Just as industry has its gold watch, academe had, of yore, its own characteristic expression of esteem for an undeniably outstanding, and aging, colleague. Today, that long-honored token of academic affection seems little but a fricative mouthful of outmodedness:
Festschrift.
German for “festival writing,” the word denotes a volume of learned articles inspired by a scholar, and often written by former students. It may also contain anecdotes about the scholar, or even personal expressions of congratulations.
The volumes’ contributors and honorees have always been more excited about them than university-press editors, but these days the changing economics of academic publishing mean the Festschrift is even less likely to get into print.
“It’s dead!” exclaims a chorus of academic-press honchos.
“In our handbook, we say Festschrifts are not welcome,” sums up one university press director.
It appears that the Festschrift has become to academe what the gold watch has become to industry -- passe.
The consensus among university-press editors is that the quality of Festschrifts is unpredictable, while the market for them is predictably poor. While most university presses can still justify publishing books that will sell only a thousand copies, a typical Festschrift is unlikely to break a few hundred.
“All of our policies are intended to be flexible,” says Lynne E. Withey, the asso-ciate director of the University of California Press, “but -- we joke about this -- the one unshakable policy we have is: We don’t publish Festschrifts.”
Yet the impulse to honor a senior scholar with a Festschrift endures, even if academic presses consider them virtual dodos. “We get a tremendous number of proposals for Festschrifts,” says Susan E. Abrams, an executive editor at the University of Chicago Press. Many editors report that a proposal arrives every time a distinguished professor on campus reaches an anniversary or notable birthday, or dies. The volumes can be deeply affecting both for their recipients, for whom the Festschrift represents a life’s work, and their givers, who wish, ultimately, to extend the life of a beloved intellectual friend.
If scholars remain attached to the form, perhaps it is because many academic presses do, despite claims to the contrary, publish Festschrifts, at least occasionally. Often, however, they attempt to disguise the volumes as thematic collections of papers that just happen to be in honor of one graying eminence or another. Cited as exemplary is Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (University of California Press, 1994), which honored Spiro Kostof (1936-1991), a professor of architectural history at the University of California at Berkeley. Its 21 essays on the character of streets around the world, by colleagues and former students, were organized so as to give readers not just a sense of Mr. Kostof’s work, but also of flying through space and time -- from modern-day San Francisco and Tokyo to pre-Columbian Inca settlements to 14th-century Cairo to 19th-century New Orleans.
A quick search of any major research-library catalog reveals that, just during the last year or so, American scholarly presses have released dozens of such essay collections. But they’ve also published volumes that explicitly fess up to being Festschrifts -- in homage to renowned figures in probability, musicology, Bible studies, neurobiology, ethics, vocational psychology, gay and lesbian studies, and student assessment in higher education, to name just a few.
Of course, the output was decidedly minor in the overall scheme of academic publishing. Many Festschrifts are proposed, but few are chosen, and publishers wish that acolytes of eminent scholars would recognize the reasons. Says an exasperated Ms. Abrams: “Most libraries won’t buy them. People won’t buy them and read them. So what is the point of publishing them?”
It’s not simply that the current era is one where lionizing any Great Man on Campus will seem like pre-postmodern naivete. Or that fewer and fewer academics retire fully at 65. Most often, say publishers, Festschrifts are all the troublesome things that multi-author books are, but more so. They are hodgepodges of uneven quality by authors of uneven reputation who miss their deadlines by varying amounts of time. Says Ms. Withey of the California press: “The students of the person being honored are likely to be in the same field, so there may be some unity, but not necessarily a lot.” Often, a scholar is eminent precisely because he or she has excelled in or influenced a range of fields.
And then there’s the question of salability. Generally, press runs of Festschrifts are unlikely to exceed 400 books, and often half or more of those runs sit, unsold, for years.
“Sometimes I ask people: When is the last time you bought a Festschrift?” says Jeffrey Grathwohl, the director of the University of Utah Press. The era of standing orders from libraries is waning, and along with it go guarantees that even intellectually worthy titles will break even.
Can’t you publish it on the cheap? scholars ask. They don’t understand, says Ms. Abrams, that American university presses are no longer simply the publishing arms of their home faculties. She explains that a press like Chicago routinely invests an enormous amount of money in editing, production, and advertising. “We couldn’t say, ‘We’ll publish this book, but we won’t spend any money on it.’”
Too often they don’t spend enough. Reviewers of Festschrifts note in sometimes astonished comments how often the books are riddled with typos and other signs of less-than-full editorial commitment.
A better option, say publishers, is the collection of essays that springs from the same impulse as a Festschrift, such as Streets, ideally organized around a specific theme, which will pay tribute to the honoree by attaining the status of a reference volume, with an affectionate dedication page. “Those can be exceedingly valuable,” says Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press. He himself co-edited Reading De Man Reading (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), in honor of the influential and controversial theorist Paul De Man, a book that sold more than 4,000 copies, far more than the press had expected.
Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (Duke University Press, 2000) is another such volume whose sales have exceeded what its press had anticipated. It is being translated into Chinese and Arabic. The book began in a shorter form as a special issue of the journal Boundary 2, with which Mr. Said has long been associated. The Duke volume’s editor, Paul A. Bove, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Pittsburgh, hastens to note: “I don’t think it’d be fair to say we thought of this as a Festschrift.” But it was prepared at a time when friends feared that Mr. Said, a literary scholar at Columbia University who is equally well-known for his advocacy of Palestinian causes, might be dying. (He didn’t, though he remains in fragile health.)
Among the more successful ways to market honorary volumes is to have your honoree win the Nobel Prize just before publication. The subject of Money, Capital Mobility, and Trade: Essays in Honor of Robert A. Mundell (MIT Press, 2001) did just that, for his work on the euro. He also obliged by having many leading economists among his former students, including the volume’s editors, Guillermo A. Calvo, Rudi Dornbusch, and Maurice Obstfeld.
Eminent contributors cannot, however, always save the day, as a review pointed out in response to the 1995 Oxford University Press volume Choice, Welfare, and Development: A Festschrift in Honour of Amartya K. Sen, the famous economist who has since won a Nobel Prize, too. Writing in the journal Ethics, Robert Sugden complained that, despite the best efforts of the editors, the breadth of Mr. Sen’s interests and achievements made the usual incoherence of a Festschrift all the worse.
Big names don’t even help would-be editors of Festschrifts win the nod from publishers. So found Barbara Herman when she and two co-editors shopped around an essay collection in honor of John Rawls, the preeminent American postwar ethicist. To Ms. Herman, a leading Kant scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles, the volume seemed a natural for the press at Harvard, Mr. Rawls’s home base.
“They wouldn’t touch it,” she says. The book, Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, eventually appeared from Cambridge University Press, in 1997. By the standards of contributed-essay volumes, “it’s done extremely well,” says Terence Moore, the publishing director for the humanities at Cambridge. It sold out its first run of 800 and is into a second printing, a rare event for academic titles. Its sales now top 1,000, even though, like most Festschrifts or similar volumes, its $60 price tag places it in the upper range of already-high academic-book pricing. Mr. Waters now calls the book one that got away: “I’d have loved to have published that one.”
Rudi Matthee, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, faced similar reluctance for a volume he co-edited in 2000, Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie -- one of the few women in her field and now a professor emerita at U.C.L.A. After making the rounds of many university presses, the book found a home with Mazda Publishers Inc., a small California press that specializes in books about Iran.
“Mazda was not our first choice,” he admits. “But our choices were limited, to be frank.” The book has been well-received, thanks in part to its handsome production and in part to the contributions it makes to scholarship on women in the Middle East. “We were lucky,” says Mr. Matthee, “because the people who contributed didn’t pull out of a drawer a paper on a dialect of Old Persian that was gathering dust.”
Mazda’s founder and director, Ahmad Jabbari, says the book will probably sell only a few hundred copies in its lifetime, primarily to library distributors and former students of Ms. Keddie and contributors.
The day may soon arrive when presses like Mazda are the only ones that will publish Festschrifts as Festschrifts.
At Pendragon Press in Hillsdale, N.Y., Robert Kessler, the founder and managing editor, shares Mr. Jabbari’s calm take on finances. “They’re not huge sellers, but they pay for themselves,” he says of books in the press’s Festschrift Series.
Pendragon specializes in scholarly and reference books on classical music, and the books have honored, for example, a chief of the music division of the New York Public Library, an organ scholar-teacher, and Ruth Watanabe, who for 37 years headed the famed Sibley Library of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Mr. Kessler relies less on standing library orders than on the affection of friends and colleagues of the honoree. “It’s a small niche that we try to fill,” he says.
For larger, university presses, economic pressures are greater, and so, in turn, is the pressure they increasingly bring to bear on compilers of volumes that they do accept. “Editors must be willing to show tough love to the contributors,” says Mr. Waters, of Harvard. They must insist that problem papers be revised, and “they have to be willing to turn things down. Younger people feel that that is too awkward. But it isn’t, really.”
The trouble is that the desire that generated Festschrifts remains, but “we just haven’t come up yet with the proper replacement form,” says Kenneth A. Wissoker, editor in chief of the Duke press.
Alternatives to the full-blown honorific volume do exist: special issues of journals, volumes issued by scholarly associations, or hand-bound collections of papers read at daylong conferences at the honoree’s home campus. But such efforts underwhelm many scholars. Diane Favro, a coeditor of Streets, can rattle off the names of several recently deceased and deserving academic architects who were not honored by a Festschrift, or anything like it, and who, in fact, now are rarely recalled. Ubi sunt? Says the U.C.L.A. architecture professor: “People disappear very rapidly from the scene now in academia.”
Of course, no one wants to be among the disappeared. Mr. Waters recalls a story De Man told him about Rene Wellek, a famous literary theorist of the postwar era. “He said Wellek always had a list in his pocket of people to invite to do his Festschrift, when and if asked to do one,” says Mr. Waters. As it happened, “there were one or two Festschrifts for him because he lived forever.”
James W. Valentine, hailed as the founder of paleobiology and still active at Berkeley, didn’t know until he was presented with Evolutionary Paleobiology (University of Chicago Press, 1996) that it was in the works. “It was very touching,” he says. He was especially pleased to discover that it wasn’t, as so many such books are, terrible. The volume has done well for Chicago, even beyond its use in graduate-level seminars.
Often, honorees who do see their Festschrift coming shudder. The subject of Unraveling the Complexities of Social Life: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert B. Zajonc (American Psychological Association, 2000), a University of Michigan experimental psychologist renowned for his work in such areas as affect and cognition, group interaction, and group communication, said he would object to the volume “if it was going to be a pre-obituary,” says one of the book’s two editors, John A. Bargh. “He felt that as long as he didn’t have a Festschrift, he wouldn’t die.”
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