University press executives follow university presidents. They do this rhetorically but never factually. Both claim to deny “myths” about growth, success, or status, for example, by fabricating new, equally undocumented ones. Recent years have seen a parade of self-contradictory games playing by financially strapped and no longer editorially consistent campus-based, university-identified publishers. In my experience and that of my peers, these presses deny the unmistakable reality of their increasingly precarious economic and intellectual status.
Consider university press sales and marketing directors at the 2022 U.S. Book Show. The May 26 issue of Publishers Weekly quotes them purporting to “dispel... unstated assumptions about university presses.” The University of Texas Press’s manager proclaims that the publisher’s panel “busted myths” but does not state what myths they are. The University of Chicago Press director asserts that “functionally, a good university press is like a trade house in terms of how you interact with the components of your list.” Does anyone know what that means?
As quoted in the PW report, these managers highlighted unusual examples of sales of one book in response to one request by booksellers or one author’s special request. “We’ve come a long way.... We’ve made a lot of adjustments.”
A Columbia University Press manager agrees: “When you’re working with our publishers directly, we are competitive” with major houses. “Our books are as easy to return as everybody else’s.”
Worse than special pleading, these speakers focus on special arrangements with universities—sometimes presidents, individual professors, or organizations; in other words, not business as usual. These examples do not sustain or disrupt unstated myths.
The more they self-promote, the less persuasive, less concrete, and less understandable they become. “We don’t expect our books to do well in every store.... Our books add depth. There’s a serendipity that our books bring to the browsing experience.”
Things differ little on the other side of the publishing house. Editors’ self-promotion and ahistorical claims of continuities amid changes skip through competing old and new myths. They are seldom accompanied by arguments or evidence.
In the “Thinking Like a Scholarly Editor” chapter in What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing, Johns Hopkins University Press editorial director Greg Britton argues for continuity despite clear evidence of change in the university press world. “Universities exist to create and transmit knowledge,” he writes, adding, “Scholarly publishing exists to support this activity.” But at the same time, Britton notes that “we make bets on certain projects,” acknowledging uncertain speculative “calculations.”
In collections like What Editors Do, the “business” gets short shrift. The increase in books published outside of independent “blind” or “double-blind” review processes and the decline in editorial and production standards goes unmentioned. A major example is books presented as original monographs by university presidents or foundation heads that are collections of talks, addresses, and excerpts from annual reports, often previously published in in-house media and written by staff. At earlier times, these publications might be printed by the incumbent’s own campus press, a trade house, independently, or by a vanity or self-publishing press. Sales are all but guaranteed, yet the myths of idealism, intellectual distinction, and tradition dominate.
Despite the myths, a golden age of university press publishing never existed. Scholarly presses have long struggled financially and did not maintain the standards that I expected even at the time of my first book in 1979. But matters have worsened over time.
Substantial reductions in universities’ financial underwriting are a dominant factor in lowering both the number of publications and of standards. My own colleagues’ experiences underscore the imperatives of shaky calculations of sales and profitability, the decline of editorial investment in proposal and manuscript development, and the decline in responsible reviewing.
Rather than admit to and confront unsettling and destabilizing transformations, even the best editors, like Britton, along with their sales and marketing directors, either restate old, never-fully-accurate myths or advance new ones at least partly to take their places. Sometimes they attempt to do both at the same time. The contradictions compromise scholarly publishing and pose the greatest challenge, as usual, for young scholars’ first books.
Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history at Ohio State University and is the author of Searching for Literacy.
