Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text ed. by Darcy Cullen (review)

There is a visual demarcation of labour in academic publishing. The scholar who works to produce new knowledge by crafting a manuscript or critical edition is visible and noted as the author or editor of the text, while the work of the publishers who enhance and present this knowledge as a book is invisible and less directly acknowledged in the final product. Academics often don’t see past their own roles in this process, which marginalizes the contributions of editors and designers. In Darcy Cullen’s collection Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text, the contributors strive to make visible the work of academic publishing and to bring scholars into conversation with the producers who configure, organize, and refine the printed text. The collection is loosely informed by D.F. McKenzie’s sociological approach to texts and is divided into four parts: “The People,” “The Text,” “The Page,” and “The Electronic Edition.” The collection is definitional in nature, with a clear structure that begins with explication of individual roles and moves outward to case studies and an analysis of digital publishing. The foreword and introduction nicely balance Helen Tartar’s account of the evolution of academic publishing with Cullen’s summary of recent theorizations of textual production and reception.

The section “The People” offers didactic contributions from leading experts in the field who identify the specific tasks of their specialties. Textual scholar Peter Shillingsburg opens with a brief introduction to scholarly editing, while Rosemary Shipton explains the distinctions between substantive, acquisitions, and copy editors. Amy Einsohn describes the position and expectations of a copy editor and identifies the varying pressures that get downloaded onto the freelance worker by the larger industry.

“The Text” is focused on scholarly approaches to textual instability. Alexander Pettit playfully reflects on the benefits of a corrupted text by exploring how the poorly copyedited print works of Chicano playwright Luis Valdez create the conditions for a kind of Brechtian alienation for readers. Peter Mahon turns his attention to the margins of the text and offers a theoretical reading of James Joyce’s marginalia in Finnegans Wake to collapse the distinction between author and academic editor.

Camilla Blakely’s essay on the illustrated scholarly book exemplifies the collaborative forces sometimes missing in other contributions. As the first paper in “The Page,” Blakely speaks to her experience as editor of the award-winning illustrated volume The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art while incorporating the perspectives of her collaborators, author Allan J. Ryan and designer George Vaitkunas. This essay not only details the social interactions at the core of the book’s construction but also itemizes and generalizes the stages of an illustrated book’s development. Richard Hendel and Sigrid Albert follow with separate but paired essays on book design. Hendel provides an overview of the designer’s role in traditional print publication, and Albert identifies design challenges presented by electronic publishing. John K. Young finishes this section by looking at the limitations of reprinting a text with a useful study of materially unique pages in the early works of Robert Antoni.

Building on Albert’s discussion of digital book design, the final section, “The Electronic Edition,” explains how publishing workflows have changed with digitization. Yuri Cowan’s essay looks back to the critical editions produced by the Early English Text Society as a way to envision the role that digital editors may play in the future. Cullen ends the collection with a reflective essay describing the shifts at University of British Columbia Press when it first transitioned into digital publishing.

While Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text compartmentalizes the various aspects of book production, the gestures it makes toward collaboration and discussion among the contributors are commendable. At times, the scholarly contributions seem poorly integrated into practical discussions about the publication process. It would have been useful to place scholars into a more direct and sustained conversation with publishers about how their scholarly work has been socialized...