What University Presses Do
by Patrick W. Conner, Director of the West Virginia University Press
Following its reestablishment in 1999, the WVU Press has been attracting more manuscripts each year, so that this year we will process nearly 100 new submissions. Because we are still a small operation and cannot commit to publishing more than 15 of this onslaught of submissions, we must turn most of them down. A good number of these authors want to know how we could have been so blinkered that we did not understand the value of their books. In almost every case, our response to them hinges on the fact that academic or university presses are very different from what they have imagined we ought to be.
We university presses trace our roots in the English-speaking world to the 1584 Convocation of Oxford University that approved a loan of £100 to establish a press. According to the supplication addressed to Queen Elizabeth through University Chancellor Robert Dudley, one of the queen’s favorites, a press would serve the following three purposes.
“First of all,” they said, “hidden away in the libraries of the University there are many very important manuscripts foully beset by dust and rubbish” . . . [to be] . . . rescued from vanishing for ever . . . . Second. Besides that, there are men in the place extremely skilled in all manner of languages and liberal arts, who . . . are prevented by the slenderness of their means from staying in London while their works are being printed; consequently these men are overlooked and unknown . . . . Third: [It is] self-evident that where there is a settlement of scholars, there should be printers, so that books can be printed most correctly and texts most carefully collated. A university cannot be deprived of printers without loss to literature.”
These are still at the heart of what an academic press does. Although even then there were nonacademic presses and they published much that we cherish today, such as the works of Thomas Malory and William Shakespeare, the 1584 Convocation’s rationales for a press were not those of the commercial publishers. They published Malory and Shakespeare for the same reason that commercial presses now publish Stephen King’s stories and Bill Clinton’s memoir: they knew they would sell.
But the members of the Oxford Convocation saw a duty to preserve the past, subsidize the best thoughts of the present, and present research and scholarship. That, in a nutshell, is what the WVU Press does. While we have to produce and sell our books in ways that help us recoup the cost, and it’s wonderful—although a rare occurrence—to get a book whose sales make up for losses incurred by other books we knew we had to publish, most university press books do not earn back what it costs to produce them. That means that we publish a given title because we have to, whether we can make it pay or not.
University presses are extensions of their parent institution, but they are also participants in a network that includes learned societies, scholarly associations, and research libraries. Like other members of this cohort, university presses have to be independent of external control in order to contribute to the public good, even from its parent university. A university or academic press must evaluate works in those three areas that the Oxford Convocation described and must commit their resources to making what they publish available to those few who need it, instead of creating need among many—as is commonplace in the world of commercial publishing—for an unneeded book.
I look at every manuscript and proposal that is submitted to us. I reject some of them as soon as I see them because they’re not what academic presses do. Some I reject because they require publishing resources we do not have, although they may be good academic press material. But many manuscripts look like they are indeed appropriate for our list, so I solicit the opinions of the experts in our own departments about that project. If the study still looks like a good choice for us, we send it to two experts who are not at WVU and pay for a proper evaluation of the project. These evaluations are taken to a board of faculty members who appreciate those three missions of an academic press, and which holds the final decision on whether to agree to publish the work or not.
At the end of the ninth century, King Alfred the Great of England initiated a program in his monastic writing centers to translate “the books most necessary for people to know” from Latin into English. As a student of Alfred’s time, I like to think that the WVU Press is translating from author’s manuscript into handsome published volumes “the books most necessary for people to know” today. Or, at least a few of them.