ACQNET v3n093 (December 23, 1993) URL = http://www.infomotions.com/serials/acqnet/acqnet-v3n093 ISSN: 1057-5308 *************** ACQNET, Vol. 3, No. 93, December 23, 1993 ========================================= (1) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: Postings from _HUMANIST_ on the Mellen Press (279 lines) (2) FROM: Barry Fast SUBJECT: Vanity presses (19 lines) (3) FROM: Judith Wann SUBJECT: Sources for international bestsellers (9 lines) (1)------------------------------------------------------------------------ FROM: Christian SUBJECT: Postings from _HUMANIST_ on the Mellen Press ( lines) DATE: December 23, 1993 Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 7, No. 0361. Tuesday, 21 Dec 1993. [Reprinted with permission. -- C.] (a) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1993 15:28:08 +0100 (MET) From: BRILL@rulcri.LeidenUniv.nl Subject: Edwin Mellen Press I read with a certain dismay Irving Hexham's comment that Brill regularly requires subventions for its publications. I contacted him and discovered that he had based this remark on contacts with Brill in the middle seventies. The situation is different in the nineties. Brill asks subventions "regularly" in the sense that subventions are received for a small number of very specialist books and some large prestige projects each year, but this is not the case for the vast majority of our publications. Julian Deahl Classics Editor E.J. Brill (b) --------------------------------------------------------------167--- Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1993 13:45:38 -0500 From: "Sarah L. Higley" Subject: Edwin Mellen: power and prestige and other myths of academia I suppose this discussion of the Edwin Mellen press is instigated by the recent excoriating review in _Lingua Franca_? Before anyone jumps whole- heartedly to the defense of EMP, or into a refutation of the charge that EMP does not referee or revise submissions, go read the article. It has some interesting revelations about the press's activities and philosophies, and a few appalling case histories. Bear in mind, though, that the article is opinionated, that the ad hominem attack on Richardson is reproachable, and the fun poked in the title and opening paragraphs at Washington's book (published by the press) doesn't examine the spirit of the book or the tradition that W. is writing in. Forgive me for not providing titles and dates. The article is at school and I am at home, and I haven't looked at it recently. I also don't know what controversies the article stirred up and would like to be informed. Perhaps it has been addressed on Humanist already. To be sure, W's book is excessively wordy and ornamental-- almost to the point of ludicrousness (he writes as much for alliterative effect as he does for content, it seems), but I and a colleague looked it up (yes, our library bought it, just like the article accused libraries of doing without reviewing), and it struck me that the style of the book, while impenetrable to me, imitated certain features of Black gospel or religious speaking/writing. I may be entirely wrong here. What was clear was that it wasn't written in the coded style of received, standard academic English that most of us in the field take for good writing, and consequently it's no wonder that it came under attack in an article that found fault with EMP's buying. It's full of chapter headings like (and here I have to adlib, not remembering the titles exactly): "Pontificating Upon the Princely Patterns of Patriarchic Paternity." We noticed, though, that Washington has published other books with other presses, many of them sporting titles just as flamboyant--perhaps the Mellen Press gives him an outlet for the writing style of his choice that few other presses do. The article in LF failed to mention that the book addressed the economic status of African nations vis a vis the first world, and perhaps the author intended to challenge the language of white academia. I'm not saying I liked the book or found its writing to be excellent or even commendable; I'm saying that the article in Lingua Franca omitted important orienting information that contextualized it. They made it seem idiotic, point blank. On the other hand, though, I don't think the rest of the article has invented some of the peculiarities of the press and its procedures. It is out for the big sell. It offers you the convenience of publishing what you want to write about and in the style you choose without the hassle and rejection that most University Presses give you. That EMP has published some valuable works goes without saying, but many of them are on subjects so obscure that most other presses won't touch them. Perhaps the EMP is the wave of the future: after all, look at the rising power of the InterNet. Our libraries are so overflowing with books published by "accredited presses" that they can hardly contain all of them. Publishing a book is now _de rigour_ for promotion; not to publish is professional death for many scholars, and yet we kill more trees and buckle the floorboards of our libraries doing so. It's crazy. The InterNet offers free publication, and it's open to many many different styles. As a critical voice, I think it will eventually outshout the old forms of publication and commentary, but we are still terrifically attached to the beautifully edited and presented BOOK. And this, finally, is what I dislike about Edwin Mellen. It caters to that kind of conservative mentality. Why not admit under a more radical rubric that anyone can seize the podium in the Halls of EMP? But you see EMP doesn't want to be radical or underground. It aims for the LOOK of "respectability" that it hasn't earned yet. It's a blockbuster movement that relies on the author's need to publish and willingness to go to any expense to do so. The author gives the press camera-ready copy, which can look quite nice what with the desktop printing options we have available. The final edition is beautifully and tastefully bound, and horrendously expensive. Only libraries can usually afford to buy these books at prices like $90 for five hundred pages on usually quite obscure topics. It also bothered me to learn from the article that EMP is in the process of establishing an "accredited" university in some third world nation in order to buy academic respectability. This is really putting the cart before the horse. And I do believe it's true that they will publish everything that they solicit or that is submitted to them. I was approached THREE TIMES by EMP to publish my Berkeley dissertation. I was mailed long explications about why MY work "deserved" to be published without payment or royalties, how publication was "reward enough"; I was told that they could probably even get two books out of my dissertation. A professor emeritus in Wales wrote me a personal letter (that I still have) asking me to allow them to publish my manuscript. Not "consider" it, "publish" it. He hadn't even seen my revised manuscript, and being the scrupulous and traditional scholar that I know that he is, in any other context he would have been wary of my applications of canon revisionist and feminist theory to the study of early Welsh poetry. The message I repeatedly got from these people in Wales who kept recommending me to EMP was that I was not respectable enough for the University of Wales Press, but that my subject was too narrow for any other press. I found this annoying, and published with a good university press which refereed and had me revise my text; the book costs $45 dollars hardback: less, I believe, than even Boydell and Brewer would publish it for. The upshot, then, of this verbose and irritable letter is that I have very mixed feelings about the Edwin Mellen Press, but also VERY mixed feelings about our canons of "respectability" and power. To be frank about the exigencies of tenure and the competitive and critical nature of many departments, I would not advise an untenured colleague to publish with EMP as it does not yet give quite the message that publishing with an accredited University Press does, despite EMP's former appeals to the pressures of tenure that it will alleviate. I say "former," because I think it may have revised its soliciting strategies and is not coming on so strongly as it did six years ago. And it does not reduce the stress upon the trees or library shelving space and floorboards-- or your own pocketbooks for that matter. On the other hand, it allows many people to publish their serious scholarship who don't want to or can't afford to go through the hassles of submission and rejection and revision and division and collision that all the "accredited" University Presses put you through. But if a press publishes just about EVERYTHING it solicits or gets sent, having you pay a large part if not most of the cost, how much can it inspire our confidence that what it accepts of ours is based on merit and demand, and not on the money it can rake in from libraries? Just to complicate things, I might add that respected University Presses are quite as commercial, but would still have us cling to the myth of learned poverty: we like to think that we publish for art's sake, and not for money, hence we spend years on a 60,000 word manuscript for a promotion without raise that would earn us maybe 15,000 dollars plus residuals were it a reasonably popular novel or a good cookbook. Note, however, how hard it is to publish these, how competing skills COUNT. Like the barristers of England who turn their backs on their remunerators (what else can that little dangling pouch symbolize?), scholars like to think that they publish for intellectual purposes only, and not for prestige or gain, and that this way they are FREE of the pressures of competition. HA. This huge myth was RAMPANT at the university of Geneva when I was there, where I had to listen to sanctimonious lectures on the evils of the merit system in American Universities from all the maitre-assistants who were infatuated with keeping up with the Derridians and other fashionable isms of europe. Nonetheless, I love any critical argument which explores and exposes the myths of intellectual asceticism, and I can see, as I write, how I'm warming up to a supportive comment for EMP. We should all pay to get published. We should all be required to buy a certain amount of airtime, the way we do on the Net, and dispense with the laborious and classist machinery of submission, reference and rejection. Something like EMP would offer the best and truest forum for what people are thinking out there. I only wish it would stop posing as a member of the club, flashing its newly bought credentials, and appealing to the same old anxieties and needs of the same old Academy. So I take it all back. Publish and be damned! ;-) Working on my cookbook-- do you think Edwin Mellen will buy it? if I make it academic enough? Sarah Higley Associate Professor of English The University of Rochester slhi@troi.cc.rochester.edu (c) --------------------------------------------------------------74---- Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 9:10:02 MST From: Karla Poewe Subject: Edwin Mellen Press Although I am not a regular subscriber to THE HUMANIST, I have read the recent correspondence on the Edwin Mellen Press and hope that you will accept the following comments:-- In the early 1980's I completed extensive fieldwork among Herero living in the Black township of Katura, Namibia. When I had written up my research I submitted a manuscript to possible publishers. The response was generally positive except that I was asked by several of them to "add a chapter on SWAPO" because, they explained, this would increase sales. Most wanted me to say good things about SWAPO, although one publisher was prepared to accept a highly critical chapter. Unfortunately, I had to refuse because the people I studied had virtually no contact with SWAPO and to have added a chapter about them would have been fraudulent. One publisher, the Ravan Press in Johannesburg, which is closely associated with Indiana University Press, accepted my book but warned me that it would be 3 to 4 years before they would be able to publish it. Therefore, they suggested I might want to take the manuscript elsewhere. Because of the rapidly changing political situation in Southern Africa I decided to give the manuscript to the Edwin Mellen Press which produced it in under six months without making any changes to my text. The book, THE NAMIBIAN HERERO: A HISTORY OF THEIR PSYCHOSOCIAL DISINTEGRATION AND SURVIVAL, Lewsition, Edwin Mellen Press, 1985, subsequently received excellent reviews, including one in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, 20 February 1987, p. 190. Later I published RELIGION, KINSHIP AND ECONOMY IN LUAPULA, ZAMBIA, Lewiston, Edwin Mellen Press, 1989. Once again the background to my decision to use the Edwin Mellen Press was political. In this case the original manuscript had been accepted for publication by a major publisher in the mid-1970's. But, before publication someone pressured the press to have me falsify certain medical data for political reasons. I refused to make any changes. After a prolonged discussion the press suddenly found that it had "financial problems" and was unable to publish my book. After this experience I left the manuscript alone and published several other books with different presses. In 1989 I revised my Zambian manuscript and sent it to the Edwin Mellen Press which published it. Since then it has been extensively cited in medical journals and very well reviewed. These two experiences convince me that the Edwin Mellen Press plays an important role in small, politically volatile, and uneconomic fields like African Studies. Karla Poewe Professor of Anthropology University of Calgary (d) --------------------------------------------------------------29---- Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 18:51:51 CST From: "Jim Marchand" Subject: Edwin Mellen I break no lance for the Mellen company; I _have_ bought some books from them and reviewed some. Some are good, some are bad, that's the way books are. To condemn a whole press because of a poor book or two seems to be folly. The line between vanity presses and non-vanity presses has been blurred for a long time now. Many noble presses require subventions, and the time of letterpress and good peer review (who pays for peer review?) is long since gone. Unfortunately, libraries have neither the staff nor expertise to decide on a book-by-book order policy; I used to suggest books to the library, but I gave up on that long ago. At any rate, blanket orders, unless your library has a great deal of many, seem to be a poor way to solve the problem. Jim Marchand. (e) --------------------------------------------------------------21---- Date: Mon, 20 Dec 93 15:45:12 CST From: Tony Schwartz Subject: Mellen Pr. (one more time) Craig Walton expressed "surprise and sadness" at my message that academic libraries generally do not include Mellen Press in their approval plans and suggested that such "negative broad-scale judgments" could "kill a small press." A point of clarification: Academic libraries do not have as one of their purposes to support small presses; that sort of altruism became untenable a quarter-century ago in face of the extraordinary growth and price inflation of scholarly publishing. *However,* academic libraries are vitally concerned with the economic plight of small research _fields_. Tony Schwartz, Rice U. (2)------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Barry Fast (Academic Book Center) Subject: Vanity presses Date: 12/22/93 Regarding the posting by Irving Hexham and his question: How do you define a vanity press? My understanding of the term is quite narrow. If the press solicits or accepts contributions from the author in order to publish the book, it is a vanity press. Underlying the term, of course, is the supposition that it takes a certain degree of "vanity" to pay a publisher to print and distribute your book. Maybe desperation is a better word. Many publishers are subsidized, especially university presses, which enables them to publish books that would otherwise not see the light of day. But the difference between vanity and subsidized publishing is that in the latter case the press is still exercising judgement, taking a risk, and has a strong motivation to sell the book. In vanity publishing there is little judgement, no risk, and not much motivation for the publisher to sell the book. It has already been sold---to the author. (3)------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Judith Wann (Oregon State Library) Subject: International best sellers Date: December 21, 1993 Does anyone know of a source of lists of international best sellers? One of our reference librarians has been trying to find a convenient source of such information, but hasn't had any luck. Any information appreciated! ****** END OF FILE ****** ACQNET, Vol. 3, No. 93 ****** END OF FILE ******