    A World of Letters Yale University Press –  .  Yale University Press     Published with assistance from the Norman V. Donaldson Memorial Fund and the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of , Yale College. Copyright ©  by Yale University. All rights reserved.  is book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections  and  of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Adobe Caslon by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Basbanes, Nicholas A., – A world of letters : Yale University Press, – / Nicholas A. Basbanes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.  ---- (alk. paper) . Yale University Press—History. . University presses—Connecticut— New Haven—History—th century. . Scholarly publishing— Connecticut—New Haven—History—th century. I. Title. .  .′—dc  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.  is paper meets the requirements of / .- (Permanence of Paper). It contains  percent postconsumer waste () and is certifi ed by the Forest Stewardship Council ().           For Constance V. Basbanes Preface, ix   e Formative Decades,    e Middle Years,   Enriching the Mix,   A Press in Transition,  Notes,  Centennial Highlights,  Illustrations follow pages 80 and 128 Contents [ ix ]  e centennial of Yale University Press comes at a time when scholarly publishers everywhere are considering creative ways to remain viable in the face of what all agree is a “crisis” in the way they have always gone about their business. With the ad- vent in recent years of what we might call the “electronic alter- native” to traditional publishing—a development of such un- precedented consequence that the whole notion of book culture is a topic of unending speculation—the role of the university press in the twenty-fi rst century has become a hot topic. Beyond the long shadow cast by the computer, a good deal of the concern stems from the steady erosion of a core market, with so many academic and research libraries no lon- ger buying books that once came to them routinely on stand- ing order, eliminating what was once a dependable outlet for even the most esoteric of monographs. Added to that trend has been the continued disappearance of the independent book- store, reduced budgets for the buying of books exacerbated by the skyrocketing cost of scholarly journals, and the growing Preface x  dominance of online retailers, each a factor that, in its own way, has had a rippling eff ect on scholarly publishing. To appreciate the degree of unease that is endemic, one need only read University Publishing in a Digital Age, a de- tailed report released in July  that was prepared collabora- tively by Laura Brown, former president of Oxford University Press USA, and Ithaka, a nonprofi t research and consulting organization focused on higher education and technology. Described by its authors as a “qualitative review” of material gathered from a survey of American university presses, the report drew also on interviews conducted with press directors, librarians, provosts, and other administrators. Among their fi ndings was evidence that university presses suff er from “a drift” in which they have become “less integrated with the core activities and missions of their home campuses.” To combat this disquieting trend, the authors of the report have proposed a joint undertaking that would assume many of the techno- logical and marketing functions that most presses are unable to aff ord on their own—one that would involve less reliance on traditional bookmaking. Without naming names, the authors report that “the need for university presses is being questioned at some institu- tions,” with administrators throughout the country “looking to other parts of campus (most commonly libraries) to assume publishing related responsibilities for digital content,” while others are reconsidering the way their presses are governed and operated. A good deal of all this anxiety, naturally, is at- [...]... 1957 and completed in 2008 of sermons and writings of a major eighteenth-century 18 t h e f or m at i v e dec ade s theologian, philosopher, missionary to Native Americans, and Yale graduate; the Yale Judaica Series, a comprehensive series of translations of ancient and medieval Jewish classics from Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic, and Arabic, including fourteen volumes of The Code of Maimonides Of particular... relevant to report that in 2007 Yale University Press finished well in the black, a circumstance that has become an annual expectation at Yale Although continued fiscal health is impressive, what is especially pertinent are the publishing goals these revenues allow the Press to achieve—the central thrust of this narrative pr e fac e xiii Yale University Press has a special history,” one of the many... history of Yale University Press on its one hundredth birthday I have been writing about various aspects of books and book culture for thirty years, beginning as the literary editor of a newspaper in Massachusetts, then as a syndicated columnist and freelance writer, and now as the author of seven books to date that have taken in the gamut of this endlessly fascinating world With that as a stock-in-trade,... Rollins’ impact was wide and clear, especially on the many university presses from coast to coast that became a vital force in American publishing The high standards of bookmaking maintained by these learned presses bear a large measure of debt to the inspiration of Carl Rollins.” But in 1920, when Clarence Day was issuing his appeal to donors, these achievements lay well in the future, and he underscored... civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.” Yale University Press, for its part, was determined to participate in that noble effort, and wasted... Heights campus was not reaching a broad audience because such “contributions to knowledge are always of a technical character and usually destitute of commercial value.” The only alternative, he felt, was to set up a publishing unit that would support the massive expansion in advanced educational programs he was introducing at Columbia and ensure that the product of these pursuits was disseminated widely... under the leadership of Daniel Coit Gilman, an imaginative educator who famously declared that one of the “noblest duties” of a university is to “advance knowledge and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.” When that bold statement of purpose was proclaimed, the promulgation of ideas to points “far and wide” meant intellectual enrichment by means of the... president of the University of California from 1872 to 1875 A similar dynamic took place at the University of Chicago, an institution established in 1890 by John D Rockefeller with a clear mandate to stimulate probing inquiry among 4 t h e f or m at i v e dec ade s a new generation of carefully trained scholars Like Johns Hopkins, this new center of learning was conceived as a nexus of primary research that... texture, and tone to images that continues to bear the name Benday In 1907, the Day brothers received the blessing of Yale president Arthur Twining Hadley to organize what they modestly chose to call the Yale Publishing Association and to take operational control of the Yale Alumni Weekly; they also introduced a scholarly quarterly, the Yale Review, that in time would achieve world renown and by midcentury... original writings of such luminaries as John Milton, John Dryden, William Harvey, Isaac Newton, James Clerk-Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin, works of lasting literary and scientific significance that set a pattern for generations to come But it was the steady sale of Bibles, many millions of them over the decades, that assured financial stability for both imprints and made possible the steady publication of other . A good deal of all this anxiety, naturally, is at-  xi tributed to the “fi nancial stability”—or lack thereof—at so many of the presses, particularly “as demand for their tra- ditional. Cataloging-in-Publication Data Basbanes, Nicholas A. , – A world of letters : Yale University Press, – / Nicholas A. Basbanes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.  ---- (alk. paper)  librarian and professor of physical and political geography at Yale, where he received his bachelor’s degree in , and as president of the University of California from  to . A similar