Editing Not Academic: An Interview with Cecelia Cancellaro

Jeffrey Williams Editing Not Academic: An Interview with Cecelia Cancellaro Cecelia Cancellaro is an acquisitions editor at Schocken Books and has been since 1996. Before that, she worked as an editorial assistant, assistant editor, and editor at Routledge. Jeffrey Williams: You're an editor at Schocken. What does that entail? Cecelia Cancellaro: Since the late 80s, Schocken has been part of the Knopf Group at Random House. It is a house with a fascinating history. Founded in Germany in 1933 with the goal of publishing books for the GermanJewish community, the press was able to operate , within the confines ofan increasingly ghettoizedJewish community , until 1937. Fortunately, the founder, Salman Schocken, and most of his book stock moved to Palestine before Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the press was officially shut down. After a fundraising visit to the U.S., Schocken decided that his list should be published here as well and the U.S. office was opened in 1945. In its early days, Schocken was responsible for publishing Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, and Gershom Sholem, among others, and by the 80s this list grew to include people like Primo Levi, Claude LéviStrauss , E. Franklin Frazier, and Jean Paul Sartre. When the U.S. office first opened, Hannah Arendt was the company's editorial director. Now, in 1998, Schocken still sees itself as a press committed to publishing important intellectual work in a wide range of areas with the ability to reach out to general readers. As an editor here my job involves looking around for books and writers that fit into this category. JW: That gives an interesting thumbnail history ofSchocken, but could you say more about what you do specifically as an editor? You acquire books? CC: Yes, I acquire non-fiction books in a number of areas, and do all the things an editor does to nurture a book idea into a book proposal into a book. JW: How long have you been at Schocken? 142 the minnesota review CC: I've been an editor here since AprU 1996. Before that I acquired books in history and politics for Routledge. JW: I want to ask you more about your experience at Routledge, but what kinds of books do you do for Schocken? CC: I acquire non-fiction books in a number of areas including but not limited tohistory, women's studies, phUosophy, and religion. The ideal bookfor me is one that has the abiUty to reach out to general readers as a trade hardback in its first year and then go on to have a long and healthy life as a paperback in other markets after that. The academic market is one of the main audiences I think of when considering the Ufe of the book beyond year two. Some specific examples might give you a better idea of the range of books I've recently signed or pubUshed : David Roediger's anthology Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (published last April, paperback coming in February ), a new memoir by Alix Kates Shulman (the highly acclaimed novelist and bestselling author of Memoirs ofan Ex-Prom Queen), due out next spring, two books for a Schocken series on great thinkers to be entitled What Fanon Really Said and What Nietzsche Really Said, the first by Lewis Gordon at Brown, the second by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins at the University of Texas at Austin, a book by philosopher Richard Shusterman on how philosophers have thought and written about the body throughout history, a study of how ethnicity is marketed in contemporary America by Boston University historian MarUyn Halter, and a provocative volume on the black intellectual tradition by the University of Pennsylvania's Houston Baker. JW: How many books are you responsible for each year? CC: I aim to sign about ten to fifteen books a year. This number is much smaller than what you would hear from a university press editor or an editor at an academic house—in fact, it is half the size of the Ust I was responsible for when I was an editor at Routledge. The reason for this is that since we see all of our...