Archive

October 27, 2005

A labor of love: UW Press turns 85

Nobody gets rich, and you have to love what you do. As University Press Director Pat Soden said, “University Presses are created to publish books that are by definition not profitable.”

Happily, however, the history of UW Press is that of a labor of love, well tended over generations by talented and committed stewards, with quality, not profit, as its goal. Now, the UW’s own publishing house is taking a pause to celebrate its 85th birthday with some reflection and a big party tonight at the UW Club.

From humble beginnings in post-World War I, pre-Depression 1920 to the point-and-click ease of 2005, the press has maintained a commitment to excellence. This has been true from its first-ever published book, an edition of The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (edited by Frederick M. Padelford), in 1920, to its current catalogs — beautiful books on museum collections, scholarly texts on Asian, Middle-Eastern and environmental studies and world-class documentation of Northwest Indian and Eskimo art and culture, among many other topic areas.

The UW published the occasional book following the arrival of printing presses for the campus newspaper in 1909, but it was not until 1943 that the Press became an independent department. That’s when the printing department and the Press, formerly separate, were united under the direction of William Merritt Read, a professor of classics. Then in 1950, the two departments were separated again, and University of Washington Press was formally established.

No history of UW Press, however brief and informal, is complete without including two names that are crucial to the house’s growth and focused direction over the last half-century. These are Donald Ellegood, director from 1963 until his partial retirement in 1996, and Soden, who took over from Ellegood and remains the current director of UW Press.

Ellegood, who died in 2003, discussed the publishing house with University Week in 1996, on the occasion of his handing over the full-time directorship to Soden. A World War II veteran who joined UW Press in what he thought was a stop along the way to a Harvard doctorate, he stayed on 40 years. “I came, I saw, I was convinced,” he said. “I thought this was a potentially great university, and those were exciting years.” Productive years, too, it seems: Ellegood helped the press direct its talents toward becoming the publisher of record for the Pacific Northwest and a leader in Asian studies, including works on Japan, China, Russia and South Asia.

Ellegood also had the foresight to nudge UW Press into taking greater advantage of its geographical location as the largest academic publisher north of Berkeley and west of Chicago. UW Press began to widen its horizons, while continuing to tend to the UW’s talents, too. “For every book that we published by faculty here, we set out to publish one or two books by scholars elsewhere,” Ellegood said in 1996. “We wanted to establish ourselves as a major scholarly publisher, not just ‘take care of our own.'” By most accounts, this goal has long since been accomplished.

Labors of love such as academic publishing are almost by definition not moneymakers, as Soden said. Academic authors are more in search of prestige and promotion than pay. Still, at least one man has profited handsomely from his work for UW Press, and therein lies one of the publishing house’s favorite stories.

Steve Gilbert worked in the UW medical art department in the late 1950s, but was interested in doing more, and had a particular talent to offer: high-quality anatomical illustrations of animals. “It was not very interesting work, painting no smoking signs and brochures, and I wanted to draw pictures,” Gilbert remembered on the phone from his office at the University of Toronto, long his home after leaving the U.S. in the 1970s.

Gilbert set about creating a series of laboratory dissection manuals. The best seller of these — and, over time, the best-seller of any University of Washington Press book, was his Pictorial Anatomy of the Cat (the most often-dissected animal in lab classes, he said), which is still in print and popular. Gilbert continues to update editions of his dissection manuals for UW Press, but the cat book remains his biggest seller. “It’s made quite an amazing pile of money over the years,” he said.

Gilbert, of course, is more the exception than the rule. For UW Press, and its fellow academic presses across the country, money is never abundant. “Every year we struggle,” Soden said. “It doesn’t get easier.”

With such concerns in mind, Soden said, the Press formed a citizen advisory board in the late 1980s and also applied for and received two National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grants, with which many endowments have been made that continue to fund new works. The UW Press, Soden said, operates with an annual budget of about $5 million, with book sales accounting for about $4.2 million of that. The rest comes from University support, income from endowments, and fund-raising.

Recent years also have seen the Press find success working with area museums as publishing partners for glossy, high-quality books about artists and exhibitions. One such mutually beneficial collaboration has been with the Museum of Northwest Art (MoNA), in La Conner, Wash., a museum whose mission is to celebrate the spirit of the much-lauded Northwest School of painters and those who follow in that tradition. The latest result of this collaboration is a book about another noted Northwest painter, titled Frank Okada: The Shape of Elegance.

Susan Parke, museum curator, said, MoNA started by producing books independently and turning to UW Press for distribution; now, however, the two are full publishing partners, and the future looks bright for more collaboration. “Our hope is to produce a book every year or 18 months. It’s financially easier for us to do this within the partnership,” Parke said, adding that the museum and UW Press fund-raise jointly for such projects.

Each year, the UW Press publishes 60 to 70 books from 1,000 or more manuscripts that arrive in the mail. Overall, the Press has published about 4,000 books, of which about 1,400 are still in print.

It’s old news by now that Internet technology is changing every aspect of publishing, and the march of change will not leave academic publishers such as UW Press unaffected.

As the digital age matures, fewer libraries are buying books or even hard-copy versions of scholarly journals. Amid this rush of change, the traditional scholarly monograph is fading from mainstream importance (though not at UW Press; “We’re a holdout because we believe that is still part of our central mission,” said Soden). But as yet, no sufficiently credible avenue for publishing online has been created to replace the monograph. “Publish or perish” remains the rule for many university scholars and researchers, even as publishing opportunities continue to shrink. How will it all work out? No one knows yet.

“I worry about the bottom line all the time, but that’s not why we’re here,” said Soden. But the mission of UW Press remains unchanged through the changing publishing climate. That mission, Soden said, is simply “to publish scholarly research and get it into the hands of people who want to read it or need the information.”

Further in the future lie more ethereal, but no less important questions: Must presses, sooner or later, seek alternative publishing means to keep up with changing technologies? Will the book, as we know it, even survive this era? Pat Soden feels confident that it will, and that UW Press, and those like it, will continue to play a central role in disseminating needed information on research and scholarly topics.

“I really feel that the book, and the value we add as publishers to create it, will live long past our lifetimes,” Soden said with confidence.

And that seems an excellent way to begin the next 85 years.