Richard Shereikis is professor emeritus of English at what is now the University of Illinois at Springfield. He spends his summers on an island in Wisconsin and his winters in Evanston. He contributes reviews and essays to such publications as Illinois Issues and Illinois Times.

If there's a future for real books, it's in places like Champaign, Carbondale and DeKalb

Essay by Richard Shereikis

"We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function."
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Readin

To steal a notion from Charles Dickens, you might say these are the best of times and the worst of times in the American book publishing business.

If you're a bottom-line type, you could look at the record-breaking $20 billion in U.S. book sales last year and argue that things can't get much better. With huge book superstores drawing hordes of browsers and cappuccino sippers to shelves and tables blooming with books, you might assume we've really become a nation of readers. But a look behind the glittery facade reveals another truth.

To serious readers and writers, these are the worst of times, in which celebrity "authors" (think Dick Morris, O.J., and Paula Barbieri, for openers) get millions for books they may not have read, let alone written; and where juggernaut book chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble steamroll their competition and drive out good books with bad, discounting stacks of schlock (tables full of Princess Di bios, for example), while letting provocative works of serious authors languish for lack of promotion.

This is "the dark heart of the [publishing] empire," as an editorial in a special issue of The Nation called it last spring. But while the bulk of that issue explored the deplorable state of America's book business, the editors saw a ray of hope in operations like university presses, where "literate people produce books rich with meaning, motivated by an old-fashioned love of art and ideas."

If there's any future for real books in America, then, it lies outside the major publishing houses, which are now just tiny specks on the landscapes of huge conglomerates like Time-Warner, Viacom and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Given the values of that sordid world, lovers of "old-fashioned art and ideas" will have to look for sustenance in less glitzy places, like Champaign, Carbondale and DeKalb, where Illinois' three public university presses perform the traditional roles of higher education. At a time when universities have abrogated much of that responsibility, evolving into something akin to trade schools or spas, the presses' productions provide generous benefits for modest investments: They enrich our culture and advance the frontiers of knowledge, serving as a stay against banal commercialism.

You won't find their products on national best-seller lists, or featured on Oprah's Book Club, but you will find their book lists deep and lively, full of solid scholarship, quirky surprises and more food for thought than you'll see down at your local superstore on 10 tables full of commercial pabulum about cats, dogs, thighs, abs and mutual funds.

Among the University of Illinois Press' fall-winter offerings, for example, you'll find scores of books on subjects ranging from advertising to women's studies. Depending on where you open the 40-page catalog, you might think the press specializes in studies of Abraham Lincoln, or labor history, or country music, or sports, or film, or literary studies, or astronomy, or contemporary poetry. But even that varied list doesn't capture the range of the press' offerings, which evolved from humble beginnings in 1918 when a few faculty monographs were published more or less informally.

Richard Wentworth, the press' director since 1979, credits his predecessor, Miodrag Muntyan, with turning the operation at Urbana-Champaign into a "coherent, major publisher of scholarly books" sometime in the 1940s. Publications in the New Math were popular early, and, in the 1960s, the press had a major financial success

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with the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, which tested children under the third grade on their reading abilities.

At a time when the press' annual budget was something like $ 1.1 million, the $650,000 brought in by the Illinois Test provided a sound financial basis, which enabled the U of I to publish works it thought important but unlikely to generate much income.

And that's precisely the challenge for all university presses, according to Wentworth, in a business where the mission is to extend the frontiers of knowledge, not swell corporate coffers. "We're usually trying to market books it's impossible to break even on," Wentworth says. "But you try to develop some that will sell enough to make up for the valuable scholarly ones that won't find a wide audience."

Over the years, the press' full-time staff has grown to 35, with an annual budget in the neighborhood of $4 million, around 17 percent of which comes from the university, according to Wentworth. (That subsidy is fairly standard for other public university presses.) The rest comes from sales, and from efforts to attract other support. Some of the press' budget comes from grants or donations from foundations that support specific books or series, like the Prairie State Books, reprints of classic regional works. Some funds come from individuals, as in the case of a $25,000 gift from a graduate of the university's history department to support historical studies. Occasionally, the home university of an author will lend support to a specific project, to advance a work it deems important.

Or a university press can reap the benefits of finding a surprise bestseller, as the U of I did in 1978 when it obtained the distribution rights to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, first published in 1937. Catching the wave of interest in women's studies and African-American literature, Hurston's work sold 38,000 copies in 1985 and has gone on to sell tens of thousands more, giving the press the means to publish other works that may not recoup their production costs.

"Normally our books will break even if we can sell 2,000 copies," says Wentworth, "and we're happy when we get a solid seller like [Irving Cutler's] The Jews of Chicago, which has sold around 5,000 copies."

Even those numbers would cause contempt in commercial publishing houses, of course, with steely accountants looking at the billing sheets. But that's all the more reason to value efforts like the U of I's labor history series, for example, which was recently enhanced by Rick Halpern's Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54, which combines traditional scholarship with oral history to tell a compelling story about race relations and American labor history. And without the U of I Press, there would be no recognition for the fine poets who are given voices in an ongoing series, some volumes of which are published in conjunction with a national program to identify and cultivate deserving new talent.

Like its older counterpart in Urbana-Champaign, the Southern Illinois University Press in Carbondale grew from modest beginnings. When it started officially in 1956, it was essentially a one-man operation, with Vernon Sternberg, who had journeyed to Little Egypt from the University of Wisconsin, taking on most of the press' responsibilities: acquiring manuscripts, editing, marketing and shipping books. In its first six months, the SIU Press had an income of $361, with an inventory that could be stored in a single room in the library.

From that beginning, the SIU Press has grown to its current state with a 12,000-square-foot warehouse, a backlist of more than 1,000 titles, a fulltime staff of 23 and an annual budget of around $1.3 million. The current director is John F. Stetter, who came to SIU from Texas A & M in 1993 with a strong commitment to the traditions established by Sternberg and his successor, Kenny Withers.

One such tradition lies in the area of rhetoric and composition, in which SIU books have won awards from the Modern Language Association, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition. Another is the unofficial series of books by and about Frank Lloyd Wright, some of which have gone through multiple printings, providing a financial cushion for other press endeavors. And for a number of years, the press has published well-received work on the film industry, including Films of the Eighties, which Choice magazine selected as one of its Outstanding Academic Books in 1993.

Among SlU's more ambitious scholarly projects is its 37-volume Collected Works of John Dewey, started in 1961 under the supervision of Jo Ann Boydston, a series which has earned scholarly approval from the Modern Language Association. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, edited by John Y. Simon, are also published by the SIU Press. That project had reached 20 volumes by 1995.

But Sternberg's legacy and Stetter's interests range beyond even these substantial achievements. A series on Scandinavian studies, several books on the rights of special populations supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, books of literary criticism and a projected series called Writing Baseball fall within SlU's compass, along with a number of regional books that have been part of the press' offerings for years.

"We've made a strong commitment to our region," says Stetter, "which we feel extends throughout the state and across our neighboring states' lines. We'll be publishing a book about Dan Rostenkowski by a Chicago journalist [Illinois Issues contributor James L. Merriner], for example, and we intend to continue our Shawnee Classics series," which includes such titles as Black Jack: John A. Logon and Southern Illinois in the Civil War Era and The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock, billed as a "riveting saga of scoundrels and rogues, an audacious cast of river pirates and highwaymen who operated in and around the famous Ohio River cavern from 1795 through 1820."

The varied fare of SIU suggests why university presses are crucial in a book world dominated by corporate values.

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A publishing house in a large conglomerate wouldn't be allowed to risk the publication of a philosopher's collected works, or even the papers of a crucial figure like Grant, let alone a look at a quirky bunch of 19th century bandits. But that variety, and the challenge of adding to our understanding of ourselves and our culture, is what makes John Stetter love his work. "If you can't have fun in a job like this," he says, "you're probably brain dead." He goes on to talk about his hopes for the baseball series, a project proposed by Richard Peterson, a longtime professor of English at SIU.

Fred Jones, Macomb Winter Triptych, 91 1991

Like her downstate counterparts, Mary Lincoln, director of the Northern Illinois University Press in DeKalb, faces major challenges in a volatile, commercial book world that produces best-seller lists contaminated by the works of comedians (Drew Carey, Whoopi Goldberg and Paul Reiser, currently), the banalities of the latest self-help gurus, and soggy, formulaic novels. It's a world, too, in which academic libraries have con spired to damage publishers, reducing book budgets in order to spend more on computers and other technological gadgets designed with built-in obsolescence. Even so, Lincoln remains optimistic about the future of her business. "Actually, this is a good time for university presses," she says, "although we have to develop a broader educational mission. We've always been strongest in literature and history here, and we mean to continue that tradition, along with our emphasis on regional studies. But we're looking for books that might have appeal beyond the scholarly community, like one we have in production now by David Young, a journalist, on the history of public transportation in Chicago."

Young's book would complement others related to the city, like Roger Biles' Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago, and Paul Kleppner's widely praised, solidselling Chicago Divided: The Making of a Black Mayor, an examination of Harold Washington's career. And it would relate thematically to NlU's Railroads in America series, which includes histories of specific railroad lines (The North Western and The Corn Belt Route, to cite two) and a number of anthologies on railroad work and travel.

Not that NIU has abandoned more specialized academic works, which are evaluated by outside reviews, a practice common at all three public universities. Its fall 1997 list includes Elisa Kimerling Wirtschafter's Social Identity in Imperial Russia, along with a half dozen other, earlier titles in the press' Russian Studies series, which has been reviewed favorably in The New York Times Book Review. A strong backlist of books in anthropology is enhanced by Elizabeth Fuller Collins' Pierced by Murugan's Lance: Ritual, Power, and Moral Redemption among Malaysian Hindus, the kind of traditional scholarly study that will find a small audience, but might have implications beyond its immediate subject.

NlU's budget is about $750,000 a year, with a full-time staff of eight. The press has about 260 titles stored

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throughout the campus in basements and central stores. Lincoln estimates the total number of volumes in the tens of thousands.

Lincoln's optimism about the prospects for NIU and the other university presses is tempered by her concern about the role of market forces in the publishing business. "It's hard to get exposure in the Borders and other superstores," she says, "when they're interested in big best sellers and they have policies that make it hard for us to work with them."

Major chains have been threatening to charge between 1 percent and 3 percent of the invoice price for each book returned, which would hamper smaller presses' ability to give their books exposure. But Lincoln hopes that more aggressive marketing will help university presses maintain a presence in the superstores while they continue to get exposure through catalogs and the dwindling number of independent book sellers — mostly in urban areas near universities — which are still interested in modest profits for responsible work. And, like Stetter and Wentworth, Lincoln sees a silver lining in recent developments among cutthroat commercial publishers. Last summer, for example, HarperCollins shocked the book business with its announcement that it was canceling contracts on 106 titles. The company's claim, in most cases, was that the authors had missed deadlines, which, in the book business is more the norm than the exception. Like other publishers who had done it less dramatically, HarperCollins had rid itself of obligations to books that it had decided wouldn't be profitable, regardless of their merit or potential significance.

Many of those authors went scrambling to find new homes for their manuscripts, and university presses may become beneficiaries. "We normally get around 300 manuscripts a year, and we publish about 20 titles," says Lincoln. "But we've seen signs that that number may rise, and we've already received at least one submission that we believe was among the HarperCollins cancellations."

The future for university presses may be brightening, in other words, despite the smothering effects of shrinking library book budgets, schlock-dominated superstores and commercial publishers who only want blockbusters. If serious writers want to tell their stories, argue their cases or remind us of our past, they'll have to look farther afield, to publishers for whom "old fashioned art and ideas" are still important.

And readers like Alberto Manguel will have to look a little deeper to find books that will sustain them. If, as Manguel puts it, reading is akin to breathing, the most bracing air for real book lovers may be coming from independent and university presses, in places like Champaign, Carbondale and DeKalb.

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Where words really matter:
Illinois' independent presses

Curtis Johnson has been called the "granddaddy of the underground literary movement" and "almost the last of the angry men/angry writers of conscience in America."

Rhondal McKinney, Normal #1322 from the series "Illinois Farm Families"

He's fiercely independent, a novelist, short story writer and essayist who has fought for nearly 40 years to keep alive the flame of independent publishing. When the founding editor of December gave the magazine to Johnson in 1958, it had 17 subscribers. By the time December ended its run in 1981, it had given voice to such young writers as Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Carver, and Curt Johnson was only losing a couple thousand dollars a year on it. But Johnson sustained the spirit of December in the press of that name, which he still runs out of his Highland Park home. He has published some of his own works through the press, and some of those have been picked up for distribution by bigger publishers. His recent Wicked City — Chicago: From Kenna to Capone, which has earned favorable reviews in mainstream publications, will be distributed by the Da Capo Press out of New York, which gives Johnson hope that he'll see some financial returns for his effort.

Johnson is too seasoned, though, to believe that current conditions in American publishing give any grounds for optimism. "Things are exponentially worse now than they were even a few years ago," he says. "Let me tell you a horror story. I had Wicked City finished about five years ago, and I gave the manuscript to an agent. He liked it, and he shopped it around, got it to a reviewer who liked it too. And then he asked me for a prospectus! I said, 'What the hell do you need a prospectus for? You've got the whole book.' And he said they didn't want to bother reading the whole book. Can you imagine? A publisher not wanting to read a manuscript?"

Which is when Johnson decided to publish Wicked City himself. And why he tries to help other writers who, he believes, deserve to be read. He's published novels like Jerry Bumpus' Anaconda, "about a drunk in southern Illinois," according to Johnson, and The Second Novel by Norbert Blei, a prolific essayist and fiction writer from the Chicago area

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who is now the scourge of developers and other predators in Door County, Wis.

Johnson's feisty independence is the sort that makes the universe of small, literary presses lively and interesting. There are at least 100 such operations in Illinois right now — it's hard to track the number exactly — and their names alone suggest their range and variety:
There's Black Ice Books in Normal; Stormline Press out of Urbana; the Thorntree Press in suburban Winnetka; Tia Chucha Press in the heart of Chicago; the Black Dirt Press, which you can contact c/o Midwest Farmer's Market at Elgin Community College; and the Third World Press on Chicago's South Side.

Together these small, often precarious operations give voices to writers who have things to say about our lives, our histories, our neighbors who may be different from us. And they usually do it as labors of love, because it's a tough business competing with corporate publishing houses that dominate displays at your local Borders or Barnes and Noble. Ray Bial, who operates the Stormline Press out of Urbana, is one of those who gets satisfaction, if not profits, from helping deserving works get into print. "What you see coming out of the big commercial publishers today isn't worth the paper it's written on," says Bial, who works full-time as a librarian at Parkland Community College in Champaign. "It's just tabloid journalism in book covers: O.J. books and things like that. They [the commercial publishers] don't care about the culture of books, about any kind of social community."

So in 1985, Bial made an effort to enrich the culture of books. He's published The Alligator Inventions, poems about his Cajun heritage by Dan Guillory, an English professor at Millikin University in Decatur; and First Frost, poems about rural life by Kathryn Kerr, both of which have received warm reviews. Stormline's most recent title is Guillory's When the Waters Recede, an account of the Great Flood of 1993 and its impact on four river towns that suffered from it.

"Getting books reviewed in national publications is a key to getting any kind of sales," says Bial. "We have an arrangement with Iowa State Press, which distributes a few of our titles, and we have a mailing list which helps some. But getting review copies to library journals and places like that is the most important thing a small press can do to generate interest and get some orders."

Like most small publishers, Bial isn't able to give his writers advances

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or high payments, but he does try to help them realize some income from their work. "We either give them 15 percent of whatever we bring in over the cost of printing the book, which means we have to sell about 1,000 to 1,200 copies," says Bial. "Or we just let them have copies, which they can take to readings and conferences and sell on their own."

Kevin Booton, Springfield Florence Quarry 1990

Either way, no one makes a living from operations like Stormline. "Now that the big publishers look mostly for the entertainment angle," says Bial, "there's no market for the old mid-list authors [like the Carvers and Oateses]. University presses are doing some really good scholarly books, and they are moving into things for more general readers. But there's still room for good things from small publishers, and it's great to have an opportunity to help writers find readers."

For the most part, Illinois' small publishers operate in a Darwinian world, in which they survive or expire based on their sales alone. But the Illinois Arts Council has helped more than one such publisher develop a project or sustain the operation. Rich Gage, who monitors the IAC's literary projects, believes that small presses in Illinois are "stronger than ever now," despite — or maybe because of — the pressures from commercial publishers. Publishers like the Dalkey Archive Press in Normal, and Tri-Quarterly, which has blended with the Northwestern University Press, are publishing serious fiction and nonfiction. Three or four years ago, a Dalkey book was nominated for the National Book Award. And a publisher like the Tia Chucha Press, which is the publishing arm of the Guild Complex in Chicago, a kind of literary arts center, has done about 20 volumes of poetry, mostly by persons of color.

The IAC has helped these activities, with substantial grants to Dalkey and Tia Chucha in recent years, and with awards to various literary organizations last year totaling more than $140,000.

Given the barren soil of the mainstream American book business, the world of independent publishers may be the only place where any literary flowers can bloom. While Rupert Murdoch's and Ted Turner's people are screening prospectuses, people like Ray Bial and Curtis Johnson will be reading actual manuscripts, looking for honest talent. And when the next Carver or Oates emerges, you can bet it will be from the fertile soil of small publishers, where literate people still have respect for art and ideas. 
Richard Shereikis

20/ December 1997 Illinois Issues