BEAUTIFUL BOOKS

...Of its first two publications, the poems Of Leonard Nathan was both a nominee for the book award and a winning book in the design show...

...That university publishing is often cut from the same cloth as trade publishing, that the day of die dull, and dull-looking scholarly treatise is almost past, that these presses work, harder, often, than then- friends across the tax barrier to make their books more attractive and therefore more salable, thai then-products as a result are often fine to look at, hard to bring oneself to dispose of, and nourishing intellectual fare In these days of elimination of everything that seems costly or peripheral, every effort should be made, by foundations, universities yes, and concerned trade houses, to see that the small university presses survive...

...In considerations of subject matter this is especially true...

...This study of what juxaeat mottle diid Lto treat and survive -fjheir wouads couptesibiy, to my jmind, be bettered...

...The extraordinary care of its production, the lavishness of its pagis, typography, cover and design...

...But two oavar university presses hooks were so recognized, Paul Fussed f&r Gtrtat War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press), and David Brion Davis' The Problem of Slavery in ike Age of Revolution (Cornell University Press...

...Since that meeting I have been watching the lists of the 55 or so member presses of the American Association of University Presses, and as a juror of this year's annual book show, inspecting with some care the books submitted as entries into the design show...

...Two other examples of books that university presses had the sense and the taste to publish but that are not distinguishable front quality trade-publishing: The recent The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination by Lawrence L Langer (Yale University Press) an absorbing and learned book, written in clear, straightforward prose, full of references to and descriptions of works of fiction...

...I liked handling and reading many of the books, finding the union between what they had to say and the way they were permitted to say it inviting...

...This is certainly a serious study...

...Harv-ardfo book is another volume on which a first-rate artist, and designer have come together to make a distinguished scholarly took, the Art of Henri Evenepad (Penn State), in which the Paris work of the Belgian painter is elegantly reproduced, A dear, cleanly oiade big book on Texas furniture (Texas University Press) . . . and on : and on...

...Or consider a book which might easily interest the many fans of country and barn-dance music, the handsome Old-Time Fiddler's Repertory which the University of Missouri Press put put in 1973...

...But it was also, I suspect, because on the whole they tended to be attractive books, inviting to hold, to open, to look upon...

...One would be hard put to see any difference between such a book, in tone and scholarship, and say, the equally scholarly and readable Mark Twain: God's Fool, by Haralin Hill published three years ago by Harper & Row...

...In his acceptance speech for the Book Award a few weeks ago, Fussell said he "set put to erect a memorial to the men...

...Perhaps because of this fortunate combination I reviewed, or had reviewed, more than a flttin' proportion (from some points of view) of university-press book Late last spring I went to Nashville, Indiana, to attend a gathering of uni...

...It is all those things, and highly moving as well, a superb book for University press to produce laid the National Institute of Arts and Letters to recognize...

...And so many other varied and ele-gwtt and informative books: Prints of Rockwell Kent (Chicago), a wonder-fid, book on toe Anatomy oft the Guinea...

...and elegy...

...versity-press editors and officials, and heard a great deal of serious talk about the monetary problems they were lacing...

...Most readers will be pleased to be introduced to this distinguished, and successful attempt to understand the effect of the atrocities of Nazi Germany on the imaginations of European writers...

...What is even stranger, note its price: $12.50...

...What makes this necessarily a university press book...

...but then so too is Irving Howe's serious sociological study, World of Our Fathers, a history ti the East European Jewish immigration to the United States, which Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published this year...

...doris grumbach is the farmer Literary Editor of The...

...The University of California Press lists among its "trade titles" a book, The Hand Mode Object and its Maker...

...It is most notable, first, how close the university presses have now come to the grey no-man's-land that separates them from trade publishers...

...Examples of this simple point abound...

...Pig, (Harvard) an unlikely subject bat so beautiful a text that one become* enthralled by the drawings and convinced of the attractiveness of tha(:, boot, experimental beast...

...While the second volume is a tribute to what we have come to tbin]c of as "typical" univemty publishing: a plethora of footnotes on the pages to which they pertain, and a tight, factual text mat sometimes grows tedious under long reading, the first volume is pure joy...

...The Yale Younger Poets series is wed known and of contfafli won awards £or design excellence judging, University of Chicago pi'ess was responsible for a wittily deigned edit km of Charles Ol-soa's Penny Arcade, and there were other, equally beautiful books of poetry daring the year...

...Last year, as a shining example, there was the beautiful book by Guido Majno called The Healing Hand...

...While I. was still ppening mounds, of cardboard brott wrappers I found that I tended to linger over new books from those presses, partly because their subjects intended me and seemed to promise reallrewards if I took the time to pursue them...

...Oxford, University Press has just issued a slight, easily read guide to the The Art of Mark, Twain by William M. Gibson, with its footnotes sensibly relegated to the back of the book...

...A profound and yet accessible (to the general reader) study of "Man and Wound in the Ancient World," Harvard University Press allowed its author every possible kind of illustration to make this fascinating text even more readable, including a color-plate of a 14th century manuscript of Celsus...

...Clearly designers of taste and talent had given them their full attention...

...As universities felt the pinch, they in turn pinched the budgets of their presses...

...everyone, it seemed, was cutting back...

...Two fine Mississippi River boats chug along on the cover, and the prose inside is easy-going and highly readable...

...What I want to say about the books of this year is based on the experiences of the two days in which I was closeted with fellow-judges David Godine, the eminent trade publisher of finely printed books, and, the typographer Freeman Craw...

...But the percentage.i&bigh as well in one category, poetry, where two of the seven books nominated were- from university presses, pus is no accident, for the university presses have token seriously the cry Jit the recent Library Congress conference that poetry was being neglected by the commercial houses for whom it is too often unprofitable to publish, Princeton has begun a series of lovely looking books, each one devoted, to a relatively unknown poet...

...Si awards were given by NBA, two of them to books produced by the university presses...

...Finally, there is evidence that presses like Indiana University Press would like to wipe out entirely the thin line which keeps them this side of commercialism...

...A recent book of theirs, The UFO Controversy in America is about to become a Signet NAL paper book and thus a best-seller...

...Two acquaintances ©f mine, neither of them in the least scientifiominded, tried to spirit this volume away from my library...

...What have I been saying...

...A number of them had already given up and disappered, like the Van-derbilt Press, and another, Northwestern University Press, had announced its imminent demise simultaneously with the awarding to it of a National Book Award for a book on the phenomenology of Husserl...

...This is so that the best-seller, the shoddy por-nographer, cheap sensational fiction, and watergated confessional literature (sic) does not inundate us all.not inundate us all...

...Most of these presses call such books "of general interest," and they are just that, highly commercial volumes of far more than academic interest...

...a book about the Richard Daley political machine in Chicago, by Milton Rakove has been excerpted in the New York Times nod the Washington Post...

...But if it seems clear that, in the main, mere is now little difference in the center of the spectrum between the books university presses are now publishing and the best of commercial publishing, it also seems evident to me that few commercial houses can devote to their books the kind of physical loving care that I see lavished on university publishing...

...Unable to find a book of old-time fiddle tunes commercially available, R. P. Cristeson spent years traveling the country and collecting these tunes in a book filled with invaluable data about the tunes and the music to accompany it...

...whose imaginations I have lived in for many years," and at the press conference which preceded it he said his book was history, literary criticism, essay...

...Only the fact tha* the National Book Awards this year abolished its science category kept it fromthe national, general recognition it deserved...