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Press Run
The long and varied career of Yale University Press, from Dylan and de Kooning to a history of the hamburger.
November/December 2008
by Alex Beam '75

Alex Beam '75 is a Boston Globe columnist and the author, most recently, of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.

Yale University Press is celebrating its hundredth anniversary; perhaps some self-congratulation is in order. By way of being 100, YUP has spewed forth a blizzard of publicity flyers, assembled a star-studded conference on “Why Books Still Matter”—Why X Matters is the catchphrase of a YUP series in gestation—and has even commissioned what might be called its own vanity-press history, A World of Letters, by the noted bibliophile Nicholas Basbanes.

What do they say on the basketball court? It ain’t bragging if you done it. YUP has a lot to be immodest about. It’s a $35 million business, which makes it bigger than Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, these days a division of Macmillan. Its staff of 130 (including 15 editors) is divided between New Haven and London. Thanks to a combination of $1.7 million in endowment income, some savvy grantsmanship, and judicious management, YUP breaks even financially and doesn’t drain the university coffers. Yale is now the largest university press in the country, as measured in books published, and it regularly plants books on best-seller lists around the country.

In a world where several smaller university presses have failed and many are running on fumes, YUP has not merely endured, it has prevailed. If you have read a good book lately, it is altogether possible that YUP’s distinctive Paul Rand-designed logo sits discreetly on its spine.

A partial list of recent hits would include Edmund Morgan’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan D. Sarna’s American Judaism, and Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, all of which appeared on the New York Times or Los Angeles Times best-seller lists. The press’s reissue of A Little History of the World, a 1935 work by the art historian E. H. Gombrich, sold 150,000 copies. “That’s a lot for any book, much less a university press book,” marvels Sara Nelson '78, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.

To survive, the press has changed radically over time. The huge, grant-funded academic undertakings that characterized much of its existence—the Horace Walpole correspondence, the Benjamin Franklin papers, the Annals of Communism project—are still in business, but they no longer occupy center stage. And it’s doubtful that today’s YUP would plunge into a disastrous high-stakes gamble like the 1965 publication of the Vinland Map, purportedly a 500-year-old sketch of the New World by visiting Vikings. (“The document … remains a matter of continuing contention,” in Basbanes’s judicious phrasing.)

In the very near future, it will be quite unlikely that YUP, or any of its competitors, publishes your brilliant dissertation, even if you have taken the time to translate it from Academic into English. Or if they do publish it, it won’t be in book form. A half-century ago, practically any abstruse monograph could count on at least a thousand “standing orders” from the nation’s research libraries, but no longer. “Nowadays, the more narrow the monograph, the lower the chance of selling even a few hundred copies,” says YUP publishing director Tina Weiner. “People are still publishing these books, but very soon, they will be published electronically, maybe with no print editions whatsoever.”

Weiner’s boss, YUP director John Donatich, estimates that about a third of the 300 to 400 books he publishes each year are in the academic division. “That kind of publishing has diminished as the core of the business, but not as the soul of the press,” he says. “We’ll take an important book, but we won’t take a book just because a professor needs to get ahead in his or her career. We’re publishers, not career counselors. Fifty years ago, that might have been different.”

For decades of its existence, YUP has been able to tap an unusual cash cow—its 35-year-old London office, which specializes in high-end art books. The art division publishes eye-poppingly beautiful books, many of them for the world’s great museums, including the Met in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and London's National Gallery. Art books generally roll off the presses in small print runs, measured in the hundreds, but can make money even with small retail sales. “Their art books are unparalleled,” says literary agent Wendy Strothman, who once ran Houghton Mifflin’s trade division and sat on the YUP board until 2003. “Princeton has a superb economics list, and Harvard does well in American history. But Yale has a deep understanding of its strong suits—in the arts, music, and the humanities.”

The third leg of the YUP stool, after academics and art, is trade books, which loosely translates into books that you are likely to read. University presses have flirted with trade books over the years. The University of Chicago published Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, and the Naval Institute Press published Tom Clancy’s million-selling Hunt for Red October. Starting under Donatich’s predecessor, John Ryden, Yale has been no exception. Past best-sellers include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, a Civil War diary edited by C. Vann Woodward; and John Cecil Masterman’s Double-Cross System, about Britain’s World War II code breakers. Kenneth Jackson’s Encyclopedia of New York City was a surprise hit, spawning the (less successful) encyclopedias of Ireland and New England.

Here is what passes for a diva in the university press world: the press’s Lichens of North America, with 900 full-color photos, has sold more than 7,000 copies, grossing over $300,000 in sales. Lichens also won an important award for scholarly reference books in 2001. Sales like that are rounding errors on a Stephen King novel, but for a university press they might easily throw a year of red ink into profitability.

Under Donatich—who previously ran Basic Books, a highbrow hybrid of academic and trade publisher—trade has a secure place. Jane Friedman, the longtime chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins books, sits on his board. He just lured away a top executive from Disney-owned Hyperion to take over part of the YUP marketing apparat. “They’ve started to be a little more tradey, and little less ivory-tower,” says Nelson of Publishers Weekly.

YUP intends to deepen its commitment to “mid-list” trade books scorned by larger publishers. Mid-list books are not destined to appear on best-seller lists, but they are generally cheap to acquire and earn back their authors' advances after sales of just a few thousand copies. YUP’s advances are firmly rooted in the four and five figures. “I don’t need all the fingers on one hand to count the times we have paid a six-figure advance,” says Donatich.

Here are some books that won’t have to sell millions to return tidy, modest profits to YUP: Gore Vidal’s Inventing a Nation, the first of a small-format Icons of America series; financier Leon Black has agreed to underwrite a biographical series called Jewish Lives, with Ron Rosenbaum '68 writing on Bob Dylan, and Robert Gottlieb on Sarah Bernhardt. Donatich has signed up several well-known writers to explain why something matters: Adam Kirsch will explain Why Trilling Matters, Jay Parini will argue Why Poetry Matters, and so on.

How Yale is Yale University Press? Well, it’s Bluer than it once was. In 1961, then-president Whitney Griswold made the separately incorporated press an administrative department of the university. “The speculation was that Griswold worried that the press was becoming politically conservative, and he wanted to nip that in the bud,” says finance and operations director John Rollins, who was about ten years old at the time.

Both Rollins and Donatich emphasize that the arrangement with the university, which has Donatich reporting directly to Yale president Richard Levin, doesn’t obligate the press to publish Yale authors. “We don’t have any written obligation to publish books by Yale faculty, but we want to reflect the values and strengths of the university,” Donatich says. YUP has published The Work of the University, by Levin, The Good of This Place by former Yale College dean Richard Brodhead '68, '72PhD (now the president of Duke), and several other books by Yale panjandrums.

Yale offers a lot: a fertile intellectual garden and a decent place to live for YUP’s hundred-odd staffers, who don’t have to fight the commuter trains and subways like their Manhattan counterparts. Deep pockets, too. When Donatich wanted to buy Doubleday's renowned Anchor Bible scholarship series, the university extended him a $1 million credit line. Today, it’s the Yale Anchor Bible series, one of three series for which YUP will start digitizing. (Another is the Annals of Communism, which has a grant to digitize Stalin’s personal archive.)

Yale giveth, but Yale also withholds. While it is true that venerable Yale scholars like Vann Woodward and Edmund Morgan have published best-selling books with YUP, Donatich is hyper-aware that Yale mega-sellers like Paul Kennedy, or John Lewis Gaddis, or Jonathan Spence '65PhD, who sits on the YUP board of governors, prefer to publish with the likes of Penguin and Random House.

Publishing is a harsh mistress. After 25 years in the business, as a traveling sales representative, an editor, and an executive, Donatich tried being a scribbler. Three years ago he wrote Ambivalence, A Love Story: Portrait of a Marriage, an intimate account of his marriage to literary agent Betsy Lerner. Donatich learned what all authors learn: it’s a jungle out there. The reviews were respectful, but mixed. “The memoirist may seem too self-absorbed or misanthropic for some,” Publishers Weekly opined. “I really enjoyed writing it, but I didn’t enjoy publishing it,” Donatich admits.

What’s next for the press? Maybe a modest “rebranding,” ditching the famous logo in favor of the Yale University logo. And, of course, plenty more publishing. For highbrows: a philanthropically endowed series of literary translations called the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters, offering contemporary Chinese fiction and new poetry collections of Italy’s Umberto Saba, Greece’s Kiki Demoula, and others. For regular folks: The Bagel, by Maria Balinska, which might reasonably be seen as a follow-on to Josh Ozersky’s well-received The Hamburger. “I think we have a fun book on orange juice in the works,” Donatich says, impishly.

Donatich says he doesn’t like to be bored, and with one of the most eclectic catalogues in publishing—if the lichens don’t grab you, then Bob Dylan will—there is little chance of that. He knows YUP will publish wonderful books, successful books, books that fail, and frivolous books; “but I’m lucky enough to say that I won’t publish a bad book.” Can your publisher say that?

Readers respond
What about the first half century?

Alex Beam’s centennial celebration centers exclusively on the last 50 years of publishing art, academic, and trade books in an atmosphere of competition, money making, and popularity ratings. Beam manages to dismiss the first 50 years of this centennial celebration when he describes President Griswold’s concern, in 1961, that the press was becoming too conservative. But what about the first 50 years, when the press got started, when books were actually printed on presses, when to touch the pages of a finely printed book was a pleasurable experience, when the art of the written word was combined with the art of the printed word? During this time Yale was a leader in setting design standards for university press books throughout the country.  It does a disservice to Yale, to YUP, and to books in general to leave this part of the story untold.

Sarah Greene '76MFS
Corvallis, OR

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