"They're closing in on me, Dick, and I'm afraid they're going to get me," said Frank Wood, publisher of the Green Bay News-Chronicle, in a phone call to his friend and colleague, Richard McCord. Drained of cash and spirit, Wood could not hold out much longer against a devouring giant, the Gannett Company. As editor and publisher of the nationally distinguished weekly Santa Fe Reporter, McCord had successfully fended off Gannett's "Operation Demolition" when it moved into town. Now Wood was seeking the help of a survivor.

Startling case histories of the dubious tactics practiced by Gannett, unsparing insights into the newspaper industry, and harsh conclusions all come together in the dramatic story of these two men's efforts to save the small Green Bay daily from being obliterated at the hands of the nation's largest newspaper chain. Their success is a metaphor for one of the oldest triumphs of the world: that of David over Goliath.

"McCord has done something marvelous with this. He's taken a deeply disturbing nationwide trend and put it on a small midwestern stage with real characters. The Chain Gang's message needs to be heard by as many Americans as read newspapers. Already Gannett's monopoly tactics have impoverished communities across the country. McCord is one man fighting back, coolly, rationally, creatively, and stubbornly. Let's join him."—Michael Shnayerson, Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair

"More graphically than almost any other available record of the era, the Gannett piracy is what has happened to this country, tolled where the price is truly paid, in the lives of communities and people."—Roger Morris, winner of the Investigative Reporters and Editors' National Award for Distinguished Investigative Journalism

"Richard McCord's The Chain Gang takes the losing battle for the soul of American newspapers from the euphoric accounts on financial pages to show what corporate news chains can mean in human terms to the people and the vitality of the victimized cities and towns. His is a unique account of the power and depredations of the Gannett Chain under its glib empire builder, Allen Neuharth. It goes behind the facade of slick public relations and financial killings for investors to show what happens when a ruthless and ambitious wheeler-dealer gets control of our news."—Ben H. Bagdikian, media critic and Pulitzer Prize winner

Offering the everyday tasks of literary editors as inspired sources of postwar literary history

Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, The Editor Function demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how.

The Editor Function follows avant-garde American literary editors and the publishing practices they developed to compete against the postwar corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. Foley studies editing and publishing through archival readings and small press and literary journal publishing lists as unique sites for literary inquiry. Pairing histories and analyses of well- and lesser-known figures and publishing formations, from Cid Corman’s Origin and Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone to Dalkey Archive Press and Semiotext(e), Foley offers the first in-depth engagement with major publishing initiatives in the postwar United States.

The Editor Function proposes that from the seemingly mundane tasks of these editors—routine editorial correspondence, line editing, list formation—emerge visions of new, better worlds and new textual and conceptual spaces for collective action.

Surveying the conventions of reading and writing that have appeared and disappeared in the Internet's wake, Vandendorpe considers various forms of organization, textual design, the use (and distrust) of illustrations, and styles of reference and annotation. He also examines the novel components of digital texts, including hyperlinks and emoticons, and looks at emergent, collaborative genres such as blogs and wikis, which blur the distinction between author and reader. Looking to the future, reading and writing will continue to evolve based on the current, contested trends of universal digitization and accessibility.

The recent announcement that Google will digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and publishing. 

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google’s Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world’s cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google’s unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad. This danger is made evident by a Google book search the author discusses here—one run on Hugo, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe that resulted in just one non-English edition, and a German translation of Hugo at that. An archive that can so easily slight the masters of European literature—and whose development is driven by commercial interests—cannot provide the foundation for a universal library. 

As a leading librarian, Jeanneney remains enthusiastic about the archival potential of the Web. But he argues that the short-term thinking characterized by Google’s digital repository must be countered by long-term planning on the part of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of inclusion and multiculturalism. 

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.

Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

The Predator Effect concerns predatory publishing — it is the first to chart both the rise and impact of deceptive publishing. The author — a scientific communications expert with 20 years’ experience — looks at how predatory journals had become an accepted part of scholarly publishing, reviewing in turn the history, development and impact of predatory journals. The book also puts their rise in context of wider issues such as Open Access and publication ethics. Other issues it addresses include: defining predatory journals, the history of predatory publishing practices, Beall’s List, authors’ motivations and the future of predatory publishing practices. 

A publishing industry insider reveals the hilarious and fascinating mishaps, hoaxes, and gaffes behind your favorite books.

It’s a long journey from a writer’s mind to a finished book, and a lot needs to go right along the way. But isn’t it more interesting when things go wrong?

Rebecca Lee, a senior editorial manager at Penguin Random House, guides readers through the secrets of the book industry, a world fizzing with scandals, rivalries, catastrophes, and con jobs. Lee demonstrates how the tiniest of typos can have oversized consequences, unearths horrifying examples of bad taste and worse style, and peeks into tales of forgeries and feuds as dramatic as any thriller. She unredacts the most egregious cases of censorship, exposes hoarders and thieves, and asks whether AI is really an existential threat to the literary universe—or if we are our own worst enemies.

An irresistible tour of mistakes and misbehavior, Rogues, Widows and Orphans will make you cringe, crack you up, and renew your appreciation for the hard work of making books—and all the ways it can go sidewise.  

For generations of readers, the Hardy Boys were the creations of the legendary Franklin W. Dixon—except Dixon never existed. Behind the iconic series stood the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a powerhouse of children’s publishing, and one gifted but largely unrecognized writer: Leslie McFarlane.

In The Secret of the Hardy Boys, acclaimed biographer Marilyn S. Greenwald uncovers the remarkable story of the man who first brought Frank and Joe Hardy to life. A young Canadian journalist with ambitions beyond formula fiction, McFarlane infused the Syndicate’s rigid plots with wit, atmosphere, and narrative vitality—helping to shape one of the most enduring franchises in children’s literature.

Bound by contract and reluctant to claim authorship, McFarlane kept his role a secret for decades, receiving little financial reward for books that sold in the millions. Yet his story is far from one of regret. Drawing on extensive research, Greenwald paints a vivid portrait of a versatile writer who navigated the shifting landscape of twentieth-century media, from pulp magazines to radio and film.

Rich in literary history and human insight, The Secret of the Hardy Boys is both a revealing behind-the-scenes account of a cultural phenomenon and an inspiring testament to creativity, resilience, and the quiet architects of beloved stories.

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.

2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Silver Medal in the West – Pacific Non-Fiction category

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brings to life the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, which was a microcosm of the Los Angeles Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and one of the premier Jewish bookstores in the United States. Blending critical analysis with a personal account of growing up in his father’s bookstore, and connecting both to larger forces that helped shape Jewish and American book retailing in the twentieth-century, Laurence Roth crafts a richly felt narrative about his family’s Jewish experience in America. It is a reminder, too, that while most independent bookstores like J. Roth Bookseller disappear from history, these retailers often had outsized effects on their communities. Breaking with conventional modes of scholarship, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore tells a unique and troubled story that rarely gets told, one that is both personal and analytical, theoretical but rooted in the everyday.

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture. The essays feature women like Marie Mason Potts, editor of Smoke Signals, a mid-twentieth century periodical of the Federated Indians of California; Lois Waisbrooker, publisher of books and journals on female sexuality and women's rights in the decades after the Civil War; and Elizabeth Jordan, author of two novels and editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1900 to 1913.  The volume presents a complex and engaging picture of print culture and of the forces that affected women's lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Published in collaboration among the University of Wisconsin Press, the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (a joint program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society), and the University of Wisconsin–Madison General Library System Office of Scholarly Communication.

This pathbreaking collection features original essays by leading scholars working at the intersections of women’s literary history, book history, and media cultures. Drawing on underexplored archives and innovative methodologies—from feminist bibliography to digital humanities—the contributors generate new narratives about the long eighteenth century and the centrality of gender to its literary production. Moving beyond a narrow focus on authorship, the chapters recover women as writers and readers, editors and curators, printers and book owners, scholars, preachers, and political actors. Across print, manuscript, and oral cultures, they illuminate the collaborative networks and material conditions shaping cultural production and circulation. Organized into sections on print histories, manuscript cultures, and new methodological approaches, this collection reshapes eighteenth-century studies while modeling ethically engaged archival research. Accessible and wide-ranging, it will appeal to scholars and students in literary studies, women’s and gender studies, and book history alike.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.