Before the dawn of 2010, many book writers, reviewers and bloggers offered assessments of the literary offerings of the past 12 months. A few even ventured to sum up the decade. Jennifer Howard, who writes about books for the Chronicle of Higher Education, wondered how many of these lists included books from university presses. She surprised herself when she actually found some. (See “Hot-Type: A Few University-Press Books Hit Mainstream “Best of” Lists, December 13, 2009.)
Those books that rated a mention by some prestigious publications included: Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, by Gordon S. Wood, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, by Benjamin Moser, Muslims in America: A Short History, by Edward E. Curtis IV, all from Oxford University Press, and The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost by Mary Beard, out of Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
In general, however, these books and the many other fine examples of general-interest, academic, literary books from the university and small presses are overlooked when it comes time to hand out accolades. Most are never reviewed, which contributes to their invisibility. So writing about them as Howard does can be a lonely enterprise. It helps if you have eclectic reading habits, a taste for the esoteric and a high tolerance level for pondering research that would bore many mortals. I know, because I have covered university-press books for about 10 years, first for Black Issues Book Review, beginning with its founding in 1999, and since 2007 for DIVERSE: Issues in Higher Education and a few other outlets from time to time.
It is a privilege few others would covet, I suspect. For me, it brings to mind a phrase coined by a former bureau chief of the Washington, D.C. news service where I spent some years early in my career. Colleagues said the chief would designate the kind of hyper-local stories we covered from the nation’s capital for newspapers around the country – oh, say a Federal hearing on mine safety in Appalachia -- as “technical exclusives.” They were “exclusive” because no one covered them but us, and no one else cared except a few folks back in some small town served by our papers.
