Georgetown University Press celebrates its 50th anniversary this year by offering visitors to its booth (1544) two books that reflect the press’s emphasis on what it calls security studies—books on diplomacy, spies, international affairs, intelligence, history, and related topics.
“We’re an academic publisher, but we’ve done a good job bridging the gap between the practical and the academic,” says Jackie Beilhart, publicist for Georgetown University Press. “Lots of our authors are former practitioners of what they write about, or are currently working in the field.”
The publisher will give away copies of Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski, a book that holds a special place in Georgetown’s history. It was originally published in 1944 by Karski, a Polish Catholic underground fighter who witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto, transit camps, and the horrors of the Holocaust. He toured Europe and the United States trying to convince leaders of what was really going on during WWII. Karski eventually immigrated to the United States, where he became a professor at Georgetown for 40 years before his death in 2000. Georgetown bought U.S. rights (the book had gone out of print) and released, first, a hardcover edition and then a paperback edition earlier this year to mark the 100th anniversary of Karski’s birth.
BEA guests will also be able to pick up a copy of Kenneth A. Daigler’s May release, Spies, Patriots, and Traitors: American Intelligence in the Revolutionary War. Beilhart points to the popularity of recent television shows such as Sleepy Hollow and Turn, which feature Revolutionary War spies. “The book concentrates on the spy ring that George Washington put together,” says Beilhart. The author is a retired CIA intelligence officer.
One of the house’s bestsellers is the Al-Kitaab: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic series originally published in 1995 and now in its third edition. That series, notes Beilhart, mirrors a lot of the changes in the publishing world. It started as a traditional textbook with exercises on audiotape. Now the third edition has a website, online interactive exercises, MP3 files, and a vocabulary flashcard app, the first app for the press.
To commemorate its anniversary throughout 2014, each Friday on its Tumblr blog Georgetown University Press features a book that had been a bestseller during the past 50 years. “It’s been fun to go back to those old titles. Many were rather esoteric, but there was also Chow for Now, a spiral-bound book for college undergrads with recipes for making meals.”
The press is also give away tote bags with the anniversary logo at its booth.
