Marginalia: The Transom

Abstract

Marginalia:The Transom William W. Savage Jr. (bio) The news item explained that a certain university press had decided to respond to its budgetary crisis du jour by abbreviating its fall and spring lists. This move, by itself, would have saved no money; but it certainly justified the issuance of pink slips to a few employees, and that did the fiscal trick. The money saved by not having to pay those salaries would allow the press to struggle through. And so it goes, a tale told around the country with minor variations and some regularity. If you can't sell books, cut back on publishing them and release staff who are now unnecessary because you can't sell books. When approximately two-thirds of the economy of the United States depends upon consumer spending, and consumers are not spending, the situation bodes ill for any enterprise that creates things to sell. Publishers, however, are subject to a double whammy, thanks to the technological revolution affecting dissemination of the written word. The received wisdom is that nobody reads books nowadays because their attention has been drawn to electronic devices of various sorts that amuse, entertain, and sometimes even inform. As well, certain electronic devices replicate the printed page, albeit on flat screens of assorted dimensions. Some observers contend that in future any reading will be done with such devices in hand, in lap, or on desktop. Or on one's cell phone, if there's an app for that. I've yet to see the commentaries of ocular specialists on the wisdom of reading books from screens approximately the size of four postage stamps, but it is awfully difficult to keep up with the details of any revolution while it is in progress. What strikes me as interesting (at the moment) is the thought that civilization may have moved from papyrus scrolls to electronic scrolling, rendering the process of turning pages a centuries-long but nevertheless momentary aberration in human history. Progress, don't you know. Happens all the time. But one wonders about the migration of data that one thinks one has under control. What becomes of that which currently [End Page 241] passes for civilization? Will historians a thousand years hence write, 'We would know more about these people, but their data migrated'? Or will there be discovered in a cave somewhere an oddly long-lived digital equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Meanwhile, back at the university press . . . Well, who knows? Perhaps acquisitions editors are even now in hot pursuit of manuscripts about new developments in lithium batteries or the long-term effects of glowing screens on retinal acuity in laboratory animals. Or perhaps I simply won't receive the two or three university press catalogues I have come to expect twice a year. Or maybe presses will survive by putting everything online: the current catalogue, the backlist, the books themselves. According to what I read in actual newspapers, downloading an e-book is cheaper than buying a casebound copy of the same title. E-books are a solution, I suppose. A solution is necessary and, one may say, mandatory. There is a line of PhDs assembling on the sidewalk. They need to be published. Just ask 'em. Not long ago, I was conversing with another historian, who informed me that the institution employing him was 'a major research university.' 'What makes you say that?' I asked. 'Well,' he replied with great solemnity, 'there's a lot of publication going on there.' So, serious business, this. Under the circumstances, you might suppose that a parent institution of a struggling press would act to protect it, keep it going, and make it a bigger, better thing; but the standard administrative response seems to involve cutting losses by killing the goose that lays the egg of golden reputation, either with one big whack of the budgetary axe or with what might be known in a late-night schlock movie as 'the death of a thousand cuts.' You might suppose that faculty members would rise up in protest, and perchance some do; but the objections are not sufficiently contentious to warrant coverage on the evening news. In fact, I am led...