5 Book Recommendations for University Press Week
Spotlighting notable books by relatively overlooked publishers
I’ve been taking a book publishing course in grad school (if you couldn’t tell by my recent surge in posts about the publishing industry), and while poring through too many articles for my research paper on university presses, I discovered that November 17th was actually the last day of University Press Week!
So instead of focusing on the paper due Monday, I of course had to post about this while the week was still relevant. Or at least as relevant as University Press Week can ever be.
First celebrated in 1978 upon Jimmy Carter’s “recognition of the impact, both here and abroad, of American university presses on culture and scholarship,” it’s still embraced by university press enthusiasts.
And university presses deserve enthusiasm. They specialize in areas of scholarship that might be overlooked, but also have increasingly published titles that appeal more to the general public. Primarily relying on academics for content, these presses’ lower budgets also make a platform possible for emerging writers, as well as long-time authors that never penned a bestseller and were thus dropped by a major publisher (Thompson, Merchants of Culture, p.186–187). We need literary voices that the Big…
