While all who read books of a serious nature have reason to celebrate the publishing houses operated by the world’s great universities, those of us with an interest in serious books about nature have a particular reason for doing so. For while a number of fine and noteworthy natural history titles are published each year by commercial publishing houses, it’s the university presses that are the force behind so many fine works of this category being brought into print; works that without the support of such scholarly presses might not otherwise – most commonly due to the highly specialized and thus understandably smaller size of their likely readership – see publication.
As I scan through my own stack of “to be read” and “ready for review” books, the vast majority carry the imprints of university presses on their respective spines: Princeton, the University of California, the University of Chicago, Oxford, and Oregon State University, to mention only a few. Would these books have been published by a commercial house? Perhaps; all are certainly of sufficiently high quality to have been. Would they have generated sufficient sales to meet with satisfaction by a collection of very demanding stockholders? Probably not; but then would any of us in the natural history community really expect a book about the curious breeding habits of oddly named Lepidopterans in the Pacific Northwest to sell in the same vast quantities as a book about the odd breeding habits of curiously named yuppies in the same geographic area?
Therefor, as this present week is officially designated by the AAUP as University Press Week, take a moment to visit the website of your favorite university presses, leave a comment on their blogs or Facebook pages, perhaps even send them a tweet – using the hashtag #upweek – telling them how much you appreciate all the work they do to promote the spread of knowledge through their publications.
