by | May 25, 2012

A sad farewell to a peer press

This morning our head publicist sent around a troubling email carrying the news of the University of Missouri Press‘s imminent departure from the world of scholarly publishing. As reported yesterday by the Columbia Daily Tribune, the press will begin shutting down in July and 10 staffers will be “affected.” There has been no date set by which operations will cease entirely.

The University of Missouri Press has been publishing books on a wide array of topics since 1958. It is the proud home of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes, among many other important works of scholarship and American letters, and the press’s regional publishing program is very well regarded. While many works of broader appeal will surely find a home with other publishing houses, the future of these regional books is less certain.

It’s tough to consider that 10 of our publishing colleagues may well be jobless by the end of the summer; more so because, as the Tribune and other media outlets have noted, none of the staff—including editor-in-chief Clair Willcox—knew of the UM System’s plans before a meeting yesterday morning. Our corner of the book publishing business is tough and the number of staff at university presses has largely shrunk or stayed static in recent years. A quick glance at the Association of American University Presses jobs board shows a smattering of opportunities, and at least a few Mizzou Press staffers are likely to land elsewhere in the AAUP universe. But with Missouri’s unemployment rate a little over 7 percent and the national jobless rate hovering around 8 percent, their employment prospects remain bleak across the board.

It is also hard to see a flagship state university ax its publishing house. Cash-strapped though the UM System may be—and have no doubt, it is struggling financially—the $400,000 annual subsidy Mizzou Press receives was a tiny portion of the system’s nearly $2.5 billion in total expenditures. It is, in fact, almost $40,000 less than the system put into its athletic programs in the 2012 fiscal year. But, as UM System President Tim Wolfe’s office said in a statement yesterday, a new set of focused priorities have forced UM’s hand; book publishing is apparently not part of the system’s “core mission.”

As noted by the LA Times (and in  contradiction of AAUP Executive Director Peter Givler’s comments to the St. Louis Beacon), this shuttering follows the recent closings of presses at Eastern Washington University, the University of Scranton, and Southern Methodist University. Whether this marks a trend or not is something those of us in the business and the scholars who create and consume our publications are anxiously waiting to see.

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by | May 24, 2012

Wild Thing: On the timing of bird migration

Wild Thing is an occasional series where JHU Press authors write about the flora and fauna of the natural world—from the rarest flower to the most magnificent beast. 

Guest post by Walter G. Ellison

Dark-eyed Junco

Anyone leafing through the recent Second Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Maryland and the District of Columbia might notice that most of the birds that nest in Maryland and D.C. do not reside at their breeding sites year round. Most migrate in winter to a distant land, but it is only a small minority of our nesting birds that are actually sedentary. Even many of those that do winter locally do not winter where they nested. For instance, Maryland’s breeding Dark-eyed Juncos nest at high elevations in Garrett County but winter at lower elevations downslope and mostly to the south and east of Garrett County.

Each bird’s biology varies with its evolutionary history, so there are as many migrations as species. Indeed, there is also much individual variation in migration within species. A small number of Gray Catbirds winter annually in Maryland, mostly on the Coastal Plain, but the vast majority winter in southern Mexico and Central America.

Nonetheless, we can broadly divide temperate migratory birds into two classes: short-distance migrants that winter in warmer parts of the temperate zone (at least warmer than where they nest) and long-distance travelers to the tropics. When early spring is warm, as it was in March of 2012, these two broad classes of migrants respond very differently to the early spring weather.

Temperate wintering birds are on the same land mass as the early spring weather and respond quickly to the predominant southwesterly winds that bring early spring warmth. So birds such as Tree Swallows and Eastern Phoebes may arrive up to a month ahead of their median long-term arrival date in warm early springs. On the other hand, birds wintering in the tropics have no indication of unusual weather north of the Tropic of Cancer. Long-distance migrants appear to rely on poorly understood inborn cues for when to start spring migration more than any obvious external climatic information; local day length in the tropics may have something to do with it.

Despite much optimism among birders seeking their summer favorites among the first migrants of the season, it is highly unlikely for long-distance tropical migratory birds to arrive much more than a week earlier than their long-term median arrival dates. Rarely, a tropical wintering bird may winter far to the north of its usual winter quarters and there are a few species that winter in small numbers in southern Florida and on the Gulf Coast that may arrive ahead of their fellows. These instances should be carefully documented, particularly because these records may provide early signs of changes in migratory behavior wrought by global climate change.

As the climate changes and brings early and record spring warmth on a more regular basis, it is possible our long-distance tropical migrants may be shifted out of synchrony with leaf-out and flowering of plants, and more importantly, the emergence of insects that feed on those early plants. Because most tropical migratory birds eat insects and feed them to their offspring, being out of step with the first flush of insect life in spring could affect their nesting success and survival. Only time, and well-designed research, will reveal if this is happening or if the birds instead adapt to the change despite its relative rapidity.

Walter G. Ellison is the project coordinator of the Maryland and D.C. Breeding Bird Atlas Project at the Maryland Ornithological Society. He is the editor of Second Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Maryland and the District of Columbia, now available from the JHU Press.


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by | May 23, 2012

A vibrant tradition: knights of the razor in the 19th and 21st centuries

Guest post by Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr.

When Damian Johnson, the co-owner of the No Grease chain of barber shops in Charlotte, North Carolina, began reading my book, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom, he was struck by the discussion of the movie Barbershop on its first page. The movie is a comedy set in Chicago’s South Side about a 20-something named Calvin, who has inherited a barber shop from his father and is frustrated with the challenges of operating a small business in the inner city. Confronted with foreclosure after mortgaging the shop to finance several get-rich-quick schemes, Calvin sells the business to a loan shark. Through a series of madcap plot developments, Calvin wins back his business after he learns how important barbers are to the African American community.

Damian related to the movie. He grew up in the business—his mother owned a beauty salon—and he had gone off to college determined to find another career. In the end, though, he embraced barbering and wrote his senior marketing paper on how to open a shop like No Grease. Since Damien thought Barbershop captured something important about his experience, he wondered if the rest of Knights of the Razor might remind him of his own life. He told me later that it did.

I was fortunate enough to learn what Damian and his twin brother Jermaine thought about my book over an excellent dinner they bought me in Charlotte on April 13. After reading Knights of the Razor, Damian contacted me about giving a lecture, so I traveled to the Queen City. Damian and Jermaine were superb hosts. I enjoyed shooting pool at their barber shop in the Time Warner Arena. I was also Damian’s guest at a fundraising gala for Johnson C. Smith University, over which he presided as the master of ceremonies. As you can tell, Damian is a great organizer. He managed the next day’s event, my lecture, with considerable aplomb. Introducing me to the crowd of about 80 people at the Levine Museum of the New South, Damian told the audience how he had accidentally found my book on Amazon and decided, after reading it, that he saw himself as one of the Knights of the Razor.

Damian and Jermaine went on to explain the parallels they found between being black barbers in the 21st century and in the 19th century. Like their predecessors, the twins had to use ingenuity to be successful black businessmen when race posed obstacles. Damian, for example, shared how he and Jermaine convinced their white landlord to finance the purchase of their first shop when no bank would give them a loan. As it happened, their former landlord attended my lecture, and he told the audience what a good investment he had made. Another parallel to their 19th-century counterparts was their first-class shops. In the three No Grease shops, all located in upscale neighborhoods, black barbers wear bow ties while they clip the hair and shave the beards of Charlotte’s black professionals.

Jermaine then explained why he and his brother had chosen the blackface image for the No Grease logo. After learning about minstrel shows while studying drama in college, Jermaine realized that a figure from the minstrel stage could have a double meaning. Blackface invoked negative racial stereotypes, but by taking ownership of the image, Jermaine and his brother could let white businessmen know that they were not playing any games.  What W. E. B. DuBois referred to as “double-consciousness,” an awareness of how he looked in the eyes of white people, was a defining trait of the 19th-century black barber. Since he served white rather than black men, understanding white viewpoints was even more central to achieving success than it has been for the Johnson brothers in the 21st century.

The strongest parallel, however, between the Johnson brothers and the intrepid barbers that I wrote about? In the 19th century, the Knights of the Razor were a fraternity. Black barbers took teenagers under their wings as apprentices, trained them for success, and helped them open their own shops. Damian and Jermaine have continued this tradition. A dozen extremely well-dressed graduates of their barber school attended my lecture. One of them, a memorable young man named Dominique, had been working for the Johnsons since he was 17 and is now the foreman of their shop in the Time Warner Arena. So, while I had traveled to Charlotte to tell Damian’s friends what I had learned about his predecessors in the 19th century, he and his brother Jermaine taught me that the vibrant tradition I studied was alive and well in the 21st century.

Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi.

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by | May 21, 2012

A response to the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease

Guest post by Susan H. McFadden and John T. McFadden

We are grateful for the opportunity to respond to the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease. While we applaud any initiative that raises awareness of the growing number of persons living with some form of dementia and that begins to marshal resources to address the needs that come with cognitive loss, we have serious concerns about some items included in the plan and—just as important—the critical needs that are not addressed in the plan.

Among our concerns:

  • Why does the United States have a National Plan to address Alzheimer’s Disease when the United Kingdom and other European countries have developed or are developing national dementia strategies? There are many forms of dementia besides Alzheimer’s and many people will therefore feel excluded by this national plan. The plan briefly notes the existence of other forms of dementia but, remarkably, then states that it will refer broadly to all forms of dementia as Alzheimer’s disease (p. 4; p. 39), ignoring the fact that these other dementias have their own unique characteristics. Buried in Action 1.A.4 is a “scientific workshop on other dementias” to be held in 2013.
  • The date of 2025 seems arbitrary.  What’s so special about 2025?  The UK’s National Dementia Strategy, published in 2009, set clear, obtainable goals to be achieved in 2014.
  • The plan is dominated by a biomedical view of Alzheimer’s disease, neglecting the critical importance of quality-of-life issues. For example, in section 2.A, it speaks of building a workforce “with the skills to provide high-quality care.” All the professions listed are medical, with nothing said about the artists, musicians, poets, dancers, and others who are already providing high-quality opportunities for creative engagement that, at the very least, can dramatically improve the quality of life for persons living with dementia. Many of these programs are supported by high-quality research demonstrating their efficacy at improving well-being, reducing stigma, supporting relationships with family and friends, etc. Why are they completely neglected in this plan?
  • The U.S. plan mentions friends exactly three times in 69 pages. Besides noting that “A person with the disease may no longer recognize family and friends,” the National Plan mentions friends twice as examples of informal caregivers. Our book, Aging Together: Dementia, Friendship, and Flourishing Communities, argues that Alzheimer’s and the other dementias must be viewed in the context of communities where citizens and organizations collaborate to enable people to live well with dementia. (Note:  the UK national strategy is not about curing Alzheimer’s disease; it’s about “living well with dementia.”) We cannot rely solely on family members, even with all the professional, government-supported programs suggested by this plan to help them.
  • The National Plan suggests that the primary goal is for medical science to hasten development of a “magic bullet” that will somehow cure, prevent, or at least radically slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. We do not deny this is a worthy goal. However, we caution that there may be many different forms of Alzheimer’s disease in addition to the other identified forms of dementia. Moreover, these pharmacological interventions will not likely be available for persons already living with memory loss and cognitive decline, a population whose numbers will swell by 2025. We regret that the plan has so little to offer to these persons, their primary care partners, their friends, and their communities.
  • We wish the National Plan had taken greater account of the National Dementia Strategy developed by the UK (and similar strategies in other European nations) that focus far more on changing perceptions about dementia (reducing fear and stigma), improving quality of life in the present, and embracing the unique identities of people living with the diagnosis. We understand that Goal 4 aims to “enhance public awareness and engagement,” but we are concerned about how the “public awareness” message will be communicated. There is no foundational statement that all aspects of this plan will affirm the personhood and dignity of those living with dementia. Thus “greater public awareness” could possibly be shaped by a view of dementia framed by fear and expressed narrowly in terms of biomedical approaches to care. Although we think research on identification of biomarkers and early diagnosis and treatment must be supported, we urge that the “translation” of this message to the public be informed by a fundamental affirmation of the whole person—body, mind, and spirit.

Susan H. McFadden is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. She writes extensively on aging, religion, and spirituality. John T. McFadden is a chaplain with Goodwill Industries of North Central Wisconsin. They are the coauthors of Aging Together: Dementia, Friendship, and Flourishing Communities.


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by | May 18, 2012

Over the Transom: manuscript editing

By Claire McCabe Tamberino, ebook and digital promotion manager

In Over the Transom, an occasional series on this blog, we’ll walk you through every step of the bookmaking process, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at just how much work goes into turning a good idea into a great book.

A couple of weeks ago, in our first installment of Over the Transom, we wrote about how Hopkins editors acquire the roughly 200 books the Press publishes every year. The next stop on our bookmaking tour: manuscript editing. It is at this crucial stage that Press editors transform rough manuscripts (and blog posts, thanks!) into polished prose fit for public consumption.

Here is a greatly simplified explanation of the editing process here at the Press. Authors under contract submit a final manuscript, including artwork and permissions, which is then carefully prepared by acquisitions staff for transmittal to manuscript editing. It is assigned to a copyeditor who reviews the manuscript word for word, fixing typos, correcting sentence structure, and checking references along the way. The author then reviews the marked-up manuscript and answers any queries the copyeditor may have. The copyeditor enters all corrections, resolves any outstanding issues, and prepares the manuscript for transmittal to production.

All of this may seem straightforward, but while the rules of grammar are fairly set in stone, or rather in the Chicago Manual of Style (the still indispensable guide for copyeditors now in its 16th edition), there is a real art to copyediting. After months, years, even decades working on their books, authors often cannot see the forest for the trees. It is the job of our talented and dedicated copyeditors to tease out the real essence of a book and ensure that an author’s intended meaning, tone, and ideas are successfully, artistically, and clearly transmitted to readers (JHU Press manuscript editor Michele Callaghan’s post last week about the difference between silver bullets and magic bullets is a fun read on how this all works out). In the words of Hopkins editorial director Greg Britton, “Manuscript editing is a key part of the value scholarly publishers add to the projects they undertake. More than just fixing commas or getting nouns and verbs to agree, a good copyeditor can refine and tighten a writer’s language. In doing so, the editor helps bridge the gap between author and reader. When done well, these subtle changes can work magic.”

Manuscript editing, like the rest of the publishing world, has had to adapt to changing technologies and evolving trends in readership. For generations, copyediting was done with colored pencils on paper manuscript. In the 1980s, computer technology began to transform this work, allowing changes to be made directly to the electronic version of the original manuscript. Less than a decade later, almost all manuscripts arrived at the Press as electronic files and were edited on screen. Now, the end product of a manuscript editor’s careful attention is, in many cases, not only a printed book but electronic editions available on ebook readers and in online collections.

The methods of manuscript editing may have changed over the years, but the practice is still as essential as ever. “You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.”–Arthur Plotnik, editor and author

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by | May 16, 2012

A family album of evolutionary trees

Guest post by Theodore W. Pietsch

When most people think of trees, they envision the leafy-green, growing, photosynthesizing kind, but there’s a vast forest out there made up of an entirely different kind of tree—branching diagrams and related iconography that attempt to reveal the relationships of plants and animals. For at least the past 500 years, naturalists, realizing that words are not nearly enough, have sought to demonstrate similarities and differences (or to reveal the imagined temporal order in which God created life on Earth) among organisms pictorially, that is, through a fascinating array of diagrams of various sorts. Most of the diagrams resemble trees in the botanical sense—images with parts analogous to trunks, limbs, and terminal twigs.

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I first became interested in these “trees of life” as a young graduate student some 45 years ago and, for no other reason than I thought they were beautiful, I’ve been collecting them ever since—making photocopies and filing them away, with no thought of what I might do with them later on. Then in 2009, when the world was celebrating Charles Darwin’s birthday (1809) and the publication of his On the Origin of Species (1859), I again began to think more about “trees” and it dawned on me that a book about them might be worth pursuing. I dug out my old files and soon realized that my collection hardly did the subject justice.

I then began a determined search for more and found, not just more of the same, but a surprising, almost infinite variety of design. And the rest is history: Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution was published in April 2012 by the JHU Press. I invite you to take a look and see for yourself these images that attest to the manifest beauty, intrinsic interest, and human ingenuity revealed in trees of life through time.

Theodore W. Pietsch is Dorothy T. Gilbert Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and Curator of Fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is author of more than a dozen books, including The Curious Death of Peter Artedi: A Mystery in the History of Science and Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea.

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by | May 14, 2012

What we’re reading

While all of us here at the Press love the books and journals we publish, we do save time to enjoy books from other publishers. As the weather warms up and so many of us get the itch to just sit outside and read, we thought we’d share the books we are reading or recently finished.

I’m in a slow reading period now so am picking and choosing from the 2011 Best American Nonrequired Reading, an eclectic selection of essays and short stories. Before I embarked on this, I read Post Office, a 1971 novel written by Charles Bukowski. I don’t really know how I stumbled upon this book, but the straightforward (and sometimes profane) writing style really engaged me. The semiautobiographical book was reportedly written in under a month, but part of the appeal comes from the rough edges.

Share in the comments what you’re reading these days and take a look at what has some other Press staffers engaged outside of the office:

Michael Carroll, Digital Production Manager & Electronic Publications Project Administrator
40 Million Dollar Slaves, by William Rhoden

I chose this book because I’m a huge sports fan (especially football and basketball) and I find it extremely intriguing to see the varied ways in which black athletes carry themselves, how they are viewed by mainstream America, and how many of them are still portrayed as entertainers with little other value to society. Based on what I’ve heard of Bill Rhoden’s book my expectation is that he will give historical context to the struggle and perception of the past and modern-day black athlete. And I must admit that based on what I’ve read so far, he’s spot-on.

Kris Zgorski, Production Coordinator, Journals Division
The Orphanmaster, by Jean Zimmerman

I recently finished reading an advance readers copy of this novel, Zimmerman’s first, which will be officially published on June 19. It is a well-researched and engaging historical novel. Part mystery, part romance, and sprinkled through with period detail, this novel is sure to be a notable book of 2012. Set in 1663, in New Amsterdam (present-day Manhattan), the novel follows the stories of Blandine von Couvering, a female trader, and Edward Drummond, a British spy, as they work both separately and together to determine why the orphaned children of the village are going missing.  Superstitious townsfolk believe it is the work of Witika (Wendigo), a malevolent creature who inhabits the woods, but Blandine and Edward believe it might be something even more sinister—a serial killer.

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