Editor's Fence

I Editor's Fence Subscription Rates 1996: In a recent issue of Publishers Weekly university librarians registered dismay at the rising cost of periodicals. The annual increases for serials acquisitions averages 10%. You can understand their uneasiness. If it persists, librarians ask, where will the money come from to meet increases three times inflation? A moderate-sized university library in North Carolina may be representative of how funds are allocated elsewhere. This library spends nearly $400,000 annually for 200 science and mathematics serials (one science journal costing $10,000). In the humanities, however, this library spends $100,000 for roughly the same number of journals in psychology, about $10,000 for that number in British and American studies. librarians aren't the only ones challenged by unpleasant choices. Editors have their share. We increased rates for 1996 because of some sobering economics. While the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the English Department are most generous in offering graduate assistance and money for day-to-day correspondence—both essential—ELT must pay its way for all the costs of producing and distributing an international journal: everything from computer equipment and office supplies to the printing and mailing of each issue. On this last point the U.S. Postal Service sent us a surprise parcel of sorts just as we were preparing to mail the first issues of 1995. While your first-class stamp moved up 10% a year ago, our Library and International Book Rates surged 78% and 19% respectively. To add to the distress, even experienced people in the university post office couldn't discover what the actual increase would be until a last-moment announcement came from the Washington D.C. postal center, better known to us as the Puzzle Palace. Anyone who deals with printed matter also knows about the increases in the cost of paper, some papers doubling in price during 1995. Since my crying-towel is soaked and too heavy to drag further, let me make the long story short. The added charges in mailing and printing made it necessary to increase our rates. EDITOR'S FENCE Still, I hope you judge the individual rate of $17 for over 500 pages of articles and reviews reasonable. More than half of our individual subscribers have renewed their subscriptions. I hope those who haven't will have a change of mind. Even our institutional rates remain modest and should not deter nearly 700 colleges, universities and public libraries from subscribing. Please remember, the support of our individual subscribers is crucial to the publication of ELT in its traditional format. Your subscriptions make an all-important difference, and we thank you. Correction in Recent Issue: From Professor M. Dolores Herrero (University of Zaragoza, Spain): "It has been pointed out to me by Professor Barbara Leah Herman (Wellesley College) that I failed to acknowledge a source in my article, Oefiance in Disguises: Mary Ward's Ambivalent Concept of Woman as Reflected in Marcella,' ELT, 38:4 (1995), 445-65. The following words, found in the second half of the long second sentence on page 459, should have appeared in quotes: '[the novel] does not convert and thus reduce the public into the private, but rather grants the private its disturbingly public dimension.' The words were taken from Barbara Leah Harman's article, 'In Promiscuous Company: Female Public Appearance in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South,' Victorian Studies, 31 (1988), 374. My apologies to Professor Harman for this mistake." I Announcements I NEW Summer Seminar: Martha Vicinus will be teaching an NEH summer seminar for college teachers June 10-August 2, 1996, The Construction of the "New Woman' and the "New Man' in the 1890s." The seminar will focus on the varied public debates and literary representations of besieged, triumphant or contradictory masculinities and feminities in the works of such authors as Wilde, Hardy, Shaw, Ibsen, Sarah Grand, and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. Readings will also include pioneering sexologists and eugenicists, as well as modern literary criticism and theories of sexuality. NEH provides a stipend of $4000. Deadline is 1 March 1996. For further information and application forms, please write to Professor Vicinus, English Dept, University of Michigan...