Professor Little

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There I was, some 3000 miles from home, in the office of a professor I’d never met before. On her desk a Gorgias Press catalogue. In that catalogue a miniscule picture with my diminutive face. Such are the little ironies of life. My ric rac career began when others started making suggestions about how being a janitor might not be living up to my full potential. Sometimes, often, I wonder if they were correct. Cleaning up after other people’s messes in the halls of our educational system seems like an incredibly honest career to me. Instead I have steered a course between the halls of academia and the halls of commerce. It is easy to suppose that I’m not really in control since even if I choose the general direction, I haven’t selected the specific circumstances. Recently I attended a conference where Gorgias Press had a booth. I looked over the tables, spying names of authors whom I had given their first start in publishing. With books struggling for elbow room in my own head, it is a bittersweet experience.

Watching the glacial ballet of higher education unfold, it often occurs to me that universities are not smart. Many brilliant minds work in them, and much light shines from them, but on an institutional level decisions are often made that jeopardize the entire enterprise. Over-emphasis on sports, over-utilization of adjuncts, over-payment of administrators—these are not signs of soaring intelligence. They are signs of institutions in a muddle as to their true identity. Are they businesses or centers of creativity and education? The basic business model is not “one size fits all,” and universities managed to maintain an enviable idealism until they began to emulate the corporate world. The tattered results lie all around us.

All through my educational journey, there was no guiding light. In my experience, higher education was a wondrous journey that suddenly terminated when I didn’t measure up to someone else’s standard of Christianity. By that point, I was ill-prepared for the savage politics of higher education. The transition from author to editor may sound simple enough, but things are seldom what they seem. Education may not make one smart, but it sure puts ideas in one’s head. Sometimes I reflect on those books that will never be written. I’ve never been any publisher’s darling, but here I am staring at a little picture of a little man. I’m sure there must be a lesson here somewhere, but I’m not smart enough to figure out what it might be.

The Death of an Art

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In most ways, I enjoy progress. Having electronic communication has spared the lives of many innocent trees, information may be had quicker, and ideas can be freed from the sometimes narrow constraints of staid publishers. (On the other hand, it has given internet users way TMI, some of it not worth the double-click.) There is, however, no comparison to holding a book in your hands. I grew up with cheap paperbacks with their brittle, brown-edged pages and their cadre of book-mites, but many happy memories have accrued to those hours of reading. I never much cared if the books were pristine, as long as they were legible. As intensive reading became a major part of my career aspirations, I started to notice the quality and longevity issues of books. Hardbacks were more durable, but less portable. Some were artworks in themselves.

I was disappointed, therefore, when I recently ordered an Oxford University Press book and I discovered that it had been done Print on Demand. Having worked nearly three years for Gorgias Press, pretty much a strictly Print on Demand publisher, I immediately recognized the hallmarks of this quick and easy way of keeping books in print – inferior print quality and image replication were dead giveaways. The truly disappointing part of the scenario was that this particular book has an intensive discussion of artifacts shown in their grainy, low resolution PoD reproductions. I realize that even large publishers save immense warehousing costs by supplying on-demand titles after an initial print run sells out, but when it compromises the quality, in part the raison d’être of a book with illustrations, some troubling issues are raised.

It seemed when I was young that no matter which copy of a book – barring obviously defective tomes – I picked up, the contents were virtually identical. The industry standard, offset printing provided many identical copies of good quality relatively cheaply. With Print on Demand, books can be outsourced to different vendors and interiors can vary considerably. I saw this all the time while checking proofs at Gorgias Press. PoD also means that little changes can be made between “print runs” resulting in different copies of the same book having variable text. The compulsive footnoter in my veins starts clutching his little chest. When books move from a print run that can only be altered by a new edition to a PDF that can be adjusted between each individual copy, I begin to wonder about the stability of the written word. I’m still enjoying my OUP book, despite the uneven printing and the grainy pictures. But deep inside I fear that rewriting history has become much, much easier.