BiblioVault - Books about University presses

Harvard University Press

A History

Max Hall

Harvard University Press, 1986

A university press is a curious institution, dedicated to the dissemination of learning yet apart from the academic structure; a publishing firm that is in business, but not to make money; an arm of the university that is frequently misunderstood and occasionally attacked by faculty and administration. Max Hall here chronicles the early stages and first sixty years of Harvard University Press in a rich and entertaining book that is at once Harvard history, publishing history, printing history, business history, and intellectual history.

The tale begins in 1638 when the first printing press arrived in British North America. It became the property of Harvard College and remained so for nearly half a century. Hall sketches the various forerunners of the “real” Harvard University Press, founded in 1913, and then follows the ups and downs of its first six decades, during which the Press published steadily if not always serenely a total of 4,500 books. He describes the directors and others who left their stamp on the Press or guided its fortunes during these years. And he gives the stories behind such enduring works as Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, and Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings.

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One Book/Five Ways

The Publishing Procedures of Five University Presses

Edited by the Association of American University Presses and Joyce Kachergis

University of Chicago Press, 1994

A testament to the ingenuity of scholarly presses, One Book/Five Ways is a fascinating experiment in comparative publishing. This book records the history of a single manuscript, entitled No Time for Houseplants, submitted to five different university presses—Chicago, MIT, North Carolina, Texas, and Toronto—and then actually published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Each of the five model publishers agreed to treat the book as a real project accepted for publication and to compile a log of procedures they followed. These logs include correspondence, budgets, forms, layouts, and specifications, providing an insider's look at the path a manuscript takes through the various departments of each press, from editorial to marketing.

With a new Foreword discussing changes in publishing since 1978 and an Afterword commenting on the actual publication of No Time for Houseplants, One Book/Five Ways is a unique educational tool for anyone interested in the publishing process.

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Vital signs

contemporary American poetry from the university presses

Ronald Wallace

University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

The selections in this anthology represent the full range and vitality of contemporary American poetry--from minimalism to epic, from free verse to traditional form, from plain conversation to richly embroidered tapestry, form passionate political utterance to intense personal drama, from light verse to tough lyricism. Since 1950 university presses have published more than 900 volumes of original poetry , opening the canon to a wide range of rich and exciting voices. Nearly 200 of the those volumes are represented here.

Vital Signs features poems by such well established poets as John Ashbery, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and James Wright. Because the presses have also played a role in discovering and promoting the work of new poets, the reader will find here poems by many younger writers as well.

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