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February 04, 2008, 01:33 PM ET
Look Homeward, University Presses
In a previous post, I cited a report on the financial and sales prospects of scholarly presses. One point in the report addressed the advantages some presses have found in regionalist works.
That raises another point about academic publishing, and the now-legendary case of John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole wrote it back in the 60s while stationed in Puerto Rico, where he taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits to the army. He finished the manuscript, sent it out to publishers, and watched the rejections come back. He killed himself in 1969.
His mother, enlisting the help of Walker Percy, managed to get Louisiana University Press to issue it 11 years later. The response was tremendous: 50,000 copies sold in the first year, Pulitzer Prize in 1981, translated into 18 languages, and two million copies now in print. Here’s a piece on its prospects for film.
LSU liked it because of Percy’s reputation and because of the New Orleans setting, but they must have considered the project something of a risk.
If only university presses could find more hits like Dunces, to the profit of the press as well as deserving authors who can’t get the attention of commercial presses. That would mean, though, that editors would have to think beyond academic trends, which often seem to prevail.
Consider, for instance, the academic star who published eight books in the 1980s alone, and followed that up with 10 books in the 1990s. Routledge published six of them from 1992-2000.
This is to say nothing about the quality of those books, but only to wonder whether the pattern best serves the scholarly/literary community. Should presses stick so frequently to “name” academics who write book after book on a semi-annual basis? Are there any other Tooles out there?
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