Publish, Don’t Perish: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes in Academic Publishing

I never thought I’d be sitting here talking to all of you, but I do want to thank you and tell you how honored I am that you have given me this award. It was completely unexpected, and I still think I’m going to wake up one day and find it was all a dream.

Not such a dream was being told I’d have to prepare an “address”—something editors rarely have to do. We are more at ease sitting in a comfortable chair reading manuscripts, or writing soothing letters to our authors who sometimes get very frazzled with all the complicated things that are involved in scholarly publishing. So I thought I’d just say a few words, certainly not an address, about what it is like to be an editor at a university press, since I fear some people think all we do is take authors out to lunch or to dinner at expensive restaurants. And we do, of course, do that too, and it is something I shall miss as I venture into retirement.

But first I want to add something. Steve Stern showed me his nomination letter and he said, in effect, that he was nominating not just me, but also all the other editors in academic publishing who, although we do not teach, and therefore do not have any practice standing up and addressing a whole group of people, do share with all of you the privilege and responsibility of encouraging and disseminating scholarship, whether in the form of books, as journal articles, or open access on the Internet.

I realize that this award usually goes to a senior scholar whose lifetime work you wish to honor, and that is as it should be, but I want to thank the nominating committee, as well as the CLAH board, for stretching the boundaries this time, not only by nominating an editor, but in doing so including, in effect, all the other people, less visible but no less important—production editors, designers, marketing people, distribution and warehouse people, and printers and binders—who also labor in this particular vineyard called publishing. It is on their behalf that I accept the CLAH award today.

From time to time I know I have asked some of you how and why you chose to work on Argentina, or the Andes, or Central America, wherever, so I thought you might like to know how I ended up with one of the most extensive Latin American lists in the country. Certainly it did not happen intentionally. In fact when I was offered my first manuscript on Latin America I said I could not take it on, that I knew little about Latin America and knew none of the scholars who were working in the area. I grew up and was educated in England, and when I was a small girl, many moons ago now, the British Empire was colored pink on our school maps. Knowledge of those areas was considered sufficient for most British schoolchildren. As a consequence the remaining regions of the world were faraway and mysterious.

When I took over the Latin American list, in the early 1990s, I knew that Duke had published a book or two a year on Latin America since about 1985 when Dan Ross, then our marketing manager, brought a few titles to the press. It was unusual for a marketing person to do this, but the press was in the process of growing and he had been given permission to expand his portfolio. After he left, the press director took on Latin America, but still for only a book or two a year, although Reynolds Smith, who handled the literature side of the press’s list, continued to acquire a number of titles in that discipline. Then that director left, and among the projects remaining on his desk was an edited collection on Latin America that needed an in-house editor.

At this point the other editors issued me what was virtually an ultimatum, telling me that I should handle it. I had...