Abstract
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, the pioneering economist and sociologist, taught at Yale University for nearly forty years. He loved debate, engaging freely in it with his students. His classroom was a battlefield of ideas. According to an old story his students told, you brought any bit of research to Sumner he would ask three questions. 'Is it true? How do you know it? What of it?' I No publisher ever put it better. Those are precisely the questions that the editor or publisher of serious books must ask and answer. They are not the only questions; others follow, nearly as hard to answer, but Sumner's questions take precedence. And these are the same questions that students of history are equipped by training and inclination to answer. If they can learn what the other questions are, and how to answer them, then those students have the potential to become publishers. And if they have the imagination to sense in the questions the creative tension that is at the heart of publishing, then it is possible for them to think of a career in publishing as an absorbing,
Published Version
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