To Publish... Not Perish

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. The following program is funded by Nebraska's for public television. . . This may be the way many Americans envision book publishing. Books are printed by the thousands, sewn and bound, and shipped to bookstores nationwide, where the public eagerly awaits the latest editions to the bestseller list. But not all books are destined to be bestsellers. . There are two distinct worlds in book publishing. The more familiar is the world of commercial publishing, the home

of large east coast firms like Double Day, Simon & Schuster and Harper & Row. It is the territory of novels and novelists. The other world is comprised of scholarly works. It is the domain of literary criticism, translation, history, and political science. It is the world of university publishing. General publishing is going the way of all large industries. Publishers are more and more concerned about making a substantial profit. So much so that profit sometimes takes the place of consideration of quality and need. Well, scholarly presses fulfill a function that the larger commercial presses can't fulfill. And now we serve a market of maybe three thousand to five thousand people, which is just too small for a little brown or McMillan or someone like that to mess with. And yet this kind of scholarship definitely needs to be out there. There is a need

for these books, even if just a thousand people want to read them. Thousands read University of Nebraska Press books because they are fascinated by the American West. And that's what makes the press special. For nearly half a century, they built their reputation on documenting the great plane's experience and featuring prominent Nebraska authors like Willa Cather, John Neihart, and Mari Sandos. We have a press advisory board this afternoon. We're taking four new titles and a new series to them. When the first university presses began to publish, they would publish solely for the university. Our primary goal is to serve scholarly publishing by printing the best scholarship we can, no matter what its source. Let's do the extra jackets. Presses like

ours represent not only a state university, but the interests of the state and beyond the state, the region. Nor do we confine ourselves to publishing authors who are only in our university or only in our state. There are very few presses in the world anymore that can aspire to be encyclopedic. Otherwise, we would be fooling ourselves and fooling our public. They want to think that Nebraska imprint means that we know what we're doing, which means concentrate. And also too, if you are trying to build a press that has a certain character to it, you need to be consistent about the kind of books you publish or you have no identity out there among scholars. When they're looking for Western history, they come to Nebraska. When they're looking for Vietnam more studies, they go somewhere else. Customers, are there any speaking? We don't expect that everything we publish will appeal to everybody. But we do want to have enough variability in our list that

someone could look at our catalog every season and find a few things that they would be interested in reading. Most of the new material is back in the series section where we have to add the whole European women writers. We still try to develop our identity by publishing the very best. And of course, every press is going to tell you that. But the benefit of this is that as presses begin to develop areas such as the American West, scholars are encouraged to enter that area. We're looking for people who write well. And that's pretty easy to identify from the academic journals and other books that are already published. And we're also looking for things that fit our list. What I mean by that is books that expand upon and complement trains of thought that are already present in the list. And we're doing cathars studies, for example, so we would go out and find the best people writing on cathar. How does cathar bring us to see what's around us and that we take for granted as Rita says is interesting?

Susan Rusowski is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and general editor for a scholarly book series on cathars work. The way in which I became a cathar scholar was out of love for Willa Cather. She's identified with an Nebraska experience, of course. But she speaks to Rita on such a broad range of levels. A junior high school student can read Willa Cather and enjoy opinears or myantonia. And a scholar who's been working on literature for 30 years can read Cather. And each reader can come up refreshed and go into her works again and find more. And that's very exciting. It's very satisfying. So what Cather's inviting us to do, isn't she, by putting us in a fairytale world, is say suspend your disbelief. Let your imagination go anything can happen. The teaching and the scholarship feed into one another. The questions that the students ask or the discussions they

bring to a classroom demonstrate the need for an addition. Willa Cather has not had a critical addition. That is, an addition that provides all the scholarly material that a major writer deserves to be studied in depth and detail. Well, I kind of love a little quote about archbishop. It is a major undertaking that involves cathars scholars, researchers and editors from Nebraska, California, Utah and Canada. The project is expected to take 10 years to complete. And when finished, we'll include 10 volumes of cathars novels and one volume of her short stories. I thought this was unusual. It looks like a real early reference to Professor's house. The aim of it is to provide all the information needed for readers and for scholars to understand as much as possible about the way in which Cather wrote her works, the different versions that they went through. The conditions in which

she conceived of them and the references she made in them. The first two volumes that we prepared are myantania and opioneers. The reason for selecting those two is first is that they're among the ones that Cather's most identified with. And they're close identified with Nebraska, which we feel is appropriate for an Nebraska critical addition. For the series, I'm now preparing the textual apparatus for opioneers. I do that primarily in the library and a study room and a library on the fourth floor that's locked off from the rest of the building. And it's like a cell and it's as close to heaven as I will ever get. When you walk into that room, you know that for however much time you're going to be there, there won't be an interruption and so it's very healthy. Cather was writing to

last. She did not write simply to make money but she took her writing very seriously and she wanted to write so that future generations would read what she had done. And Nebraska is the press for Cather studies. There are a lot of unsolicited manuscripts, they're not necessarily the best but we take some of them and then in other situations we're out there knocking on doors saying we want you to come and publish with us. So it works both ways. We receive between six and seven hundred requests every year and of these somewhere around 80 will see the light of day as a University of Nebraska press book. Well, good writing to me has a couple of aspects to it. First of all, the

scholarship has to be sound. I don't think that a book has to be obscure or unreadable to be scholarly. I happen to think it needs to be clear and it needs to have good solid background to it. A publisher will first screen the manuscript to determine that it is something that perhaps many hundreds of people want to read. That's a compliment to those who succeed. It's not necessarily a rebuff to those people who don't. We simply may not be the appropriate publisher for that particular manuscript. I have a manuscript here that's going to need a lot of editing. The first screen is done by an editor. If the editor thinks that the book has some possibility, he or she will send it to a series of readers who are expert in the field. If the reader is also think this is worth publishing, the editor will then take the manuscript to a faculty committee. The faculty committee will discuss the book, discuss

the reader's reports and either approve or decline approval of publishing the work. So far, the reception from the critics has been better than the reception of the marketplace. That committee is the press advisory board. It includes representatives from various disciplines at the university, including faculty from the history, English, ag economics and biology departments. The question they always ask before they give their approval is, why is this book good enough to be published with the name Nebraska on it? I know that they're sitting there and that they're going to ask me that question. So I start asking that from the very first time I look at a manuscript. Occasionally, a manuscript which is nearly perfect will come to us. We can print that within a matter of a year. In some cases, a project is so ambitious and so complex that it could take as long as a decade. The Lewis and Clark papers will take that long. History professor Gary Molton is the editor

of the journals of Lewis and Clark. I'm editing the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. These are diaries kept by the two captains, Lewis and Clark, and foreign listed men as they crossed the continent in 1804, 1806. Well, this is meant for primarily research libraries. It is also meant for people who are just interested in Lewis and Clark. Well, the notion that you learned in schools with child is probably the notion of Lewis and Clark as romantic adventure. That it was an exciting escapade, an adventure in which they were caught up going into new lands, having encounters with the Indians and this sort of thing. And I think this is a notion that's persisted since 1814 with the first edition that came out. The journals were meant first for President Jefferson and Congress who commissioned this. It was also meant for the scientific community. Books have come out on this Lewis and Clark scientific

aspect, and I think that the new journal editions will just help promote this idea. The original edition of the journals were done as a paraphrase of the more than 1 million words written by Lewis and Clark. Although the journals have been redone a number of times, new manuscripts have been discovered since the printing of the last edition, and researchers have continued to expand upon the scientific information of the expedition. How do you read this here? It's the SAR. The Nebraska Press edition involves the contributions of botanist, geologist, zoologist, and historians from across the country to compile the 11 volumes in the series. While Gary Molten and his staff attend to the content of the volumes, the University Press staff continues to work on the production aspects of the series. What we do

in production is lavish attention on production. The design, the printing, the proofreading, the binding, all of these things lead to the physical object of a book that someone is actually going to hold and read or not read, depending on how well the book attracts them. The design can be an element in establishing the identity of a press. You can give it a certain look and feel. People are mystified and they simply don't understand that there are areas of decision in the physical makeup of a book. And yet I think the same people probably would have pronounced preference for one edition of the same text over another. We're almost done. There's still a couple tables to finish. It ought to be pretty straightforward as far as some pay step goes. I'm responsible for the book from the point that it's been copied. We check the quality at every point. We do the proofreading.

We get a lot of phone calls from people saying, will you print this book for us? We give us a quote on the price and I have to say that's not what we do here. Most of the books are printed in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan and it has become known as Short Run Alley because most of the eight printers in the area specialize in small production runs of 1500 to 3000 copies per book. For scholarly publishers, Short Print Runs are the most economical. And as a result, most university presses in the country use printers like Edwards Brothers. At the printing plant, it's a very complicated process

they make negatives first. They set up on their camera huge negative sheets. Those are all put together in what they call flats. We check to make sure that the negatives are clean, that there aren't any scratches. We see blues. It's very similar to an architect's blueprint. Once they know that those are clean and okay, they make plates that are strapped onto the printing presses. It's a big flexible sheet and it hits another roller that's carrying the ink and then hits the paper. Which is why they call it offset that the plate itself is not touching the paper. And it shoots on through and is

dried and piled up at the end. They have other machines that automatically fold these up and cut them and trim them. When they're paperback, they kind of grind off the back edge and then put the cover around it. If it's a case -bound book, there's some together. Some hand here still goes into it. I mean, a lot of people think that you can put in the book of one end and get out of finished product with automation. That's not true. The most surprising thing is that the jackets are all put on my hand. Some of our books are then shrink

wrapped with that plastic wrap and can be in the sizes, packed in the cartons, stenciled on the outside and then they arrive at our warehouse. That is how most books are printed for the University Press. But illustrated books of art and photography are another matter. They often require other printers who specialize in high quality photographic reproductions. More than a desire to produce a flashy looking book, I personally didn't believe that it was worth producing a book at all if it couldn't be done to state of the art standards because that's what the discipline of the history of photography demands now. John Carter should know. As curator of photographic collections for the Nebraska State Historical Society, he spent five years creating a book about pioneer photographer Solomon Butcher. It was an arduous task requiring him to select 100 photographs from a collection of 3 ,500 images.

What Butcher had that was unique and actually very, very far -sighted was a sense of the camera as the tool of history. He set out in 1886 to go photograph, homesteading while it was still going on. When it came to photography Butcher was tireless. He'd ride hours and hours and hours in a wagon to make a picture. But I don't think for him that was work. That was his passion. That was his love. We had a concern that we wanted to produce a book that normal everyday people could relate to. We weren't interested in a nesoteric monograph. But we were also interested in something

that the scholarly world would accept and understand as well. We were trying to serve two masters, if you will. Those are all these two file cabinets here. One of the things that I was very interested in doing was reproducing the prints full -sized. It seemed to me the most conservative thing to do there was to print everything that Butcher captured on his film and let the viewer crop in his or her own mind. So I began to look at that mountain of photographs sort of through his eyes, trying to see what he might have seen and sense what he and other people who had come to Nebraska might have sensed. I believe that the press saw the prestige of the publication and the marketability of the book being tied to a quality production and a quality design. It really was a very, very collective process to arrive at the finished product and one that I think works very successfully.

This is what I may help you. Marketing is, I think, one of the most important aspects because you can publish the best book in the world. But if you don't get it out there for people to see, it doesn't do much good. Marketing is becoming more important to publishers every year, particularly as publishers become more competitive. We are in the business of publishing books at a rate that will support the business and failing to do that, publishing enough books to support the whole publishing enterprise. To make this possible, University of Nebraska Press established a paperback trade series called Bison Books. Our Bison Books are particularly important to us because it enables us to keep authors alive that otherwise would have been lost. And it is our best mode of reaching the general public.

We try to choose Bison Books that we know will sell several thousand copies. This permits us to finance scholarly books that will only sell a few hundred copies. For each book published, the marketing staff creates display advertising, writes publicity releases, organizes direct mail campaigns, assembles catalogs for booksellers, and directs 15 sales representatives to distribute University Press books throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. We do absolutely everything we can within our budgetary limits that a New York publisher does, not as good see perhaps, so. The last time you changed me, I run around the wagon. Really? Well, don't be running around the wagon now, just sign the book. Of course, one

of the things that we are proudest of doing is publishing original documents about the frontier experience. And occasionally, once or twice a year, one of these will have a certain brightness that will lift it above the rest and be something that would be of interest beyond the popular historian or the immediate family of the author. Lynn Scott's book is like that. At age 75, Lynn Scott seems an unlikely author. In fact, the same pound Nebraska native had not intended to write the covered wagon and other adventures when he began it. The book chronicles the Scott family's travels by covered wagon in 1906 to a hot springs in

Thermopolis, Wyoming, and two years later to Southwest Oregon. All in search of a cure for his father's asthma. That says, let's go to Wyoming and so we went to Wyoming. And if anything hard about it, it was kind of like an oddness to anybody. But we did everything. We had a lot of fun. Everybody had their own work to do, even me. It didn't start out as a book, really. Some of my grandkids asked me to write about one hour of the boy. So, at first I just started drawing in a kid's picture book. And then I decided, well, why don't I just make something that they would appreciate after they were grown -ups too.

Well, I tried to show it through a child's eyes as much as I could. I wanted the children to understand why we left here. They asked me to write it in my own handwriting. And draw the pictures just like I do if I was making them for them. My own kids, they all read it. And most of the grandkids, I guess, have read it. I think it's pretty great. I think I have always been a writer because when I was in primary school, the teachers used to save my essays for themselves. When I got the first book done, I sent it to Bill. He lived in Pennsylvania and he had it. He wrote a copy. And

he kept asking if his copy was ready and they'd tell him no, they wasn't through yet. Until finally he got tired of waiting and he went down and he says, what in the world is the whole new app? Well, Fella has done most of the copy work. He said, well, we haven't all read it yet. Well, I've always thought of him as an author, but I didn't think of him as a published author. If your hands are getting tired, I'll bring it out to the farthest dead. It's up to you for sure. Well, I can't say that I am really surprised that he is published because he's a good writer. It's more of a recognition of his talent rather than talents themselves because he's always handed me. History isn't going to stop. We want to continue to be the major press in this area and to let people in this area know about themselves and about their new neighbors. We want

to keep doing the history right up to the present day so people will have a permanent record of that. And we want to continue to develop new areas to make sure that the press doesn't become an old folky at a growing institution. I think I'd always want to work for a university press. There's a sense of idealism about what we do, that what we do is important, and our books are more important than what comes from a commercial press. I think that's what I like the most. I'm real proud to work for a university press and to feel like I'm doing some good in the world. What I like most about this is the constant reminder that education never ends. And to be part of that and to meet so many intelligent and intently curious people is a dream come true. And to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and

to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of that and to be part of was funded by Nebraska's for public television. was

funded by Nebraska's for public television. was funded by Nebraska's for public television.