The Transom: Mail Call

My January complaint in this column about the failure of most university presses to send seasonal catalogues to faculty members who might reasonably be expected to buy books yielded surprising results. I anticipated deluge. I supposed that my mailbox would be filled to overflowing with attractively printed matter. I was fully prepared to have the collective AAUP membership call my bluff. I set about saving my pennies for the twenty-six university press books my sense of honour would oblige me to buy.

But apparently I had made an offer that nearly everyone could refuse.

And nearly everyone did: I received mailings from exactly four publishers.

So, either (a) hardly anyone reads JSP, (b) hardly anyone reads Savage, or (c) hardly anyone gives a rat's patootie one way or the other, in the matter of selling what they publish. I vote for (c), and not simply for reasons involving ego.

Of the catalogues I received, only one described any books in which persons other than the authors, their immediate families, or perhaps six other PhDs could have much interest. By happy coincidence, it was also the only one that advertised books priced to sell to underpaid scholars. The rest of the catalogues had nothing to offer - to me, at least. I'd have fared better with them were I inclined toward the arcane, the esoteric, the obscure, and the unfathomable, and if my pockets were as deep as those belonging to, say, Bill Gates or Steve Forbes.

The materials I received raised the same old questions that geezers like me have been asking for the last twenty years, for instance, why do some presses publish such incredibly ephemeral books? Their crimes may be committed in the name of scholarship, but they are crimes nevertheless. Of course, it could be that the editors who write the catalogue copy are capable of producing only soporific prose, and perchance I have been led to a false conclusion about the books they have so unfairly maligned. But probably not.

One catalogue explained (but certainly did not excuse) its deplorable contents by displaying prominently the assertion that each and every volume described therein had been approved for publication by a board consisting of actual faculty members. That press, surely, is bound for fiscal success, because the only staff member who need be retained on salary is the production manager. Think of the money to be saved by firing the director, the editor(s), and anyone else who might ordinarily (or is it nowadays extraordinarily?) be involved in decisions having to do with content, style, and what the general public might care to know. Well, my critics will say (while Chester Kerr spins in his grave), we're not doing this for the general public.

And to that I reply: No, and you ain't doing it for content or style, either.

Another question the catalogues raised has to do with prices. How can two scholarly houses publish two different books with the same number of pages, the same trim size, the same number of charts, tables, graphs, and illustrations, et cetera, et cetera, but one sells for $45 and the other is priced at $24.95? Somebody doesn't know how to submit bids to jobbers? No, the answer is, I'll wager, far simpler than that. The more expensive of the two books is as scintillating as mucus and probably has a print order that reflects the fact. It is a must-have book for libraries that must have everything. The less expensive book discusses something that is interesting, and its publisher might even sell four or five thousand copies before slapping paper covers on it. The higher the print run, the lower the ink cost, and the cheaper the book for the customer, n'est-ce pas?

And people wonder why scholarly presses are struggling.

Frankly, the process of reading through the materials I received has made me even more cynical about the future of scholarly publishing than I was prior to my January rant. I am now a strong advocate of cyber-publishing, to make sure that things (like most...