Press of Business

The book publisher sat in his spacious home in Norman, Okla. and swirled a glass of brandy. "There are no more hicks in America," said Savoie Lottinville, 52, head of the University of Oklahoma Press. "The cultural face of the continent has changed from concentration in New York and San Francisco. A great lot of the best ideas come from localities far removed from those great cities."

Publisher Lottinville, onetime Rhodes scholar, speaks with authority. For 20 years, he has run his bustling, 40-man shop in the shadow of an oil derrick. Yet Oklahoma is known for more than oil. Over the years, its topflight press has published 426 books, ranging from the influential Plowman's Folly (340,000 copies sold) to last week's Athens in the Age of Pericles, the first of an intriguing series on great cities. Oklahoma's recent music books make it better known in Milan and Bonn than many a famed name on Manhattan's publishers' row. "The world is full of audiences," says Savoie Lottinville, "and we look to the whole."

Publish or Perish. What is true of Oklahoma can also be said of university presses across the U.S. No longer content with murky monographs on the mud turtle, or the academic jargon of cloistered professors, the presses have become favorites of U.S. readers. This year the 50 members of the Association of American University Presses will produce 1,300 new books on subjects ranging from art to zoology. In their own field--adult, hardcover nonfiction--universities will account for one out of every four original books in the U.S. and sell them for about $14 million, more than double their income of ten years ago.

The sum may be small in big business terms, but it is significant in terms of growth and the new directions the presses are taking. Starting with the first U.S. press at Cornell in 1869, university publishers long concerned themselves solely with faculty books too abstruse or too specialized for commercial publishers. For years, they plodded along producing the dusty and dull, expanded only when the "publish or perish" dictum started influencing a scholar's status. Even then, the growth was slow.

Pros & Prizes. The recent spectacular surge gets its impetus from the cold economics of postwar commercial publishing. Soaring costs have fostered the hit psychology of the Broadway theater, forced commercial publishers to shy away from nonfiction books that are likely to sell less than a break-even 8,000 copies. The university presses have no such profit-and-loss problems. As taxexempt, nonprofit enterprises, often bolstered by subsidies, they can afford to keep slow sellers in print as long as they prove useful. Result: more and more commercially marginal but eminently important books are being handed over to the universities. And the presses in turn are starting to attract first-rate editors and designers to give the works a professional shine. So improved are the book designs that about 25% of the selections at the annual books show of the American Institute of Graphic Arts are products of the university presses.

No one has benefited more than U.S. readers. At the Louisiana State University Press last week, able young (35) Director Donald R. Ellegood, who worked at Oklahoma under Savoie Lottinville, was busy culling a list of some 350 manuscripts that includes something for everyone: biographies of Confederate generals, an eyewitness account of the 18th century Haitian revolution, the secrets of modern hurricane forecasting. Other university presses are ready this fall with a list of impressive books that might never see print without university backing. Harvard University Press (over 100 titles last year) is bringing out the first of four volumes of John Adams' diaries. This month, Yale will publish the first of 40 volumes of Benjamin Franklin's papers. The University of Minnesota has launched a series of critical introductions to U.S. writers aimed at foreign readers, while the Johns Hopkins Press is running off copies of its five-volume Presidential Nominating Politics just in time for the 1960 campaign and a raft of orders from aspiring, though unnamed, U.S. Senators.

Pasternak & Profits. Few university publishers can claim quite the enterprise of the University of Michigan's Fred Wieck, an ex-Henry Regnery Co. executive, who took over an unimpressive setup in 1954 and built it into a $1,000,000 operation noted for stunning jacket designs. Last winter Wieck published the first Russian-language edition of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in the Western Hemisphere and sold an amazing 15,000 copies, is following this week with a collection of Pasternak's poems in English that is likely to sell even better. Says Publisher Wieck: "There isn't a strand of ivy on our building."

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