It’s not your mother’s Peyton Place.
By the end of 1956, the year it was published, one out of 29 Americans owned a copy of Grace Metalious’s scandalous novel about illicit sex and abortion in a small New England town, despite -- or perhaps, in part, thanks to -- its having been banned in several U.S. cities.
Times have changed, and Northeastern University Press’s new edition of Peyton Place doesn’t need a brown-paper wrapper -- it even features a scholarly introduction by Ardis Cameron, analyzing the novel as a cultural artifact of 1950s America.
“By reinterpreting incest, wife beating, and poverty as signs of social as well as individual failure,” writes Ms. Cameron, director of the American and New England studies program at the University of Southern Maine, “Metalious turned ‘trash’ into a powerful political commentary on gender relations and class privilege.”
Northeastern isn’t counting on re-creating the original sales sensation when it releases the book next week, but 8,000 copies are waiting in the warehouse -- about four times the press’s typical run. Northeastern beat Simon & Schuster to the punch: To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the trade house, which had published a mass-market edition in 1981, was planning a re-release.
Northeastern’s publication has brought a mention in The New York Times Magazine, local television and magazine coverage, and an interview with Ms. Cameron by National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg. While current reviews have stopped short of calling the book “literary sewage” -- as did a newspaper of the time -- coverage of the new edition hasn’t been entirely enthusiastic. The novel “never was an important one,” wrote Kirkus Reviews, “and no amount of retroactive puffery can make it so.”
“That’s a facile response,” counters Ms. Cameron. “When a book sells 12 million copies at a time when the average novel sold 2,000, we have to ask questions about how those categories ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are created, and how people use popular books to make sense of their lives, rather than performing as the guardians of culture that book reviewers try to be.”
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The University of Arkansas Press continues to recover from its near-death experience last April. A year ago, university chancellor John A. White declared the press beyond its modest means, and announced that it would close later that spring. But after a campaign by journalists, writers, and even F.O.B.'s -- Friends of Bill’s -- to save the press, Mr. White granted it new life.
The press went on to its best year ever, with sales of more than $950,000. It’s poised to take another step by offering the director’s job to Lawrence J. Malley, an old hand in the university-press business who has been editor in chief of the Duke University and University of Illinois Presses, and is now a publishing consultant.
“We think we’ve found our man,” says Jeannie M. Whayne, chair of the university’s history department and head of the press’s search committee. Ms. Whayne says the press, which publishes between 20 and 25 books a year on a budget of $1-million, will continue to focus on the fields for which its known: Arkansiana and poetry.
The undisputed front-runner in the race to publish new books about Arkansas, the press also enjoys a national reputation as a first-tier publisher of poetry. But although poetry may win the press laurels outside the land of the razorbacks and Clinton, it’s the Arkansiana that’s putting the press on solid ground. The press’s best seller last year was a history of the state for junior-high students.
Ms. Whayne says Mr. Malley would build on the press’s track record of studies of black communities to broaden the scope to more general Southern history. But, she adds, whoever becomes new director will have to make sure the press also stays committed to all things Arkansan and lyrical.
Mr. Malley, meanwhile, says it’s too early for him to discuss Arkansas’s offer.
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Section: Research & Publishing
Page: A20
