Ad Astra per Aspera : University Press of Kansas, 1946-2005

As if wrought by Dickens, the fifty-nine-year history of the University Press of Kansas is filled with great expectations, hard times, pluck, and books aplenty.

The progress of scholarly publishing in Kansas corroborates the state's motto, ad astra per aspera, which is usually glossed as 'to the stars through difficulties.' Kansans pride themselves on their doughty survival through tornadoes, droughts, blizzards, and grasshoppers. In contrast, the University Press of Kansas for almost four decades suffered an unnatural inclemency - a state constitution that prescribed that all public printing must be performed by state printing facilities. At every crucial turn, section 4 of article 15 played a major role in thwarting the ascent of the press toward publishing prominence.

Like that of any press, the history of the University Press of Kansas has been shaped by the main currents of higher education and scholarly publishing and by the tributaries of local influences. For its first thirty-six years, local factors arrested its development. From 1946 until 1982, Printing, Money, and Bureaucracy rode together as the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Of this unholy trinity, Printing proved to be the most baneful.

The prehistory of the University Press of Kansas hinted at the difficulties with which it would grapple. As early as 1911, University of Kansas (KU) Chancellor Frank Strong, who regarded published research as an effective way to publicize the school, reported that 'important work done by members of our Faculty ... had of necessity been sent for publication to other Universities and to Commercial publishers.'¹ He explicitly complained that the laws governing state printing hampered university printing and binding. Joining Strong's brief, Professors Merle Thorpe and William Carruth also deplored the excessive printing and binding costs that constrained the university's fledgling efforts in publishing.

Twenty American universities founded presses in the 1920s and 1930s, a factor that doubtless contributed to growing faculty interest in the University of Kansas having its own publishing house. On 9 January 1940 the Committee on Publications and Printing recommended to the Faculty Senate 'that the Administration be invited to consider establishing a University of Kansas Press.'² The Senate adopted the recommendation, but the United States' entry into World War II intervened before the university administration could act on the faculty's invitation.

War or no war, other universities joined the publishing fray: Tennessee and Vanderbilt in 1940, Nebraska and Wayne State in 1941, Kentucky and Syracuse in 1943, South Carolina in 1944, and Alabama and Florida in 1945. At KU the machinations chiefly involved an American serviceman in Australia, a graduate school administrator, and a former Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company executive. Dr Clyde K. Hyder (1902-1992), a wartime cryptographer in the US Army Air Force and a peacetime KU English professor, received an unexpected invitation. John H. Nelson, then assistant dean and secretary of the Graduate Research Council, asked Hyder to serve as the first editor of the yet-to-be-established publishing operation. The former pineapple merchant was Chancellor Deane W. Malott, who had most recently forsaken the Harvard faculty for Kansas. While Malott's approval was necessary for the plan to succeed, Nelson was the driving force behind the organizing of the University of Kansas Press.

Malott seemed poised to endorse Nelson's initiative. In August of 1941 he had renamed the Bureau of Printing the University of Kansas Press, a change that prefigured a more organized approach to publishing but blurred the distinction on campus between printing and publishing. In November of 1943 his executive secretary, Raymond M. Nichols, had answered Alabama's inquiry about setting up a press: 'Just before the war broke out we were studying the possibility of establishing a press for publication of research work of the faculty but that plan has, of necessity, been pigeon-holed for the duration.... After the war we hope that we will find it possible to complete our plans.'³

I. 1946-67

The postwar influx of students (enrolment jumped 136% from 1945 to 1946), we can guess, diverted Malott from thoughts of publishing. But Dean...