Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Eugene Vance

Lockwood Professor in the Humanities
University of Washington

The panelists in this session are medievalists. As such, they deal with an epoch of Western culture remote in time yet privileged because it has bequeathed to the modern world many problems which are particularly urgent in our own time. The breakup of empires -- first, the Roman, then the Carolingian -- in the Middle Ages led to the fragmentation of power and to violent emergence of national cultures, as has occurred in Eastern Europe and Asia with the end of the Cold War in the last decade. Now is also a time of old fashioned holy wars: Judaic, Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms are threatening and toppling secular governments and creating clerical hegemonies. Inversely the European Economic Community is constituting itself as essentially a palimpsest of the maps of the Carolingian Empire and the crusading nations. In the realm of personal experience, the Middle Ages both inherited and nurtured the gender models of the Church Fathers that are being so hotly contested -- and defended -- today. So too, medieval culture bequeathed to the Western World the twin discourses of romantic love and of misogyny. And just as marriage became a sacrament in the Middle Ages, now church weddings, instead of civil weddings, are once again in vogue. Even the modern clothing of the chic in Paris and New York is harkening back to the robes of the medieval clergy!

More pertinent to our interests in this conference today, however, is the fact that the Middle Ages brought not only literacy to the masses, but new modes of understanding what was written, and with these skills came new personal and political powers.

Thus, as medievalists, we are strangely, if anxiously, at home among many of the social realities of the modern world, including those of electronic literacy and publishing. However, as medievalists, we have two practical modern concerns before us which need to be addressed. First, a distressing one: there is a serious crisis in academic publication in the Humanities, and among its effects is the increasing difficulty for medievalists to share the great wisdom that they possess with all of those who need it so badly but don't know it. Since some of our best scholarship is potentially unprofitable in today's publishing market, it is simply not published; if published it may be so expensive that it is often not purchased even by major research libraries -- much less, by individuals.

The second concern is more positive: given the new and yet uncharted potential of electronic publishing, is it not possible for medieval scholars to re-invent (as their medieval forebears once did) the modalities both of the production of scholarly knowledge and of readerly experience of learning?

Since I speak as a scholar to an audience of librarians and publishers, I feel that the first practical concern relates us all to each other, and should be addressed head-on. I shall do so by evoking a case that is hypothetical but painfully detailed. A distinguished press at a large public university, call it North Calibraska, has a 10-year-old monograph series in medieval culture. Its editorial board is well-known and maybe even the best that could be assembled. The reviews of its books have been uniformly positive, but funds for publicity have been diminishing, and the books are selling slowly. They have not turned a profit, and the press has suddenly been savaged by the university's board of regents. One day the director of the press writes the following letter to the editor:

Dear Scot:

It may be just as well that your hurried schedule at the MLA convention prevented our meeting. I had bad news to deliver that has since become bitter.

Like almost all state universities, North Calibraska University has been going through a series of budget cuts. Last spring, for the first time, the administration had to choose between cutting faculty or cutting budges of auxiliary units, including the Press. We had to absorb a 15% reduction in state support and direct more of our attention to books that sold in the thousands rather than the hundreds. We did cost-and-income reports on all our subject areas and were forced to suspend two series, including a Scandinavian translation series that had received spectacular reviews.

Last fall the news was worse: we would lose another $150,000 in annual university support, a truly staggering amount. We again reviewed costs and income and identified four series that do not recoup their investments. One of these series is the series on Medieval culture.

This week I was informed that we may take an additional cut of $50,000 this coming fall. The university is well aware that our ability to produce scholarly monographs is in serious peril, but the loss of faculty positions is considered an unacceptable alternative.

In the next year it is likely that we will be required to suspend series that cannot pay their own way with sales or subsidies. The only two titles that have repaid their costs are The Speech Acts of God and The Pilgrimage to Hell, the two titles with the broadest general appeal. It is no accident that subsequent volumes have not fared as well: each new book is published in an environment less able to afford it. Despite increased marketing, sales for scholarly series continue to fall. Most university publishers report that library standing orders for purchase of scholarly books have dropped about 40%, a drastic decline.

No doubt you will want to discuss this. At present I see very little light amid the gloom.

Unhappily,

Suna Geist
Director, North Calibraska Press

Now suppose that our imaginary series editor is a person quick on his or her feet. Since public university presses are so beholden to state legislators, why not just go ahead and offer this distinguished series to a private university press -- indeed, why not go right to the top: nothing less, say, than Prince Hardvale University Press? So off goes a letter, and just imagine our editor's suprise at the perfectly uncynical response it gets.

Dear Dr. Eriugena:

Thanks very much your letter of 1 August and for sending along the admirable collection of reviews. I've had a chance to present the series for preliminary discussion at one of our internal editorial staff meetings. Although my colleagues are favorably impressed by the aims and ambitions of the series as you describe them, we are inclined to believe that the series as presently constituted would not one that we could afford to undertake. Let me explain.

We remain committed to the notion that it is our function as a university press to publish books of exceptional scholarly merit. Since the Press receives no general subsidy, however, our books must pay for themselves through sales (the irony that a subsidized press feels unable to sustain the series has not been lost on us). Yet, as you are aware from your dealings with North Calibraska, economic conditions for academic publishers are unfavorable at the present time: books are becoming ever more expensive to produce, while book purchases by ibraries continue to decline. For these reasons we must be ever more selective in choosing titles for our list.

For these reasons we've also determined that our humanities segment of the list must remain relatively fixed in size. In practice this means that each book we commit to publishing in a given year leaves us with one option fewer we can exercise thereafter. Inasmuch as we always seem to be facing an acute embarrassment of riches, we naturally tend to favor those projects with potentially greater sales appeal over those that are more highly specialized.

Given the size of this organization, and the corresponding operating costs, we simply cannot persuade ourselves that we act responsibly by taking on book projects in the humanities with the potential of selling significantly fewer that 1000 hardcover copies in five years. You suggest, as the reason for the poor showing of the newer books in the series, that North Calibraska "lightpedalled the publicity." For most monographs, especially those with narrowly disciplinary readerships, promotion beyond a certain minimal level rarely translates into sale.

I've been frank (not to say long winded), and I trust that you'll understand that I've been speaking, and regret having to do so, mainly about financial success, and not about "succes d'estime", which all the books you've published have unquestionably attained. At this university press, I'm afraid, we have little choice but to pursue scholarly ends by increasingly commercial means.

Cordially,

Arch Dumpster
Editor-in-Chief
North Calibraska University Press

So, there you have it: scholarly presses must act like trade presses, and libraries cannot buy expensive scholarly books. But does this hypothetical case apply to good medievalists? Well, I am sorry to say that these letters are real ones, with the names and titles changed, and that a lot of real potential authors, many without tenure, will not survive to produce medieval scholarly books that will become best sellers.

Now it is possible that electronic publishing will someday eliminate this dilemma, and perhaps medieval scholars who write paperless books will soon be more widely read more than ever before. Though it is technically possible to print electronic books that could not make it on paper, those very same prospects should also be taken as an opportunity for scholars to transform their modes of scholarly production in order to reach a new audience, and also to transform their way of relating to that audience. These are questions that must be.addressed by all of us, including the scholars of this panel, all of whom have distinguished themselves by publications in their fields that I need not enumerate here, and all of whom have had extensive experience in adapting electronic technology to their fields of study. Kevin Kiernan, Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, has been experimenting extensively with the digital reproduction and transmission of medieval manuscripts, and will demonstrate his results... Michael Fuller, Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Irvine, has also spent several years as a professional programmer, and will speak of ways in which the building of electronic databases of documents of early Chinese culture raises the problem of ways in which modern criteria of selection and ordering relate to the textual order and the priorities of early Chinese culture itself. Mary Wack, Professor and Chairperson of English at Washington State University, is a specialist in Middle English, and will present the results of her efforts to exploit computer based pedagogy to offer to students access to Chaucer's texts, to multi-layered scholarship relating to Chaucer and his time, and to images illustrating Chaucer's works in their medieval context. David Seaman, Coordinator of the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center, will tour us through an innovative enterprise that makes electronic texts both available to scholars and useful in new and exciting ways.