HE DOES IT HIS WAY: “The most widely read academic medieval historian in the English language.” That’s a description of Norman F. Cantor by...well, Norman F. Cantor.
Indeed, the emeritus professor of history, sociology, and comparative literature at New York University has achieved remarkable commercial success: Among his many books, The Civilization of the Middle Ages (HarperCollins, 1993) is in its 40th printing. In the Wake of the Plague (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2001) made its way onto the New York Times best-seller list.
The 73-year-old’s forthcoming memoir, Inventing Norman Cantor: Confessions of a Medievalist (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, September), includes some tips for other would-be popularizers. “You have to write from what you feel, as well as what you’ve read,” he says in a telephone interview. There is a “considerable market for books on medieval history,” as he and writers like Barbara Tuchman have demonstrated. The problem, he says, “is that publishers have had a very hard time finding people who, one, had solid information, and two, could write for a general audience.”
Academic reviewers have often harrumphed at Mr. Cantor’s success. His 1991 book, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (William Morrow), now in its 15th printing, was greeted as “brilliant in conception, clever, witty, and entertaining in style, and bristling with judgments.” But it was also tarred as a condescending hatchet job, dogmatic, sloppy, and “less reliable the better he knew the individual.”
Mr. Cantor is accustomed to the knocks. In fact, he says in his memoir, “the best writing, for me, comes not when I am confident, relaxed, happy, and self-satisfied but rather when I have sustained an unpleasant shock...or insults and abuse from a group of academic colleagues. Then I write to affirm my own dignity, humanity, and autonomy.”
Writing for the educated general reader, he relates, “seemed the only alternative I had left” after careers as a traditional academic medievalist and a university administrator. Those were marred, in his account, by others’ academic jealousies and anti-Semitism, a difficult marriage, cronyism in university administrations, and a prolonged struggle with depression. “Then things started to go wrong,” is a typical sentiment in the book.
As a young man, he was so fearful of approaching women that “incessant work was the outlet for my strong sex drive,” he writes. “I was a walking example of Freud’s theory of sublimation.”
But all that bookish solitude paid off. “There is no pleasure in life greater than receiving a substantial royalty check,” he writes. “In spite of publishers’ usual failure to distribute, market, and promote my books effectively and in spite of crabbed old men and jealous young academics trying to prevent me from communicating to the public, I can go on my way of writing.”
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CURIOUS DRY BOOKS: Reprinting a nun’s 1947 guide to the trivium -- the first three of the seven traditional liberal arts -- would not seem to be the savviest way to break into modern-day scholarly publishing.
But it typifies the approach of the tiny, Philadelphia-based Paul Dry Books, which since 2000 has been going where ever fewer university presses dare go.
Among the press’s recent publications of fiction and nonfiction works -- new, out-of-print, or in the public domain but unavailable in trade paperback -- is The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric: Understanding the Nature and Function of Language (May), whose title is as unwieldy as its scope is ambitious.
It was written by Sister Miriam Joseph Rauh (1898-1982), a member of the Sisters of the Holy Cross who taught English for 30 years at Saint Mary’s College, in Indiana. While much of its subject matter has fallen from pedagogic favor, “until the 19th century, that’s what people were taught,” says Paul Dry, the press’s founder. “The book is about the way you think, and the way you put thought on paper.”
Other publications, prepared by a staff of three, have included a 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and My Business Is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery, edited by Stephen Berg, the founder of The American Poetry Review. Due out next is Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (September), by Eva Brann. A tutor since 1957 in the Great Books program at St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Md., one of Ms. Brann’s recommendations became one of the press’s first reprints: the satirical 1930 novel, His Monkey Wife, by John Collier, about a British schoolmaster’s weird love entanglements in the Upper Congo.
“The big publishing corporations have decided they can’t make enough money on particular types of writing,” says Mr. Dry, “and that has left open niche markets for small publishers like us.” His niche, he says, is books for people interested in close reading of the kind that he did as a Harvard University undergraduate, and that he rediscovered in the 1980s when he joined a book group. Another book-group member, John Corenswet, a Harvard-educated lawyer, is now his business partner in Paul Dry Books.
Mr. Dry may seem to have thrown caution to the wind in entering publishing, but he comes to the trade after 17 years in a much riskier business, stock-options trading. It is his profits from that, and Mr. Corenswet’s from his legal work, that are financing the press. “I figured that if I published books that I love, other people would love them, too,” Mr. Dry says.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A20
