The Editor's Department: Bidding farewell to book notices

A good many of my columns in this part of Language have focused on transitions of one sort or another:¹ my taking over as editor, obituaries and passings, changes in the journal’s policies or format, and the like, almost always with an eye to discussing aspects of history. My musings here are no exception, as they focus on the fact that book notices—the short, generally descriptive reviews of books that have long been a staple in the Language line-up—appear in print for the last time in this issue. As has been mentioned a few times in the pages of this journal,² book notices will now be appearing in the LSA’s electronic online publication venue known as eLanguage.³ This column, therefore, offers a bit of history on book notices, providing an obituary of sorts for them (and thus making good on a promise from my previous column (Language 83.3.493)).

Book notices have had a long run in Language, appearing first in volume 53.1, in March of 1977. The creation of the book notice as its own genre in the journal seems to have been part of a general overhaul of Language book reviews by then-editor William Bright.⁴ The first change he made, acting on a suggestion that emerged from a 1974 LSA questionnaire on ‘how members feel about the Society’s publication policy’, was the addition of ‘a separate category of review articles, which would be longer than regular reviews’, as announced in his annual report for publication year 1974 (p. 14).⁵ He added (p. 14) that ‘the distinction between review articles and reviews will have the advantage that extended comment on books of major interest will be made possible, in the form of review articles, while notice of more specialized works can be given in brief reviews of one to two thousand words’ (the standard for regular reviews in the first years of his editorship). It is clear that one issue that concerned him was that reviews often appeared some three years after a book was published—a lag he referred to as a ‘bad effect’ of reviewers not delivering on their promise of producing a book review (p. 12)—and perhaps he saw this as part of the solution.⁶

The distinction between review types (and the possibility of shorter, prompter review pieces), it seems, was carried one step further with his second innovation, that of ‘brief notices’ (relabeled without comment to ‘book notices’ after the first year). He formally announced their creation in his annual report covering the publication year 1976,⁷ where he mentioned that his ‘hopes of increasing the number of books reviewed in LANGUAGE are not yet reflected’ in his figures on the numbers of book reviews published in that year, but, he continued, ‘I have been soliciting reviews more energetically during the past year … [and] in addition to regular book reviews and review articles, I am adding a new section of brief notices; in this section, works for which full-scale treatment does not seem appropriate will be given reviews of around 500 words maximum length’ (pp. 4–5). The first ‘brief notice’ section thus appeared in the March 1977 issue.

The first brief notice published, written by Bright himself (Language 53.1.257), was on A survey of the current study and teaching of North American Indian languages in the United States and Canada by Jeanette P. Martin (published by the Center for Applied Linguistics, 1975). In fact, all twenty brief notices published in that first issue (spanning pages 257–65) were by Bright. The second group of brief notices (Language 53.2) had a more diverse authorship—Bright did only one—but Bright’s hand is still obvious, for many were written by his UCLA colleagues, including the first one in that issue, by Russell Schuh, as well as two by then-graduate student Brent de Chene.

Since that first book notice, there have been 4,330 book notices published in Language in thirty-one years (including those in the current issue), an...