received long, glowing reviews that omit to mention the translation. I have come to accept that for a translator, particularly a translator of non-fiction, not being mentioned is equivalent to a good review. Most readers would prefer to pretend there is no translator between them and the author.

And of how translating Winock’s biography deepened his sense of Flaubert’s greatness:

His sentences can be difficult, his word choice occasionally obscure to the modern reader, but once I made my way through the thicket, often by consulting a nineteenth-century dictionary, I always found him astonishingly precise. I understood the famous stories about Flaubert agonizing for days over a single word and was thankful to him for the effort—I never had to guess at his meaning, which is the worst situation for a translator to find himself in when translating a dead or otherwise uncommunicative author.

Porter offered advice to aspiring translators:

Revise! And then do it again, and again, and again… Another piece of advice I’ve found myself giving to undergraduates who think they may be interested in translating fiction or nonfiction professionally is to read the New York Times and Le Monde (or comparable target and source language newspapers) every day. This usually surprises them, but I try to convince them that it’s important for translators to be informed about a wide variety of topics and to be familiar with the terms in which they’re discussed in both languages. 

And Todd, who was a co-winner of the 2010 Translation Prize for bringing Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon into English, described the fun and the challenge of translating wordplay:

There were a few plays on words, usually taken from pro-German or anti-German propaganda: for example, members of the Resistance said of Radio-Paris, the collaborationist station, “Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand,” playing on the verb for lying, mentir, and the word for German, allemand. I translated it as “Radio-Paris lies, Radio-Paris deceives, Radio-Paris is Germendacious.” On the pro-German side, it was said of those who listened to Charles de Gaulle’s broadcasts from England, “Le dingaullisme s’attrape, surtout, par les organes auditifs.” Dingaullisme is a portmanteau word, a combination of dingue, meaning “crazy,” and gaullisme, “Gaullism,” as in “de Gaulle.” I translated it as, “Dengaulle Fever is caught primarily through the auditory organs,” and was happy to learn that one of the symptoms of Dengue Fever is insanity.

This year’s winners will be announced  at an Awards Ceremony on June 8th. Our congratulations to Elliott, Porter, Todd, and the other translators and publishers recognized as finalists.

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.

Cultures of All the Lands

In a widely noted essay of 2011, renowned Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock sounded an alarm for what he called a “crisis in the classics.” At the time of independence, he wrote, great Indian scholars of classical literature, “heirs of the longest continuous multicultural tradition in the world,” produced unsurpassed studies of their collective heritage. Within two generations, a variety of national and international forces had created conditions under which the number of Indian citizens able to read and continually revitalize the documents of the classical era “will very soon approach a statistical zero.”

Such a development would be a great global loss, he argued, and time to prevent it had grown short. He concluded his piece by making matters plain:

India is confronting a calamitous endangerment of its classic knowledge, and India today may have reached the point the rest of the world will reach tomorrow. This form of knowledge, under the sign of a critical classicism, must be recovered and strengthened not for the mere satisfaction of those outside of India who cultivate the study of its past but for the good of the people of India themselves. I may not have ready to hand an institutional solution to the crisis in the classics, but I remain hopeful that one can be found. Achieving this solution will require a collective public conversation on the problem—and the conversation must be insistent and loud.

Not long thereafter, one element of a solution presented itself when Rohan Murty, acutely aware of the potential for vast stores of knowledge to be lost, founded the Murty Classical Library of India, with Pollock as General Editor. Together they laid the groundwork for a series that would tap the world’s most qualified scholars to present the greatest literary works of India from the past two millennia to the largest readership in the world. The first five books arrived in early 2015, four more followed this year, and none involved see any limit to the library’s potential growth in time.

Recently, Sheldon Pollock joined scholars and institutions around the world in a show of solidarity with students, faculty and staff of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, who’ve seen their political expression cast as anti-national sedition. Pollock’s action in doing so has been received by some as a political intervention unbefitting his post with the Murty Library, and put forth as evidence that such a project could be properly guided only by Indian scholars themselves. This past weekend Rohan Murty addressed those concerns, reiterating his intention to aggressively counter the crisis he and Pollock saw, and his willingness to work alongside any honest scholars who shared that goal:

I am proud to have such a diverse mix of scholars contributing to MCLI, as ancient Indian classics ought to have universal appeal. They are as much a part of world heritage as Greek, Latin, or Chinese classics. Hence I do not agree with the view that classical Indian scholarship is the sole purview of Indians, no more than I believe that the study of Shakespeare ought to be exclusively left to the English. In fact, some of the best-known scholars on English literature are Indians! On this note, I am inspired by what the Mahatma said: “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.” Sadly, as a society today we have let our institutions, manuscripts, and scholarship in these areas fall into a state of disrepair. And this I am going to help rebuild.

Around the time when Pollock wrote of the crisis in the classics, we at HUP published The Classical Tradition, a thousand-page guide to the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. In a Preface, editors Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis addressed their use of the definite article:

Ideally, this Guide would have been entitled not The Classical Tradition but rather A Classical Tradition, for one of the things we have all learned from our recent history is that Europe is only one part of a complex and interlocking world. Europe’s cultural heritage can be understood fully only when it is replaced within the larger context of other cultures with which it has always been in dialogue. The Graeco-Roman classical tradition is only one of the limited number of classical traditions that define the history of world culture, and its important affinities and divergences with such other classical traditions as the Islamic, Judaic, Chinese, and Indian ones mean that it cannot be fully understood without systematic reference to them. Ultimately, we have had in mind as potential readers for this volume not only the direct beneficiaries of the Graeco-Roman classical tradition but also interested members of other cultures. Our hope is that scholars who understand those other, non-European cultures better than we do will be stimulated by work like ours to explore, together with us and with those who we hope will follow us, the similarities and differences between all these traditions, so that we will someday be in a position to understand better what it is that makes a classical tradition classic. To what extent are ideas of the classical throughout our world the fruit of interaction between various cultures, to what extent are they indigenous products? What if anything differentiates the classical tradition in the West from the histories of other canons? Toward the remote but not unimaginable goal of a truly comparative history of all classical traditions, our volume is intended as an invitation and as a preliminary contribution.

We’ve been—and we remain—extremely proud of and gratified by our work with Rohan Murty, Sheldon Pollock, and scholars the world over both to invigorate the study of Indic classics in their own right and to facilitate a more capacious understanding of our collective classical tradition. Indeed, none involved see any limit to its potential growth in time.

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.