FAYETTEVILLE — A quarter-century ago, a packet of poems arrived on the porch of the University of Arkansas Press much as manuscripts often do, with a barbaric yelp! and a great empty echo of dismissal.
McIlroy House was as peculiar then as now, its native stone and Tudor timbers unlike anything else on campus. Its facade opposes the modern and mighty Sam M. Walton College of Business campus; its tiny footprint is outlined by a circular drive. Inside, a wide fireplace, uneven oak floors and crowned thresholds give the setting a rural, cloistered ambience.
This packet of poems found itself in the care of UA PressDirector Miller Williams, a poet himself with an office down the lane at Kimpel Hall. He affixed 17 of the poems with a paper clip and a note that read: “Poems with a paper clip around them are very good poems. The rest do not measure up to that standard.”
Far from discouraged, the poet, back in New York, set about his inky labors. For the next year, he crafted new poems under the direction of the paper clip standard.
Finished and dispatched, the new manuscript arrived yawping. This time around, it warranted a phone call.
“I think we have a book here,” the poet-director said.
Today, the little 61-page volume is the UA Press’ second best-seller ever - 21,215 copies. The Apple That Astonished Paris has earned about $166,000. Oh, it’s small pommes de terre for Billy Collins, who since has served as U.S. poet laureate. But back then, working with Williams, who himself was later picked to deliver a presidential inauguration poem, it was an emboldening corroboration.
“That’s all I needed ... just ... someone to tell me, well, first to isolate what was good, which he did with that paper clip, and also to give me the kind of promise of a book,” Collins says. “So I got to work ... trying to please this guy Miller Williams.
“He launched me.”
Now marking its 30th anniversary, the UA Press began with a majority vote of the board of trustees in May 1980. By year’s end, the new operation had found a home at McIlroy House.
The first year of production bore three titles with the Arkansas imprint. The next year, five more were added.
Thirty years later, the number of original manuscripts bound and bundled by the press stands at about 500; nearly 550 in all bear the McIlroy House silhouette. (One of the responsibilities of the press has been to take on out-of-print books published elsewhere.)
The aim has never been profit, but rather the dissemination of scholarly and creative material congruent with the ultimate mission of the university. Because of an early collaboration by Former President Jimmy Carter with Williams and James Whitehead, another poet and professor, the press has accumulated the publishing rights to seven Carter books (and one Rosalynn Carter title), including the 39th U.S. president’s popular Blood of Abraham.
Largely, the press has advanced material germane to Arkansans, race relations, the state’s black communities, Southerners at large and regional studies.
Making a book involves receiving and accepting manuscripts, editing them, designing them, marketing and distributing them and, ultimately, warehousing them. Despite the name, there was never a time when the UAPress actually printed books. The printing is farmed out (often to Ann Arbor, Mich., sometimes to South Korea).
Five years ago, its biggest wholesalers included Ingram Book Co. and Baker & Taylor, the latter the nation’s leading school and library bookseller. Its presence on Amazon.com was nil, but UA Press Business Manager Mike Bieker expects that the online retailer will surpass the others this year and become the single biggest peddler of its products. Sales via Amazon grow exponentially.
FIRST DOCUMENTARY FILM
Recently, the press broke into the documentary film business with the production and distribution of Larry Foley’s The Buffalo Flows. That partnership began immediately after Foley sold out of the first 500 copies he had printed himself, just days after its AETN premiere.
The film premiered nationwide a year ago. When a viewer orders a copy online at PBS.org, it’s a sale for the press, which so far has moved nearly 4,000 copies (adding up to about $42,500) and added Foley’s most recent work, Sacred Spaces, a film about architect Fay Jones.
“I’m now thinking about bonus features and the packaging of the DVD [as] vital if not more vital than the broadcast,” Foley says.
The Buffalo Flows is a rare crossover - an Arkansas project that went national. If every UA Press cast reeled in such an impressive catch, formerChancellor John White would never have proposed scuttling the ship in 1998 - a move so unpopular he reversed course two weeks later and later called the controversy the lowest point of his first year.
No, most products are like A Piece of My Soul: Quilts by Black Arkansans by Cuesta Benberry, a photo book that followed the popular Old State House Museum exhibit; or The Headpots of Northeastern Arkansas and Southern Pemiscot County, Missouri, by James F. Cherry, a text every bit as abstruse as its title. These books aspire to be Faubus, the well-regarded biography by Roy Reed, a project that itself could not find an interested commercial publisher.
“I think the history of Arkansas has been better preserved and recorded in the last 30 years than it ever was in all the years preceding,” Reed says.
It’s fair to note that Reed was a founding committee member and a staunch supporter of the idea of a university press from the start. In a spirited defense published in the New York Times on Sept. 24, 1989, he took that city’s entrenched publishers to the woodshed.
“For better or worse, 20thcentury America is richly, crankily diverse ... a nation of tribes and territories,” he wrote, but “the big publishers have little interest in tribal matters.”
FUNDS AND THE FUTURE
The favorable resolution of White’s thought to closedown the press was precipitated largely by an endowment from the Tyson family of $1 million.
Today, the press keeps to a yearly budget of about $850,000, down about $100,000 from the amount a decade ago. It generates about $650,000 from sales, while receiving a $250,000 fixed subsidy from the university. It has 12 fulltime employees who collaborate in the production of about 10 titles for the spring catalog, and another 10 for the fall.
The most recent catalog features a new book by Thomas Hauser, Boxing Is: Reflections on the Sweet Science; a collection of essays about being black and a Razorback, Remembrances in Black; and The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing.
On a recent weekday, the loose manuscript for the latest William Gilmore Simms reprint - The Partisan: A Romance of the Revolution - sat on the otherwise bare oak desk of production editor Brian King. Simms was an antebellum writer whose eye for Southern place and characters endears him to contemporary Southern academics, men like former UA professor John Guilds, who was series editor. Today, the press has 13 Simms titles in print.
“That used to be a staple of university presses, these [restorations], where you’d get the complete works of an author, and they would be really welledited and annotated,” King says.
Today, a widening niche at the press is Middle Easternand Arab-American authors and subjects. Two of the nine hardback books offered this fall fit this classification; a third, Sin, a collection of poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, is being offered in paperback. It was the brainchild of Larry Malley, UA Press director since 1999, who saw the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the UA as a likely synergy.
While online retailers like Amazon and sales at the three independent outlets in the state - That Bookstore in Blytheville, WordsWorth in Little Rock and Nightbird Books in Fayetteville - make up the biggest slice of the revenue pie, sales to college bookstores and nonprofits like libraries and museums are considerable.
BUFFERED BY SALES
Commercial publishers have complained that university presses are unfairly advantaged by grant acquisitions, endowments and taxfree status. Curiously, most press budgets are buffered by sales of books long ago jilted by commercial houses.
“We also publish a different kind of book,” Malley says. “Most of our books have current runs of a thousand copies or less. Most of our books are by professors for other professors and their students. We do not see ourselves as having advantages over the big houses.But, they’re right: We can publish a book that doesn’t make money, that can just break even. But I don’t consider that an advantage.”
Besides, “there are now more worthy manuscripts than worthy university presses,” says Ted Genoways in “a manifesto” on the future of the university press and journal published in the Virginia Quarterly Review’s online site last year.
The dawn of the electronic book could change that. It’s certainly “the question of the day,” Malley says. “Twentyfour hours a day. That is all we talk about.”
This summer, Amazon reported that sales of digital editions had surpassed hardcover sales. Although the UA Press doesn’t have contracts to sell such a product on Amazon (or the recorded book giant Audible), it’s getting ready to.
Already, one copy of every book goes to Google to be scanned for its book search, and Bieker, the business manager, says the page views sometimes astonish. It’s not a pay model, but there’s some advertising revenue, and views do result in purchases.
For now, the sum of all the press’s work can be found the old way - that is, at the website UAPress.com - where any title can be searched. And every title can be scanned by typing an asterisk into the search box.
Style, Pages 59 on 10/10/2010