Editorial Imagination Can Save Us

A t the end of the year, Peter Dougherty, 68, will step down from his job as director of Princeton University Press, where he began working as an editor in 1992 and became director in 2005. The Chronicle Review asked Dougherty, who is also a former president of the American Association of University Presses, about dos and don’ts for junior scholars pitching books, the most intimidating intellects he’s worked with, and the future of university presses.

What drew you straight out of La Salle University in 1971 into academic publishing?

Serendipity. I was tending bar at the Jersey Shore. And this friend of mine who I’d gone to La Salle with worked in a bookstore, and he’d gotten a job as a textbook salesman for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. In those days textbook salespeople had the summers off, and he was looking for a summer job. So I got him a job in this little town where I was working, and he told me about a textbook-sales job with Harcourt in Baltimore. I’d been planning on going to graduate school in international relations, but it sounded like an interesting prospect, so I got on a bus one morning at 6 in downtown Ocean City, N.J., and went to New York on an interview. By the time I got on the bus to come home, I was in love with the idea of a career in publishing. The next day they offered me the job. Eight thousand dollars a year, a company car, the summer off. I was the happiest person on the East Coast.

Princeton University Press is one of the major players. Who are your serious competitors?

They’re Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago Press, MIT Press, Columbia, the University of California Press, Johns Hopkins, and some of the larger state-university presses. Plus Oxford and Cambridge. Each of those is 10 times our size. They’re department stores and we’re boutiques.

You’ve worked with winners of the Nobel and other awards. Who was the most intellectually intimidating author you ever worked with?

The most brilliant author I’ve worked with is Bob Shiller, whose Irrational Exuberance was the first book that we did together, in 2000. It was a best seller, and it’s the book that predicted the dot-com bubble bursting. I had the privilege of accompanying Bob to Stockholm in December 2013 when he won the Nobel, which was a tremendous thrill for me. We’ve worked on a number of books together now. To the extent that he’s intimidating, his fearsomeness is tempered by his friendliness.

You’ve served as president and as an active member of the Association of American University Presses. In what areas are presses better off working together or better off working competitively?

It depends partly on scale. For smaller presses, there are opportunities to work together in terms of back-office functions — distribution being one. The obvious example is the University of Chicago Press Distribution Center, which includes dozens of smaller university presses along with its own books. There are a couple of other collective distribution arrangements, too.

Among the presses, who are the rising stars?

Dave Hamrick, who’s the director of the University of Texas Press, does a great job. He and his colleagues understand their mission. They’re a regional press, and they serve their region with a great deal of style and distinction. And there are some interesting niche presses. For example, Catholic University Press, in Washington, under the direction of a very learned and smart director, Trevor Lipscombe. Jim McCoy, at the University of Iowa Press, is terrific. He does a lot of poetry, and they’re going to be publishing this Walt Whitman novel. That is a wild discovery, and we’re so proud that it’s going to be published by a university press.

What disciplines are underrepresented in scholarly publishing and primed for a surge in the next few years?

Spring Books

In this special spring books issue, Peter Dougherty, stepping down from Princeton University Press’s directorship, says editorial imagination is the key to scholarly publishing’s future. Bruce Walsh, of the U. of Regina Press, explains how he plans to open Canadians’ eyes to their nation’s history. We profile Chris Lebron, whose new book contextualizes #BlackLivesMatter, and Yascha Mounk, whose theories about threats to liberal democracy have turned out to be more timely than he wished. Also featured are reviews of books on writing, social media’s effects on civic order, and capitalism’s contradictions. Then, just for fun, play Promotion, which combines strategic thrills and existential nausea for a one-of-a-kind gaming experience.

• Promotion
• Scholar Seeks to Reframe Black Lives Matter Campaign
• Contradictions of Capital
• A Political Theorist Joins the Resistance
• ‘A Voice for Many Peoples’
• Anti-Social Media?
• Writing Better Won’t Cure Your Academic Woes

Years ago, I published an article in The Chronicle Review about the importance of science publishing, and to this day I believe we could be doing more. But I think university presses should be publishing much more, too, on the relationship between the pure academic disciplines and the professions. For example, sometime next year we’re going to be publishing a book called The Ethical Engineer. The author is a professor of engineering at Stanford. I think it’s this kind of interaction between traditional humanities and what’s happening in business, architecture, engineering, law, and medicine that’s really promising.

What trends have you seen come and go during your time in academic publishing?

When it became clear that the market for monographs was going to continue to diminish, there was a rush to publish trade books, books for general readers. What presses discovered was that in addition to being able to occasionally win big in trade books, there are all sorts of opportunities to lose big. I think that’s pretty well run its course.

What trends have endured throughout your career?

I think there’s a great ongoing market for what we refer to here as big history, the major histories. When I got into the publishing business, big histories that conformed to the structure of courses — for example, the history of 20th-century Europe, the Middle Ages — those books tended to be done by commercial publishers, and to some extent they still are. But that’s kind of an enduring genre that really holds up and that university presses can do particularly well. Walter Scheidel [author of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century] is a good example. And years ago, we published a history of the 19th century by a German scholar named Jürgen Osterhammel. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in a way is big history. These books cut across disciplines, and they represent a durable and important genre.

There was a lot of talk some 10 to 15 years ago about whether university presses would survive the advent of e-books and Google’s digitization project. Has the hand-wringing stopped, or is the future of university-press publishing still an open question?

Oh, it’s still an open question.

Books have survived. They have a kind of authority and a value. If books were going to go away, they would have gone away. There’s no reason why, if the internet is as powerful as it is, that it wouldn’t have destroyed books five or 10 years ago. That said, the market for monographs is such that it’s a real challenge for some university presses to stay in business. A lot of presses are struggling against very serious odds.

What do you say to the hard-core business-minded board member or administrator who’s overseeing a press that’s losing money?

I say books are an essential asset in scholarship.

So it’s a question of mission?

It’s a question of mission, but it’s also a question of how the mission is structured. An engaged, creative press can serve its mission well while also striving for balanced growth: that is, creating a portfolio of kinds of books — monographs, trade, advanced texts, and reference — that in combination generate ample revenue while making a compelling scholarly statement.

And what would you say to a director of a beleaguered press?

My advice would be twofold: First of all, figure out what your strategic advantage is. If there’s an opportunity to combine regional publishing with some aspect of publishing about the professions, you should be doing that. The other thing that I would recommend is that editors be a good deal more creative in developing concepts for books — understanding what fields need and taking the initiative. They’re not all going to work, and sometimes it’s difficult. But in a financially challenging environment, I would argue that the most important asset we have is our editorial imagination.

Can you give me an example?

Some years ago, we had a colleague in the U.K. — David Ireland. He was a mathematics editor, and he came up with this idea of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. He visited Tim Gowers, who is one of the world’s two or three leading mathematicians, in Cambridge, and he encouraged Gowers to edit the Companion. Gowers did, and it formulated a comprehensive statement — the whole being more than the sum of its parts — of modern mathematics. And it has performed brilliantly.

Do you have dos and don’ts for scholars pitching a book idea?

I remember one time being at a conference — this was many years ago. An author had managed to snag a cart from a grocery store and had put multiple copies of his manuscript in it and was walking from one booth to the other. That may be the most egregious approach I know of.

What’s most important is that prospective authors do research, that they talk to their advisers — not necessarily their thesis advisers, but professors who have published successfully in their area, know the lay of the land, can recommend them to certain editors and help make the initial connection. And write a brilliant proposal, including a great first chapter and a clear, discursive table of contents. The first chapter of your first book is the most important thing you’re ever going to write.

That and getting to know, personally if possible, prospective editors with whom you’ll be working — and getting a reasonable set of choices among editors. Not everyone can have their books published by Chicago or Harvard or Princeton. There are very good series. For example, the University Press of Kansas has a wonderful series of books on the American presidency. That’s a list that has some prestige attached to it. Know that there’s life beyond the Ivy League presses.

The Doubleday editor Gerald Howard has noted that you have a vast untapped knowledge of jazz, soul, and R&B music, especially in Philly. Might you take a detour from the social sciences to write or publish a music book?

It is something I would like to consider. I spent most of my early years in West Philadelphia, a few blocks from the American Bandstand studio, and at the intersection of three communities — the Penn and Drexel campuses, the largely Irish and Italian communities to the southwest, and the mainly African-American communities north of Market Street. As distant as these were from one another, they had a glue that united them: popular music, including R&B, soul, some jazz, and doo-wop. That music not only provided a soundtrack for many Philadelphians of my generation and later, giving us a historical thread to tell the Philadelphia story, but also served as one of the city’s great export products.

Alexander C. Kafka is a deputy managing editor of The Chronicle Review. This interview has been edited and condensed.