The Transom Vanity Fare

Subsidy publishers (commonly known, especially among detractors, as vanity presses) have sometimes solicited business from new PhDs by asking just one trenchant question: Why wait years for a university press to publish your monograph (assuming you can find a university press capable of making a timely decision in your favour) when you can work with a house equally committed to scholarship but much more concerned about your professional success, especially in the matter of obtaining tenure?

Their hope is that small fry who've never felt the hook will rise to the bait of a seemingly straightforward proposition: You pay your money and we publish your monograph. At least one subsidy publishing house, not wishing to see its customers blindsided by righteous academic bluenoses who might question the propriety of the venture, requires prospective authors to obtain permission slips from university administrators prior to any other negotiation, so that (the wag might say) everyone will be on the same subsidized page. The solicitation from another subsidy house suggests that The Chronicle of Higher Education has endorsed vanity publishing as a practical solution to the problem of congestion in the pipelines of university presses, as if the enterprise required a cachet of respectability.¹

Over the years, I have encountered an assortment of PhDs who, as reckless youths, published their dissertations with subsidy houses. Three come immediately to mind. They were undeniably intelligent people who, in the context of their employment, should have known better. Their careers were damaged irreparably by the act of publishing with vanity presses.

The first of the three, in a hurry and certain that the judgement of the university press rejecting his dissertation was badly flawed, engaged the services of a subsidy house, received his book in exchange for his money, and promptly lost his job with a large state university. Arrogant and cocksure, he had concluded that institutional requirements regarding 'proper' publication had nothing to do with him. It took a few years, but eventually he obtained permanent employment in his chosen field, though at a lesser-known and much smaller school. He published other books, this time with university presses; but the blot remained upon his intellectual escutcheon, and he never found the prestigious position in which he'd always imagined himself ensconced. You receive no respect from the gunslingers, he learned, once you've shot yourself in the foot.

The second PhD remained in place at the junior college to which he'd gone to bide his time until a better opportunity arose. Indeed, he was epoxied there, not so much by his first vanity book (again, a consequence of rejection by a university press) as by the several others he sent lumbering after it. His behaviour made no sense at all, but he persisted in it. In the matter of foot-shooting, he lost a toe every time he pulled the trigger.

The third PhD, by retiring, withdrew from competition for the title of World's Oldest Assistant Professor. He claimed to have done business with a subsidy house only because he had panicked at the thought of coming out on the short end of his approaching tenure vote. He had attempted to publish his dissertation before the deadline for tenure-worthy achievement, but university presses did not cooperate. On the cusp of dismissal for dealing with a vanity house, he tearfully mea culpa'd his way to tenure, assuring colleagues that their confidence in him would not be misplaced, that he'd not disappoint again, and that he would be a productive scholar who published the way scholars were supposed to publish. So, of course, he became his department's albatross, never publishing another word for the duration of his career but spinning some wonderfully creative yarns to explain why his literary roscoe remained forever holstered. I always thought he should have published those.

The three PhDs had published their books with three different subsidy houses, but the volumes had several things in common: they never appeared in any catalogue I ever saw; they were never for sale in any bookstore I ever entered; and they were never reviewed...