Book of lists: Princeton University Press at 100.

University presses satisfy many needs, from publishing scholarly monographs for highly specialized audiences to commissioning reference books to which we all have occasional recourse. How, then, to balance the demand of purveying niche while offering something for everybody--particularly at a moment when libraries, on whose backs academic presses ride, are tightening their surcingles--is a basic question all scholarly publishers must at some point address. Princeton University Press's impressive "Goldilocks solution"--neither too specialized nor too general--has given rise to a publishing mandate that, season after season, results in fascinating lists in a variety of disciplines, from medieval history to economic behavior. This year Princeton's press celebrates its hundredth birthday with the publication of A Century in Books: Princeton University Press, 1905-2005, in which editors and friends of the press have compiled a list of the most provocative hundred titles issued over the years, each accompanied by a synopsis of its publication history and an account of its renown. I spoke to one of the principals involved in putting A Century in Books together, executive editor Brigitta van Rheinberg, to find out how the old place is holding up.

ERIC BANKS: Charles Scribner played a role in founding Princeton University Press by providing seed money. How long did he support the press financially?

BRIGITTA VAN RHEINBERG: Whitney Darrow, who was the business manager of Princeton Alumni Weekly and a Princeton grad, had the idea of establishing a press--mainly a printing press, though he probably also saw the need for a publishing company that would issue scholarly books. So he contacted Charles Scribner in New York, who thought it was a great idea and gave him a check for a thousand dollars in 1905. Darrow raised another four thousand dollars and bought a local printer, Zapf Press. About four years later, Scribner encouraged Darrow to look for a place for the whole outfit, which at that time consisted of a printer and sort of a publisher. Darrow found a place very close to the Princeton campus, on Williams Street, which is still our location. Scribner gave him a check to cover it, and put him in contact with the architect Ernest Flagg. Later, Scribner gave another seventy-five thousand dollars, for the whole building and everything else.

EB: Did Scribner maintain a financial interest in the press, or was that a gift?

BVR: No. I think it was literally a donation. As a commercial publisher, he saw the need for a press that would print books that weren't financially feasible for commercial publishers. He was also instrumental in instituting some of the bylaws--that the press was established not for financial gain, that it had to work in the interest of Princeton University to promote education and scholarship, etc.

EB: Many of the books on the list you've complied to mark the Princeton University Press centenary have, however, been huge commercial successes. What is the best-selling book in the history of the press?

BVR: I suspect it's Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces.

EB: I was amazed to discover that Henry Dewolf Smyth's Atomic Energy for Military Purposes sold sixty thousand copies on the day of its publication in 1945.

BVR: Isn't that amazing? Our first instant book. It was produced in just a few weeks.

EB: That's an incredible story--the 9/11 Commission Report of its day.

BVR: It also points, of course, to our tradition of publishing important military and strategic books, of which we have quite a number.

EB: In looking at all the military and policy-oriented titles, it is fascinating to see the political and cultural diversity of the list--that the same press could publish, say, Milton Friedman and Fredric Jameson.

BVR: There have been some true golden years in the press's history. In 1922, we published Einstein's Meaning of Relativity; less than a decade later, we published Frank Lloyd Wright's Modern Architecture.

EB: Judging by the hundred titles selected, It's a very catholic press. One reads in the centenary book the story of Princeton's 1967 acquisition, from Pantheon, of the Bollingen Series, which Paul Mellon sponsored. This series had a basis in Carl Jung's retreat in Switzerland. Did it retain its Jung-Ian orientation?

BVR: Largely, although there were other types of titles in the series--Paul Valery's collected works; The Collected Dialogues of Plato; the Complete Works of Aristotle; Coleridge's Opus Maximun. The Jung titles are our perennials, and there are a lot of special sales to Jung societies all over the world.

EB: A Century in Books features essays by Michael Wood, Anthony Grafton, Sylvia Nasar, Daniel J. Kevles, and Robert May on various aspects of the press's history. I especially enjoyed Wood's essay on the publication of so many important books by German Jewish Intellectuals in the '40s, particularly Erich Auerbach, Siegfried Kracauer, and Erwin Panofsky.

BVR: Yes, it's one of the strongest points of the list. In European history in particular, we have maintained one of the best lists. In the last seven or eight years, I've really tried to build up a significant American history list, especially in the twentieth century, because this is where a lot of the action is, so to speak. In the '50s or '60s, we had a very strong American history list, but if you looked at Oxford's list, for example, they were the place to be. Sheldon Meyer, the editor at Oxford, scooped up everybody. Princeton had some catching up to do. But now I think we're really on the map again with American history.

EB: But some of the most important titles in the history field are in your catalogue--certainly for medieval, Renaissance, and particularly French revolutionary history.

BVR: Yes, R. R. Palmer, Georges Lefebvre, etc. French history was a very exciting field. I think today comparative history is becoming very interesting, and a lot of historians are getting into world history, so that's also where I'm trying to capture the most exciting books and scholars these days. One of the benefits of traveling so much is I meet people in diverse fields and find out what they're working on. For example, I just met somebody at the Davis Center, here in Princeton, who's a historian of the Irish famine--but then I found out that he is not just a historian of Ireland but has been writing about famine in general for thirty years. So I asked him to write a short history of famine, from all periods and ages--its dynamics, its causes. In other words, I don't wait for good things to come my way; I go out and encourage people to write on certain topics, which is far more interesting.

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EB: Your view is one that's wider than the hyperspecialized perspective in academic departments--a stereotype of university presses as well. It's interesting, then, how different presses balance the scholarly monograph and a title that has broader appeal. Princeton has long been able to survive on the basis of its titles alone, without the cash cow that comes with publishing a manual of style or an extensive journals program.

BVR: That's something special about Princeton. I think we've always had a more diversified list than most other university presses, which are traditionally heavy in the humanities, and maybe the social sciences. From early on, we have been quite strong in the natural sciences, and in economics as well.

This is crucial for our survival, for doing well when library sales are shrinking--the average library sale for a book in the humanities twenty years ago was eight or nine hundred copies, and now it's two hundred. To counter that, we've built up a very strong economics list in the last fifteen years, and very strong lists also in the sciences.

EB: Von Neumann and Morgenstem's 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior has become so widespread. I've actually seen a copy of it on sale in the Gambler's Book Shop in Las Vegas--the only university press publication I've ever seen on those shelves.

BVR: Oh my God. I didn't know that! [laughs] As you work longer at the press--I started in sales, I've been the director of subsidiary rights, then I became an editor seven years ago--you realize there is no dichotomy between scholarship and commercial success, or at least not as much of a dichotomy as it is made out to be. Ultimately, we find, especially by looking at these hundred books, that the great works of scholarship the press has published are the ones that sell and keep the lights on. That is, I think, the single most-important lesson for everybody here.

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