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Stanford University Press

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Stanford University Press

Stanford University Press
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Stanford University Press (SUP) is the designated publishing house of Stanford University, a role it has performed with varying degrees of fanfare since its inception. It holds the title of one of the oldest academic presses in the United States and was, geographically speaking, the first of its kind to be established on the West Coast, a fact of little consequence to anyone east of the Rockies. The press is a current, and one assumes, dutiful member of the Association of University Presses. On an annual basis, it releases approximately 130 books into the world, covering the well-trodden ground of the humanities, social sciences, and business. Its backlist contains over 3,500 titles, a testament to the enduring power of ink on paper and the human capacity to keep writing.

History

The origin story, like most, begins with a man with a list. David Starr Jordan, in the process of accepting his role as the first president of Stanford University, presented four stipulations to his benefactors, Leland and Jane Stanford. The final, and for our purposes, only relevant point insisted, "That provision be made for the publication of the results of any important research on the part of professors, or advanced students." These pronouncements were to be packaged as 'Memoirs of the Leland Stanford Junior University.'

In 1892, this vision materialized. The first scholarly work published under the Stanford banner, The Tariff Controversy in the United States, 1789-1833, by Orrin Leslie Elliott, was given the thrilling designation of "No. 1" in the "Leland Stanford Junior University Monographs Series." The same year, a student named Julius Andrew Quelle, demonstrating a spark of entrepreneurial spirit that would later define the region, founded a printing company on campus. His operation handled the student-run newspaper, the Daily Palo Alto (now known as The Stanford Daily), alongside articles and books from Stanford faculty.

The imprint "Stanford University Press" made its first official appearance in 1895 on The Story of the Innumerable Company, a book penned by President Jordan himself. By 1915, Quelle had hired John Borsdamm, a bookbinder whose presence attracted other artisans to the press, including the master printer Will A. Friend, who would eventually manage the operation. The inevitable institutional absorption occurred in 1917, when the university purchased the printing works, officially domesticating it as a division of Stanford.

The original Stanford University Press colophon, a simple design featuring a tree and the press's name. The original Stanford University Press colophon. Simpler times.

In 1925, SUP decided it needed an editor and hired William Hawley Davis, a Professor of English, as the inaugural general editor. A year later, the press issued its first catalog, a modest document listing seventy-five published books. By 1927, University President Ray Lyman Wilbur saw fit to form a Special Committee—comprising the editor, press manager, sales manager, and comptroller—to oversee the press. Its stated purpose was "to serve in the publication of University publications of all sorts and to promote human welfare generally," a lofty and charmingly vague ambition.

A 1929 black and white photograph of the Stanford University Press staff posing in front of a building. The Stanford University Press staff in 1929. Look at all that optimism.

The first official press director, Donald P. Bean, was appointed in 1945. The post-war years were apparently productive; by the 1950s, the printing plant was ranked seventh nationally among university presses for title output. During the late 1950s and 1960s, the press had the good sense to employ the printer and typographer Jack Stauffacher as its head book designer. Stauffacher would later be recognized with an AIGA medal, confirming that at least some of the output was aesthetically defensible.

In 1999, the press was reorganized into a division of the Stanford University Libraries. It later abandoned its long-time home adjacent to the Stanford campus, relocating to its current, and presumably more corporate, headquarters in Redwood City during 2012–13.

The new millennium brought new branding. Stanford Business Books, an imprint for professional titles, was launched in 2000 with a pair of publications focused on the local obsession, Silicon Valley. In 2012, the press introduced the Briefs imprint, a series dedicated to short-form publications, because attention spans were, and are, in decline. With a predictable infusion of cash from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SUP unveiled a publishing program in 2015 for born-digital interactive scholarly works, a valiant effort to make academic writing seem dynamic. That same year, it launched its trade imprint, Redwood Press, debuting with a novel by Bahiyyah Nakhjavani.

In April 2019, the university administration provided a brief, thrilling moment of drama when the provost announced plans to eliminate the press's subsidy. This decision, a spectacular misreading of the room, provoked widespread and entirely predictable criticism. Following a chorus of protests from Stanford faculty and students, not to mention the broader academic and publishing communities, the university backpedaled. The subsidy for the 2019–20 academic year was reinstated, and a vague promise was made to discuss future fundraising options, effectively postponing the argument for another day.

Imprints

Redwood Press

Redwood Press is the imprint for books aimed at a general trade audience, meaning people who read for pleasure, not just for tenure. It publishes a range of topics from both academics trying their hand at popular writing and actual non-academic writers.

Stanford Briefs

Stanford Briefs are, as the name implies, short. They are essay-length works published across the press's various disciplines, designed for those who want the scholarship without the multi-hundred-page commitment.

Stanford Business Books

The Stanford Business Books imprint serves the professional world, publishing academic trade books, course texts, and monographs that delve into the social science aspects of business, because even commerce deserves a little scrutiny.

Digital publishing

SUP's digital projects initiative, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is an attempt to create a formal channel for the peer review and publication of "born-digital" scholarly works. This corner of the press is dedicated to projects in the digital humanities and computational social sciences, for academics who prefer pixels to paper.

Notable series

The press maintains a number of ongoing series, each a carefully curated collection of intellectual inquiry. They include:

  • Asian America
  • Cold War International History Project
  • The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
  • The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Cultural Lives of the Law
  • Cultural Memory in the Present
  • Innovation and Technology in the World Economy
  • Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, founded by the late Werner Hamacher
  • Post*45
  • South Asia in Motion
  • Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities
  • Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity
  • Stanford Studies in Human Rights
  • Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
  • Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
  • Studies in Asian Security
  • Studies in Social Inequality
  • Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

Notable publications

Over its long and storied existence, the press has published a number of significant, or at least noteworthy, titles.

  • The Tariff Controversy in the United States, 1789–1833, by Orrin Leslie Elliott
    • The first book published in the Leland Stanford Junior University Monographs series, a title that just rolls off the tongue.
  • The Story of the Innumerable Company, by David Starr Jordan
    • The first book to bear the Stanford University Press imprint.
  • Illustrated Flora of the Pacific States, by LeRoy Abrams
  • Between Pacific Tides, by Ed Ricketts and Jack Calvin (1939)
    • The 1948 edition would feature a foreword by John Steinbeck, lending it a degree of literary credibility it has retained ever since.
  • The Art of Falconry, by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, translated and edited by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe
  • The Ancient Maya, by Sylvanus Griswold Morley (1946)
  • Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist, by William Walter Greulich and S. Idell Pyle
  • The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame
  • Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, by Roberta Wohlstetter (1962)
  • Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949, by Lucien Bianco
  • The Many-Splendored Fishes of Hawaii, by Gar Goodson
  • The Sexual Contract, by Carole Pateman (1988)
  • The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, 5 vols., edited by Tim Hunt (1988–2002)
    • The press would later supplement this with The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 3 vols., edited by James Karman (2009–15).
  • The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated with an introduction and notes by Maureen Gallery Kovacs (1989)
  • Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France, by Natalie Zemon Davis (1990)
  • A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, by Melvyn P. Leffler (1992)
  • Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, by Giorgio Agamben (1998)
  • The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, by Friedrich Katz (1998)
  • The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, edited by Chong-Moon Lee, William F. Miller, Marguerite Gong Hancock, and Henry S. Rowan (2000)
    • The inaugural title in the Stanford Business Books imprint.
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (2002)
  • The Zohar, 12 vols., translated with commentary by Daniel Matt (2003–17), a monumental undertaking.
  • The Physics of Business Growth, edited by Edward Hess and Jeanne Liedtka (2012)
    • The inaugural title in the Stanford Briefs imprint.
  • Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia, by Dariusz Jemielniak (2014), a book about the very ecosystem you are currently inhabiting. How meta.
  • The Woman Who Read Too Much, by Bahiyyah Nakhjavani (2015)
    • The inaugural title in the Redwood Press imprint.
  • The Burnout Society, by Byung-Chul Han (Briefs, 2015)
  • Enchanting the Desert, by Nicholas Bauch (2016)
    • The inaugural digital project published by supDigital.
  • Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court, by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve (2016)
  • The Omnibus Homo Sacer, by Giorgio Agamben (2017)
  • Enemies and Friends (1967)

Major awards

For those who keep score, the press and its publications have accumulated a respectable number of awards. Here is a partial list of the hardware.

  • Bancroft Prize (1962): Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision
  • Bancroft Prize (1993): A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War
  • René Welleck Prize, American Comparative Literature Association (1996): The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic
  • Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association (2000); Albert J. Beveridge Award, American Historical Association (1999): The Life and Times of Pancho Villa
  • Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association (2003): The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy
  • Gold Medal, California Book Awards, Commonwealth Club of California (2009): Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970
  • Nautilus Book Award (2010): Companies on a Mission
  • National Jewish Book Award, Jewish Book Council (2010): From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking
  • National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies, Jewish Book Council (2010): Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1
  • Yonatan Shapiro Book Prize, Association of Israel Studies (2011); National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture, Jewish Book Council (2011): Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
  • National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture, Jewish Book Council (2014): Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950
  • National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies, Jewish Book Council (2014); Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize, Modern Language Association (2015): A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987
  • Prose Award for Excellence in Social Sciences (2017); American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award: Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court
  • Independent Publisher Book Award (2018): Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo
  • Hayek Book Prize, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (2018): The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs
  • Palestine Book Award, Middle East Monitor (2018): Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World
  • Gold in Success/Motivation/Coaching, Axiom Business Book Award (2019): Life Is a Startup: What Founders Can Teach Us about Making Choices and Managing Change
  • Gold in Autobiography/Memoir III (Personal Struggle/Health Issues), Independent Publisher Book Award: Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura
  • Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies (2019): A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule

1933 murder case

In 1933, the press's history took a lurid turn. David Lamson, a sales manager at SUP, was accused of murdering his wife, Allene, in their home on the Stanford campus. The case became a local sensation. The novelist and poet Janet Lewis, in a move of civic engagement, wrote a pamphlet arguing for Lamson's acquittal, highlighting the profound risks of relying on circumstantial evidence. After the ordeal of four separate trials, Lamson was ultimately set free. A bit of true crime to spice up the publishing history.

See also