Editorial Ricochets

216 EDITORIAL RICOCHETS An Invitation to Editorialize In ELT, XXI: 3 (1978) I published an invitation to selected directors of university presses to comment' on various publishing problems that confront teachers, scholars, and potential scholars. Here I reproduce an invitation to editorialize that was mailed to selected publishers of reprint series. If responses warrant, I plan to publish the most useful comments in a future number of ELT. To Publishers of Reprint Series Many teachers are concerned that the decline of the diversity of titles in reprint series, the tendency to drop many titles after one or two years, and the tendency to reprint the same familiar titles imposes a rigid canon on the syllabi of many courses and makes teaching some courses almost impossible. Many of the courses I have in mind admittedly have small enrollments, partly because they are often graduate courses, partly because enrollments in general are declining. I do not deny that teachers themselves often contribute to cultural atrophy. They play it safe and sometimes are lazy. One cannot go far wrong by requiring, say, Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, or Tess of the D'Urbervilles year after year. The Woodlanders and even Jude the Obscure might be more risky in attracting adequate enrollments and, of course, one might have to read a new text and prepare new marginal notes. Titles such as George Moore's Esther Waters, Confessions of a Young Man, or The Brook Kerith, or George Gissing's New Grub Street, The Emancipated, or Odd Women, not having the advantage of familiarity or effective PR, would be even more risky to include in course syllabi. That these titles contributed significantly to the character of a forty-year period in English literature , that they might significantly diversify and enrich a student's appreciation of our cultural background, and that these titles might even be readable and provocative as possibilities overshadowed by economic unfeasibility. Some of us in the academic world do understand the economics of publishing and thus sympathize with the commercial publishers in a time of creeping, if not leaping, inflation. Some of us also believe that mutually beneficial solutions can be found. Some of us still believe that publishers have a responsibility not only to their stockholders but to society, to the culture which they do much to reflect and even to shape. I doubt that reputable publishers any more than reputable academicians want to see the day when all we teach are best-sellers or even good-sellers or whatever titles and authors happen to be "in." This situation clearly does not make for a good liberal education or, as some of us old-fashioned codgers like to say, "the preservation and reassessment of our cultural heritage." With no intention of prescribing subject or attitude, I suggest the following topics as a guide for editorial responses. It is especially appropriate, however, to focus commenis On late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century English literature (e.g. titles by S. Butler, F. M. Ford, E. M. Förster, J. Galsworthy, 217 G. Gissing, T. Hardy, R. Kipling, Vi. S. Maugham, G. Moore, W. Pater, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, O.Wilde, and other writers of the period from about 1880 to about 1920). Replies will, I hope, be concise; depending on the responses to this invitation, I may select and arrange the text to make up a composite that will have some coherence. 1. Can titles that have modest sales in the course of a single year (even fewer than 1,000 copies) be kept in print? Are there means for cutting costs, adopting economical methods of production and methods of warehousing and distribution to make this possible? 2. Could computer-composition and a system of production akin to the Xerox UMI 0n-Demand publishing plan be applied to paperback reprint series? 3. Could such economies be instituted as the following? (a) Less costly advertising for reprint series, e.g. simple one-page flyers merely listing available titles, editors, editions on which based, and price; (b) elimination of examination copies (teachers presumably are familiar with titles they intend to adopt); (c) elimination of excessively long introductions, notes...