Some Lessons From America

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 7

Some Lessons From America

[X June of last year, the "Saturday Review of Literature" devoted itself for the third time to University Presses in a special number, the guest editor being Donald Porter Geddes. We have taken extracts from three of the articles it contained, as having some relevance to the establishment of a University Press in New Zealand.

On Utility and Practicality

(From an article, "What University Presses plan for the future," by Datus C, Smith Jr., Director of the Princeton University Press). HE whole question of utility of scholarly publishing is part of the larger and more familiar one of the practical value of "impractical" research; inasmuch as publicatibn is merely the final stage of the research process, the arguments in the two cases are identical. Precisely because the university presses carried out important pre-war publishing projects even though no immediate application was apparent, they were in a position to do a critically important, down-to-earth practical job when the country’s great need came. An example can be cited from the list with which I am most familiar, but every press can illustrate the same thing. In 1938, Princeton published a book called "Hurricanes," by Ivan Ray Tannehill, chief of the marine division of the United States Weather Bureau. The number of readers professionally concerned with Caribbean meteorology was very small, and in those days the lay market for specialised technical books was insignificant, the popular interest in hurricanes (before the 1938 blow) practically nil. No technical house was

UNIVERSITY PRESS (Continued from previous page) interested in bringing the book out, and Princeton published merely because our scientific advisers said the world ought to have a comprehensive monograph on the subject. We expected to lose money, and if we had considered only immediate practicality we would never have published. And in that case the book would not have been available as a tool for Army, Navy, and Coast Guard meteorologists, for the Merchant Marine, and others when the practical need arose some years later.

On Beginners’ Errors

(From an article ‘"‘What it takes to start a University Press," by W. T. Couch, Director since 1932 of the University of North Carolina Press). REMEMBER the enthusiasm with which I pushed copies of a book into North Carolina bookstores, then

bought advertising space in state papers and broadcast circulars to everybody I imagined might be interested. As luck would have it, this book, the first published after I started, caught on and sold rapidly at the beginning. Before the first printing was exhausted we _ jubilantiy ordered a second printing of five thousand copies. Our order at that time had to go through the University . business office. I was fearful this order would be held up. expressed my fear, and was told that the order

would be sent immediately to the printer. The University business office had not been set up to handle affairs of a press-none of the people there understood why I was in™such a hurry. I suppose my urgency was so familiar, so like that of the academic person who wants something done right now, that they discounted my insistence and then forgot about it. Anyway, to dispose of me, they told me that the order had gone through and that the books would be delivered in time. I was to calm myself, go back to my office, forget about the order, and take care of my job. I had short-circuited the University on previous occasions to get materials that were badly needed, had run into difficulties as a consequence, and this time there was nothing else possible but to do what I was told. The order was held up for several weeks and when the five thousand copies were ready the demand had completely disappeared. The cost of the second printing was a dead loss. And that was not all. The bookstores had helped us and we:had let them down by not supplying copies when they could sell them. bg a * OW were we to get manuscripts worth publishing? Nobody ever sent us a manuscript until he had shopped around elsewhere and found that commercial publishers and other university presses considered his work hopeless. At first the bookstores had stocked and displayed our books, but when they learned they couldn’t sell them, they quit ordering. After the first

excitement over the publication of books in the South, reviewers lost interest, and no longer created a furore over each item as it appeared, * * * HE results of having no money were not all bad. For the first time, we found ourselves under no pressure to publish manuscripts merely because they were submitted and somebody wanted them published. If we could no longer enjoy the luxury of spending freely on anything that anybody recommended, we could at least enjoy the exercise of our own’ judgment and stand or fall by it.

On Mistaking Ends For Means

(From an article, "Growing Pains of a Press Editor," by Henry M. Silver, Associate Director of the Columbia University Press). ACH year representatives of the university prasses meet together in New York. Each year at these meetings are displayed the prime products of each press. The books are handsome. There

are title pages in two colours, the type set by hand and carefully letter spaced. Design is not stinted, nor is expense. The entire exhibit is a credit to the typographer and the binder. . But where are the books which should be displayed? I mean the books which would not have been published at all if a university press had not been willing to bring them out-the books in an edilion of three or four hundred, the hooks for specialists, the books containing the latest re-

search and the yet experimental approaches toward conclusions not quite proved? The books in which expense has been scraped to the bone? These are the books which a university press exists to publish and to publish, furthermore, as cheaply as possible so that scholars can buy them on limited personal or department budgets. It is well that a university press knows how to manufacture a fine book. The man who can manufacture’ a truly superior book will know how to manufacture a decent cheap one. But fine books, books that are more expensive than they need be, are not the business of a university press, To bring them out other publishers exist. We exist to publish what otherwise would never appear. If we forget that we should fold up. This is not to argue that a university press should never bring out a trade book or a collector’s item. Trade books help make the mare go, and collectors’ items are good for the soul. By all means let the budget be balanced with the cookbook, the encyclopaedia, the anthology, the standard text. That, after all, is why most university presses run bookstores or conduct general printing offices. But these devices are not ends but means. They pay the overhead and keep the employees in decent flesh. Whatever is left over and everything that can be scraped from the floor must be applied to fulfilling the ultimate function. We are the channels through which the knowledge and research of the universities should be disseminated.