Scholarly Madness

Nearly every major university today has its own academic press--a branch of publishing that seeks to bridge the gap between the world of scholarship and an increasingly educated public eager to find out what the scholars have to say. "We publish the smallest editions at the greatest cost," says Yale University Press Director Chester Kerr, "and on these we place the highest prices and try to market them to people who can least afford them. This is madness."

Madness it may be, but there is method to it. No longer just an outlet for the resident faculty and unreadable

Ph.D. theses, the nation's university presses are growing in professionalism --and popularity. Last year the 67 members of the Association of American University Presses sold $22 million worth of books, five times 1948 sales, and they now account for one out of every eight nonfiction titles produced in the U.S. Many have joined the paperback boom, and are eagerly spreading U.S. scholarship abroad: 15% of all university press sales are now made overseas, and Columbia, Chicago and Yale even operate a joint sales office and warehouse in London.

Significant Scholarship. A major reason the university presses are booming is that their product has improved--in style, quality, polish and design. Much of the new professional sheen of academic publishing has been fostered by three veterans of the industry, each of whom has recently announced his impending retirement from his own pace-setting press. Combining sound editorial technique with a sense of significant scholarship, each has put his own distinctive imprint on university publishing. The three:

>Roger W. Shugg, 62, a former Princeton history teacher and aide to Commercial Publisher Alfred Knopf, has directed the University of Chicago Press since 1954, made it into the most efficient academic press in the U.S. He has led the drive to provide author-professors with better editing as well as better contracts and royalties. Shugg has also installed computer billing and full-time coast-to-coast salesmen, written eyecatching ads that are more seductive than sedate. Although most university presses fail to turn a profit, the Chicago Press has made $500,000 in the past ten years.

> Thomas J. Wilson, 64, a Rhodes scholar, former French teacher and executive vice president of Henry Holt & Co., has developed at the Harvard University Press a book list considered to be the best in range of topics and depth of study. He took over the press in 1947, at a time when President James Conant considered it so inert and expensive that he wanted to abolish it. Now it turns out massive works of scholarship, such as the Adams family papers, which may run to 100 volumes (13 have been completed), as well as topical titles like Edwin Reischauer's The United States and Japan. Its bestseller (100,000 copies since 1944) is the Harvard Dictionary of Music; yet it will keep in print any book that sells at least 125 copies a year, something no commercial firm can afford to do. "The object of the university press," says Wilson, "is to publish as many books as it can without losing its shirt." > Savoie Lottinville, 60, another Rhodes scholar and a former boxing instructor and newspaper reporter, has built the University of Oklahoma Press into the nation's standout example of a successful regional publisher. A bouncy little man (5 ft. 5 in.) who contends that no field can be properly explored in less than five volumes, Lottinville has completed a 90-volume series on the Civilization of the American Indian, 53 volumes of the American Exploration and Travel Series, 36 volumes of the Western Frontier Library, 24 volumes in the Centers of Civilization Series.

Claiming that Oklahoma is the "only press in America using paper that will last 300 years," Lottinville argues that a university press must take a long view of man's publishable knowledge. "It's what you produce over 40 to 50 years that counts," he says.

The goal of university publishing, explains Stanford University Press Director Leon Seltzer, is not to seek out the surefire seller but to find the book that will "add a dimension to man's understanding of himself." Most university presses thus tend to reflect the strengths of their university. Yet each must also look beyond its own campus: scholars rate a university press self-centered if more than a third of its books are written by its own faculty.

Reshaping the Landscape. More by accident than design, some university books turn into bestsellers. The Lonely Crowd, by Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, has sold more than a million copies since it was published by Yale in 1950; Chicago's Manual for the Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations has sold nearly 900,000 copies. Oklahoma's Plowman's Folly, written in 1943 by a county agricultural agent, Edward H. Faulkner, not only sold 355,000 copies, but, by advocating shallow disk harrowing for small-grain crops instead of deep plowing, literally reshaped the landscape of rural America.

Most university presses are budgeted along with the regular departments of a university; the subsidies range from $30,000 a year at small presses to $300,000 at Harvard. Sales of most books are inevitably small; but to university press directors, quality is always more important than quantity. "The publications of a university press," says Chicago's Shugg, "are an index to the quality of the university."

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