Robert Langenfeld, Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

We are familiar with headlines describing the prowess of mega-publishing and super bookstores: headlines such as "S&S Revenues Top $2.3 Billion"; [1] or, "Sales Near $5 Billion at Top Bookstore Chains,"; [2] or, "The Crushing Power of Big Publishing."[3] We know too of the tribulations publishing goliaths create, signaled by a different sort of headline: "Many Unhappy Returns."[4]

Publishing in recent years seems to give new emphasis to historian John Tebbel's belief that "no other American business has changed so completely so quickly."[5] But Tebbel's conclusion about the nature of these changes is arguable. He says "the fun has gone out of publishing," a comment he admits may seem "simplistic, even naive" to those unfamiliar with the history of publishing in America. I respect Mr Tebbel. I understand his melancholy, but I disagree with his pessimism. From my point of view as a small press publisher and editor, there is still a lot of "fun" in publishing. The AAUP knows the word, too, and acknowledges it, I believe, in its own special way each year with the Constituency Award.

Of course we know of changes in university press publishing in particular--for scholar-authors especially (though the scholars don't realize the scope or implications of the changes yet, nor do the all-powerful tenure committees and administrators). As others panelists have indicated, the problems for the scholarly monograph are pressing but they also bring fresh opportunities. Those who are responsible for the university press mission must continue to experiment with new solutions, explain them to scholars--make a special effort to communicate with administrators--and then take the necessary risks for change.

Perhaps some of those new solutions we seek reside in the small press revolution; it runs parallel to developments in mega and university press publishing. Today small presses have a measurable influence, not so much in total dollars, but in the kinds of books we print. Publishing abhors a vacuum; the history of book-making shows this again and again. Small presses, like university presses, are capturing opportunities trade houses now overlook. However, we don't often think of the small press in the mix of university publishing. Northwestern University Press incorporated some small press titles into its list. And William Dowling in the April 1997 issue of Scholarly Publishing presents an interesting and persuasive argument for a small press to publish unique monographs that university presses can't afford to do these days. But the Northwestern and the Dowling approaches use small presses born and raised separately from the university.

I bring you a different concept. ELT Press was founded in cooperation with the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; admittedly the press has an unusual origin, but I think our mission is familiar. We play a very small role in the wide-ranging world of university publishing, but a useful role, we hope. I've been asked to share the ELT Press experience: how it was founded and its mission, how it is funded and operates, the kinds of books we publish, and perhaps speculate on whether or how other such small presses might be developed in other universities. Question: is some version of the small press I will describe one of the new solutions we should be considering?

ELT Press published its first book in 1988. Its founding and mission grew out of the journal, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, which publishes articles and some 100 book reviews annually, covering British writers at the turn of the century, from late Victorians to the high modernists. The journal was started in 1957 at Purdue University by Helmut Gerber, with the close support of Maurice Beebe and keen interest of scholars like Jacob Korg, James Hepburn, and Richard Ellmann. (Beebe went on to found Modern Fiction Studies at Purdue and later the Journal of Modern Literature at Temple.)

ELT the journal was created to open a forum for scholars to discuss minor but important turn-of-the-century authors. Other journals didn't care much about publishing articles on Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Olive Schreiner, and many others from this era I could list. What began as a mimeographed publication of 48 pages four decades ago is now a 500-page quarterly with approximately 900 subscribers in 40 countries.

In the mid 1980s two of Gerber's grad students saw the need for a press that would complement the work of the journal. The advent of desktop publishing and affordable short-run printing technology made it possible for us to do so. We stated our mission in our first "catalog" (a word I use with caution in this context): ELT Press is interested in a "host of important British authors increasingly regarded as essential not only to the study of the Transition era but to modern literary history"; we will make "available new critical, biographical, bibliographical and primary works on Transition authors," printing, we boasted, "handsome cloth-bound books on acid-free paper, with dust jackets and end sheets." (Youth is a splendid thing.)

Word about the press was spread among scholars by means of the journal. One established British scholar approached us directly with a collection of poetry by John Gray he had edited. He couldn't get a university press interested in this minor poet's work. (Gray was a fascinating figure in the Oscar Wilde circle, an alarmingly handsome man whose beauty became the inspiration for the infamous Dorian Gray.) We published The Poems of John Gray, and 9 years later we still receive a few orders for the book. Other established scholars came to us, one with a bibliography on Arthur Symons; another with a critical edition of Walter Pater's last novel; still another, Ian Small (General Editor of OUP's forthcoming edition of Oscar Wilde's works), with an extremely useful book on Wilde scholarship. A few years ago we published a new PHD's book on Henry Newbolt (that Kipling of the sea) and later this fall another young scholar's book on Pater and Joyce will be published by ELT Press.

We have rejected manuscripts from well-published scholars. There have been numerous proposals from new scholars, most of which we have also refused. No doubt some untenured writers have been reluctant to tie their hopes of tenure and promotion to a small press that may not fare well with a review committee.

Our procedures in vetting manuscripts are conventional. Manuscripts I as editor believe have genuine potential for publication are evaluated by two scholars from ELT's Advisory Board. They receive an honorarium. When accepted for publication, the author signs a contract. Initially we offered a 10% royalty on net sales after the first 200 copies sold, but we dropped the royalty (which never quite matched an author's fantasy) in lieu of a generous "payment" in copies of the book. We do not accept subventions of any kind (though they have been offered and are tempting).

A customary editorial process ensues. Revisions that have been agreed to (based on readers' and the editor's evaluations) are made, the new manuscript is submitted (with accompanying computer disk) and we work through a series of proofs, first and second proofs being created with WordPerfect on a 600 dpi laser printer. Then final proofs and repros are set with the CorelVentura desktop publishing program, proof reading done with the aid of our graduate assistant. Repros are produced on a 1200 x 1200 dpi laser printer, or more recently with Electronic Prepress technology for 1600+ dpi resolution. All our books and the journal are printed by Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan, a company many of you know.

We design the layout, dust jackets, and write copy. I involve the graduate assistants in this work, some of whom bring a fresh creativity to it. A few years ago we published The Selected Prose of John Gray. It became an interesting project simply from a design viewpoint. The wily typographer Eric Gill designed his Joanna especially for the original publication of Gray's novella Park: A Fantastic Story. We used the newly minted digital version of Joanna from Adobe as the display and text type of our Selected Prose of John Gray. But we added an Arts & Crafts touch. An editorial assistant who worked with ELT Press, a skillful artist, created 14 hand-drawn drop caps. We incorporated this predigital aspect into the late 20th-century desktop publication technology.

Our advertising and distribution have kinship with university press practices. Admittedly, though, advertising and getting the word about the press out to librarians is a weak point for us. We used to create a small brochure about our books, but two years ago we moved the catalog to our web site. We now circulate a one-page flyer through snail mail that gives an overview of our titles and draws attention to the detailed web site. Exchange ads through ELT with journals like Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, MFS, and others give us some visibility. A relatively few orders come to us directly from individuals, libraries, small book stores, or even Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. In Europe the books are distributed by Colin Smythe Ltd. We ship 120 copies of each new title to Smythe. But most of our books are sold through jobbers such as Yankee Book Peddler, Coutts, Blackwell North America, and our favorite (for those of you in marketing perhaps yours too), Baker & Taylor (whose customer reps appear to get their training at the G. Gordon Liddy Charm School.)

These are the outlines of how our small press operates. The initial money to start ELT Press came out of our own pockets (myself and grad school friend, Mike Case). We print on average two new books annually, pay for supplies, computer software upgrades, and other operating expenses. The English Dept at UNC Greensboro provides office space, day-to-day mailing expenses, and of course graduate/editorial assistants.

We have books to do: a new work on Pater and Joyce; an new edition of Oscar Wilde Revalued; another book by Professor George Thomson, Dorothy Richardson's "Pilgrimage": The Annotations, an important follow up to his very useful A Reader's Guide to Dorothy Richardson's "Pilgrimage". If I had more time to devote to the press (I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in literature and publishing in addition to editing the journal), we would publish more books, taking more risks.

In essence, ELT Press is a micro-university press. It's acquisitions, editorial and review procedures, production and marketing are modeled on the university press example. One advantage of an ELT Press, however, is the minimal costs of its operation. Yes, ELT Press needed the capital to print the first couple of books, and UNC Greensboro's English Department does generously provide daily mailing expenses (correspondence and the mailing of manuscripts). We sell enough of our books to carry the capital forward and print new books (print runs of 500; selling 250-500 books of each title, most priced at a very reasonable $30, a cloth edition with jacket).

There are no salaries to pay; we use existing office space in the department; graduate assistance is taken from the pool of students provided; those students are getting unique experience with the press and we receive their hard work and enthusiasm (a nice symbiosis); the physical "capital" of the press entails a few personal computers, scanners, laser printers: standard office equipment available in every university setting. We have a web site (www.uncg.edu/eng/elt). It offers reproductions of jackets, details on the books and how to order, as well as information and excerpts from the journal ELT. I have considered putting one of our books that sold out and is no longer in printer (Pater in the 1990s) on the web site for free. That would be our first E-Monograph.

Is it possible for a university press to employ the micro press in other settings? I would think there are selected departments who would enjoy this kind of relationship and find it beneficial on several levels: for students, faculty, and the reputation of the institution. There are of course faculty who already practice the sort of work I am doing, editing and publishing journals. In many academic areas there are people, given some fundamental training in book publishing, ready with expertise and connections for peer review to help acquire and publish scholarly monographs. For example, departments with special strengths (say in certain periods of literature or particular fields of history) might publish an appropriate series of books; acquisitions and other related facets of the process would be coordinated with the flagship press, but the main work of putting books from a series into print would be conducted by the micro-press and its staff.

Many details would have to be considered, obviously. The university press would have a serious commitment in time and oversight for the first couple of books. Chairs of departments, Deans, tenure review committees would have to rethink how they credit this kind of editorial/publishing work for tenure and merit considerations, though such rethinking is already going on. More than a few universities are coming to see there are many ways to measure research activity.

Five years ago few among us predicted the tidal wave called the World Wide Web, much less thought we'd utilize web sites for our presses. I'm not of course saying that the small press in university publishing will bring a new wave of change. It is worth consideration and may help make certain kinds of monographs for certain university presses more affordable. Even to play a small but useful role in university publishing is rewarding. It's also (dare I say it Mr. Tebbel) fun.

Notes

[1]Publishers Weekly, 10 March `97, p. 12.

[2]Ibid., 31 March '97, p. 12.

[3]Nation, 17 March `97.

[4]Publishers Weekly, 17 June '96, p. 8.

[5]John Tebbel, Between Covers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 462.

[6]William C. Dowling, "Saving Scholarly Publishing in the Age of Oprah: The Glastonbury Project," Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 28.3 (April 1997), 115-34.