A Press for West Virginia
BY PATRICK W. CONNER,
Ph.D.
Dr. Conner is director
of the West Virginia University Press
and is the Eberly College Centennial Professor in English.
In 1999, the West Virginia University Press moved from the care of the WVU Libraries to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, and the college has dedicated itself to making our press one of the great university presses in the United States.
In reconstituting the West Virginia University Press, we wrote a mission statement which clearly defines the society we serve: "The press shall publish scholarly and creative works treating the West Virginia and Appalachian Region and other works." This is the context in which we claim to be "the press of West Virginia."
We are fortunate in having been given a very solid start from the beginning. Robert F. Munn, head of the WVU Libraries from 1955 to 1986, began publishing books on West Virginia subjects in the 1960s. Subsequently, he established the West Virginia University Press imprint during the 1970s.
Among Munn's first books was The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History by W. P. Tams Jr., published in 1963. Tams was one of the last independent coal operators in West Virginia, and his recollections in this book provide major documentation for the history of mining, labor relations, and a host of other subjects related to West Virginia. Nearly 40 years later, this book remains in print, and we are undertaking a second edition of the book with a new introduction by Professor Ronald D. Eller, author of Miners, Millhands & Mountaineers.
Dr. Munn solicited Tams's account of his life, convinced him to write it, helped him with research where his memory failed, and edited all that into the book we have. He had the foresight to know that here was information West Virginians needed to know and the ability to see that it was preserved as a part of our history.
In keeping with Dr. Munn's vision of preserving West Virginia's history and culture, we are particularly enthusiastic about our publication of John A. Cuthbert's Early Art and Artists in West Virginia. This is the most ambitious project the West Virginia University Press has ever undertaken, and it represents the very spirit of a university press-the roots of which go back at least as far as the early 17th century to books published by scholars at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
Early Art and Artists in West Virginia contains 280 full-color reproductions of fine paintings produced in West Virginia from the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. Such a book would be a major undertaking for any press; for us, it is an indication of our firm commitment to making the best of the state's traditions available to citizens and friends of West Virginia. In his foreword to the book, Senator Jay Rockefeller notes that the artistry displayed within demonstrates that "sophistication and elegance have long coexisted with the state's celebrated mountain folk culture."
Of course, our press is equally interested in making the best of West Virginia's folk culture more available. To that end, we have brought out two CD collections of Edden Hammons's justly famous fiddle music—first collected on aluminum disks in 1947. Hammons had doubtlessly learned most of the tunes before the turn of the 20th century. When you listen to the fiddling of Edden Hammons, you look straight back into 19th-century West Virginia.
We take on ambitious projects like Early Art and Artists in West Virginia and our West Virginia University Press Sound Archives, which the Hammons CDs have launched, because we think these are things West Virginians want and need. As Dr. Munn must have thought while working with W. P. Tams, we are helping West Virginians to remember where our history comes from, and to aspire to match the accomplishments of the past with our own creative efforts.
There are wonderful projects on the horizon, too. My favorite is a first-hand account of the settlement of Anmoore, W.Va., by Spanish zinc smelters at the beginning of the 20th century. It is from one of these 50 families that most West Virginians with Spanish surnames trace their ancestry. The book is being edited by Marc Brazaitis, whose The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. We hope to issue the book with Spanish and English versions of the text on facing pages, and to market it here and in Spain because this is a story that links both nations within one small West Virginian town.
A large part of the work of a university press lies in the publication of academic scholarship, and we have many titles already published and in various stages of production to help us develop in those areas. There are books on botany, nursing, engineering, literary studies, and African history, to mention but a few of the general areas in which we work. It is to our West Virginia publications, however, that we want to give pride of place here, because they are the works that touch all of us who live and work here in this beautiful, complex state.