Nicholas Basbanes is the author of A Gentle Madness, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His other books include Patience and Fortitude, Among the Gently Mad, A Splendor of Letters, and Every Book Its Reader. He lives in North Grafton, MA.

A World of Letters

Yale University Press 1908-2008By NICHOLAS A. BASBANES

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2008 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11598-7

Contents

Preface…………………………………..ixONE The Formative Decades………………….1TWO The Middle Years………………………71THREE Enriching the Mix……………………121FOUR A Press in Transition…………………167Notes…………………………………….197Centennial Highlights………………………209

Chapter One

The Formative Decades

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS IS A CURIOUS form of publishing enterprise that has emerged globally by way of two strikingly different sets of circumstances. Certainly the most venerable operations are to be found in the United Kingdom at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, where both institutions maintain publishing enterprises with pedigrees that extend back more than half a millennium, each established around the time that the earliest printing shops were being set up in England by William Caxton and his followers. First to issue a book under its name was Oxford, with the release in 1478 of an obscure commentary on the Apostles’ Creed attributed to Jerome; it was printed by Theodoric Rood, a German expatriate credited with producing seventeen titles for the university through 1484. Despite such a fruitful beginning, output there was haphazard and inconsistent at best over the next century, and production did not become firmly institutionalized until 1586, when the Star Chamber-at the urging of the earl of Leicester, the university chancellor and a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I-granted Oxford a decree confirming its privilege to print books. Thirty-five years later, the university received royal permission to produce and sell the King James Authorized Version of the Bible, an extraordinary concession that assured profitability in the centuries to come and contributed measurably to a long period of sustained growth that would be highlighted by such early efforts as Sir Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605), Captain John Smith’s Map of Virginia (1612), and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The Crown granted similar permission to Cambridge University Press, which had been established in 1521. Before long Cambridge would be publishing the 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 worthy efforts that continue to distinguish their names and bring credit to their parent institutions.

In the New World, as with everything else, the historical record is far more truncated than the European example, with the American form of academic press emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a response to the professionalization of scholarship then taking place throughout the United States and Canada, and as a way to document the pioneering work being produced. Two of the earliest endeavors to begin operations in North America did so as deliberate components of newly established research institutions. The Johns Hopkins University Press-the oldest university press in continuous operation in the United States-was formed in 1878, just two years after the institution itself opened 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 printed word. Gilman’s point, made simply, was that if ideas and discoveries were to be shared, they had to appear first between the hard covers of bound books or as articles and essays in reputable journals, a conviction he nurtured during his nine-year tenure (1856-1865) as college librarian and professor of physical and political geography at Yale, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1852, and as 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 a new generation of carefully trained scholars. Like Johns Hopkins, this new center of learning was conceived as a nexus of primary research that would develop specialized graduate programs then unheard of in the United States but common in Europe. William Rainey Harper, the founding president, was a brilliant strategist whose innovative approach was to combine the interdisciplinary strength of American liberal arts colleges with the rigorous structure of German research universities. An essential element of success, he made clear, was the immediate organization of a publishing unit that would be an “organic part of the institution,” not an “incident” or informal “attachment” to the overall scheme. The formation of a press was included in his original plans for the university, created, in fact, as one of four major divisions, to be controlled by a special committee of trustees but operated as a private corporation. Harper’s strategy paid immediate dividends; by 1900, the press had published 127 books and pamphlets and set up eleven scholarly journals featuring original contributions in education, the social sciences, the humanities, and the physical sciences. In 1907, Albert A. Michelson, a University of Chicago physicist credited with determining the speed of light, became the first American scientist to receive a Nobel Prize; the books outlining many of his findings-The Velocity of Light (1902), Light Waves and Their Uses (1903), and Studies in Optics (1927)-were published by the University of Chicago Press, which today claims twenty Nobel laureates among its authors.

Rounding out the first generation of North American academic presses were the University of California and Columbia University, which both established publishing divisions in 1893, followed by the University of Toronto in 1901. In the early years of the twentieth century, the founding spirit at Columbia, Nicholas Murray Butler-philosopher, diplomat, winner in 1931 of a Nobel Peace Prize, and from 1902 to 1945 president of both the university he transformed and the press he urged into being to serve it-had expressed repeated concern that “marked activity” in the production of original research being done on the Morningside 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.

In 1905, the New York publisher Charles Scribner, Princeton Class of 1875 and a Princeton trustee, took the initiative to get a publishing operation up and running at his alma mater. Scribner had been toying with ways to go about publishing scholarly monographs not feasible for commercial ventures when he was presented with a proposal to support an independent academic press. In addition to furnishing seed money, Scribner bought the land for the headquarters, furnished it with printing equipment, and underwrote construction of a building designed by his brother-in-law, the architect Ernest Flagg. His ideal for the press, according to an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune, was to promote “disinterested service to Literature.” Incorporated as a self-supporting corporation to be operated apart from the university-an arrangement that continues there to this day-Princeton University Press would publish nearly four hundred books in its first twenty years and provide the conceptual model for three enterprising Yale graduates who were intent on establishing a nonprofit publishing enterprise of their own a few years later.

The Yale trio included George Parmly Day, Class of 1897, and his older brother, Clarence S. Day, Jr., Class of 1896, the sons of Clarence Shepard Day, Sr., Class of 1876, a prominent New York broker, banker, railroad director, and for many years governor of the New York Stock Exchange; they were also the grandsons of Benjamin Henry Day, the founder of the New York Sun, and the nephews of Benjamin Day, the inventor in 1879 of an engraving process used in commercial printing to add shading, 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 operate on its own. Joining them in their modest undertaking was a classmate of Clarence’s, Edwin Oviatt, who would edit the alumni weekly and later write an institutional history published by the Press in 1916, The Beginnings of Yale (1701-1726). Their careful effort to publish The Journal of an Expedition across Venezuela and Columbia by Yale professor Hiram Bingham-an accomplished explorer soon to be acclaimed as the discoverer of Machu Picchu and later to serve as a United States senator from Connecticut-increased their standing with President Hadley, who in 1908 allowed them to call their enterprise Yale University Press, with the explicit understanding that the university would monitor its activities. In 1919, as Hadley reflected on his two decades as Yale president, he deemed the Yale Review and Yale University Press to have been “our best products of the past twenty years.”

Sickly for much of his adult life-he died in 1935 at age sixty-one-Clarence Day, Jr., achieved celebrity as an author, most famously of a best-selling memoir of growing up in Manhattan in the 1890s as one of four sons in an affluent East Side household headed by a domineering father. Published five months before his death, Life with Father became the basis of a comedy adapted for the stage by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It opened on Broadway in 1939 and ran for a record 3,224 performances; a 1947 film starring William Powell, Irene Dunne, and a very young Elizabeth Taylor received Oscar nominations for cinematography, art direction, musical score, and best actor.

Apart from lending his full enthusiasm to the Press, Clarence Day was content to allow his younger brother be the prime mover in the ambitious initiative, which began operations not in New Haven but in New York, where George Parmly Day was gainfully employed in his father’s Wall Street brokerage firm and in no position, just yet, to give up his day job. The enterprise briefly set up its headquarters in what he described years later as a “ten by twelve” room before moving into a marginally larger space-“a little black cave” of an office-in the Ginn Building at 70 Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. The workforce during that embryonic period consisted entirely of George Day’s wife, Wilhelmine Octavia Johnson Day, who was responsible for keeping a record of all the Press’s work “in a ridiculous book, four by seven, with a thin cover that looked like butchers’ paper,” according to a charming reminiscence written by Clarence Day, Jr., in 1920. Each morning, Clarence Day recalled in the chatty piece, Wilhelmine “rushed” to the front door of the building to see if the postman “had shoved any mail through the slot of the door; and when some of it was orders she had to telephone downtown at once to announce them, because orders make you happy when you are starting a publishing business. One morning there was a splendid order for thirty-one books, and it took her all day to get them tied up and sent off and billed for.”

Long after a full-time staff was in place handling Press affairs in New Haven, Wilhelmine Day retained an abiding interest in its well-being. An orphan raised by a guardian, and childless throughout her fifty-seven-year marriage to George Parmly Day, she was a formidable presence, and not shy about offering an opinion. Such was the case in 1931, when she returned from a trip to Europe and urged her husband to publish an overview of economic reform then being attempted in Sweden as a response to world depression, an experiment in government that would later be described as a “constructive compromise between capitalism and socialism.” Following her advice, the Press commissioned Marquis W. Childs, a young foreign correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who had reported from Stockholm, to write Sweden: The Middle Way, which in 1936 became an international best seller, so influential that Yale published a sequel, Sweden: The Middle Way on Trial, forty-four years later. Alvin Eisenman, founder and director of the graphic design program at the Yale School of Art and one in a long line of great printers and graphic designers to work at the Press, told Roberta Yerkes Blanshard, an editorial employee from 1929 to 1950, about a telephone call he received from the boss’s wife on his first day of employment as a Yale typographer in 1951. “Mr. Eisenman,” she told him, “I want you to know that Mr. Day and I never had any children. The Yale Press is our child, and I want you to treat it carefully.” At that point, according to Eisenman, “Click, she hung up. And never mentioned it again.”

Clarence Day’s good-natured essay “The Story of the Yale University Press Told by a Friend” reflected lightly on the first dozen years of the bold publishing project he had undertaken with his brother and was written with the idea that it might persuade prospective donors to help the operation secure financial stability beyond what they were able to commit themselves, and-while they were at it-underwrite the establishment of a printing plant of its own. Day noted how Yale’s sibling press at Princeton already had “a beautiful plant, which was given [to] it by Mr. Charles Scribner,” presented by the New York publisher in the spirit of builders who “enjoy watching their work grow, and get some fun out of giving.” Day used the metaphor of a builder repeatedly in his piece, most pointedly to describe the process of making worthwhile books. “The publisher who thinks of himself as a builder of ships, will naturally care about designing and building them well. The types and the paper and the bindings must be stately and strong-or have whatever characteristics suit the contents and life of each volume.” What he was saying, in essence, was that if Yale were to achieve true excellence as an academic publisher, an onsite plant was essential to ensure that “beauty of workmanship and design” would always come first, and that “the object would be to make each book perfect if possible. Not books de luxe only, but every kind, each in its way.”

(Continues…)

Excerpted from A World of Lettersby NICHOLAS A. BASBANES Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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