October 24, 2001: Features

Of books and the bottom line
Walter Lippincott ’60 has spent 15 years remaking the Princeton University Press

By Ann Waldron

Caption: Above, Press director Walter Lippincott ’60 stands in the Press’s serene courtyard; a selection of recent offerings from the publisher.

Soon after Walter Lippincott ’60 took over as director of the Princeton University Press in 1986, he sold off the press’s printing plant and eased out a number of old-time employees. He dropped the Press’s sponsorship of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, moved from in-house copyediting to the use of freelancers, and put sofas in the vast stone-floored lobby of the Press’s Scribner Building on William Street.

Each move, even the sofas, stirred the ire of someone.

But under Lippincott’s leadership the Press went on to double the number of books it publishes each year, open an office in Great Britain, pioneer the publication of digital books, and embark on a complete remodeling and enlarging of the building.

The Press had to change, says Lippincott. “If you don’t grow, you shrink,” he says. “We had to change to survive.”

When Lippincott, a mild-mannered opera buff who has been in publishing most of his adult life, arrived from Cornell 15 years ago, most people thought the Princeton University Press was doing fine. It carried the prestigious Bollingen series with its collections of C. G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and a popular translation of the I Ching. The Press’s books raked in prizes for design (a tradition started by P. J. Conkwright, the legendary designer, and fostered by Lippincott’s two predecessors, Datus C. Smith ’29 and Herbert Bailey ’42). It was respected for its scholarly publishing.

But the 1990s would prove to be difficult years for university presses. Libraries, their main customers, devoted more and more of their budgets to scientific journals, forcing them to cut back purchases of scholarly books. For the fiscal year ending in June 2001, Harvard’s press ran a deficit for the first time in 10 years, and sales at other presses were significantly below projections, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Princeton, however, broke even, with what was until March its best sales year in its long history. (High returns from

bookstores in late spring changed the picture somewhat.) Annual sales, which were $12 million when Lippincott came, are now $18 million.

Last year the Press had a bestseller, Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller, and sold the paperback rights for a handsome sum. The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, edited by Richard J. A. Talbert, a respected historian of the ancient world, has sold an astonishing 5,000 copies at $325 apiece and received lavish praise from scholars in classical archaeology and history. (The first atlas of the classical world since 1870, it took 13 years and $4.5 million in funding to prepare. Thirteen experts worked from satellite-generated aeronautical photographs to return the modern landscape to its ancient appearance.)

The Press also landed John Singer Sargent, by Elaine Kilmarry and Richard Ormond, the catalog for an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London and the National Gallery here. “We went after that,” Lippincott says. “We were in competition with big art publishers. Nobody thought we’d get it, but we did.”

This fall the list includes another big catalog from the

Tate, Surrealism, edited by Jennifer Mundy, and two books already being widely reviewed: Blue: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoreau and Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts by Richard A. Posner, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. “The Posner book is exactly the kind of book Walter wants,” a Press employee says, “a work by a distinguished scholar that will be read by readers of the New York Times Book Review and New York Review of Books.”

Lippincott doesn’t disagree. “A lot hinges on the success of a big title,” he says. “It’s not a simple world any more. Just to exist is difficult.”

To the critics who say he goes after these splashy books at the expense of the Press’s avowed mission, scholarly publishing, Lippincott replies: “Fifteen years ago the Press was publishing monographs that sold 700 to 800 copies a year, some that sold less than 300 copies. These were bought by research libraries, and research libraries quit buying these books. All university presses had to adopt strategies to make up for this loss of trade. Our strategy was to increase the titles in art history, economics, and history.”

Lippincott emphasizes that this doesn’t mean the Press has abandoned the humanities. “We can sell more copies at higher prices in other fields,” he says. “All really great scholarship will continue to be published, but first books and revised dissertations in English and history may not get published unless it’s a hot subject. And a hot subject may not be the most important.” The Press still has two editors in the humanities. “In a sense, economics subsidizes the humanities,” he says.

“We do publish more trade books,” Lippincott adds, “but we’re not trying to become a trade publisher. The Press does not try to make money, certainly not to make a surplus. We have endowments. The budget is based on deficit. Ninety-eight percent of university presses are dependent on the universities. We’re not.”

In addition to his publishing strategy, critics also questioned his decision to sell the Press’s printing plant, a key element of its original charter. “My predecessors thought it was necessary to own our own plant in order to control quality, but it’s not,” Lippincott says. “The plant cost us money. Every other press has gotten rid of its own plant.”

He also defends severing the Press’s ties to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, even though the Press was founded in 1905 chiefly to print the young alumni publication. The Press soon began publishing books — its first was John Witherspoon’s Lectures in Moral Philosophy — and went on to bring out such landmark volumes as Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity. Although Lippincott concedes that PAW has traditionally been part of the Press’s mission, he says, “We didn’t have any expertise in running magazines, any more than we did about running printing plants. And there was no way we could control expenses of the magazine, or raise prices.”

He has been criticized for letting design standards for the Press’s books slide, but Joanna Hitchcock, a former editor at Princeton and now director of the University of Texas Press, says the appearance of the books on the Press’s list does not indicate a decrease in quality. Lippincott says that the Press spends more on design than it ever did.

Lippincott also aroused seething resentment when he eliminated the Press’s copyediting staff and farmed out copyediting to freelancers. He says it’s more efficient. “Nobody’s doing their own copyediting any more,” Lippincott says. (Harvard and Yale do maintain in-house copyediting staffs.) “You can’t maintain a schedule with a limited number of in-house copy editors. You have a great many books at one time and you have to have a lot of copy editors. Then it slows down and you don’t need but one. It’s better to have 10 people you can use as you need them. It’s a matter of structural efficiency.”

Lippincott, who first became interested in publishing while working in corporate research for a New York bank — “I wrote up Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, and I was fascinated with William Jovanovich. He took Harcourt Brace from a $50-million-a-year trade publisher to a billion-dollar-a-year textbook publisher” — is particularly proud of two recent developments at the Press. The first is the new Great Britain office in Woodstock, near Oxford. “We have an editorial office there and we hope to acquire the best of British scholarship,” Lippincott says.

The second is the Press’s entry into electronic publishing. Princeton is in the lead in electronic publishing, according to an article in Publishers Weekly, the trade journal of the industry. “We are digitizing both the back list and our out-of-print books,” Lippincott says. “A third of the back list is ready to print on demand. This is good for any monograph that’s apt to sell fewer than 300 copies a year.”

Electronic publishing takes two forms: on-demand printing and e-books. On-demand printing is well established at the Press. If, for example, somebody orders 15 books from Princeton University Press, 13 might come from the Press’s warehouse, and two from the company, Lighting Source, that prints the on-demand editions.

E-books, or digital books, are a different matter. Ursula Bollini, director of the Press’s e-book operation, explains they’re never printed on paper. When one is ordered from the Prince-ton site on Amazon.com, it’s immediately ready to “pick up.” “You download it, have the entire text very fast,” Bollini says.

The Press now has 450 books ready in e-form. Bollini credits Charles Creesey ’65, a former editor of PAW who is now in charge of the technical side of computerized books at the Press, with making this possible. “He had a vision before anybody else. He insisted on keeping electronic files — diskettes and tapes — after composition was finished. Everybody said, ‘Why, Chuck?’ But he saw the possibility and the files were there when we needed them.”

Under Bollini’s leadership, the Press has also embarked on a project called “Digital Books Plus,” a series of 10 to 12 topical books a year that are published first as e-books, then published in book form. In electronic form, these books get reviewed and discussed thoroughly on various Internet milieus. The Press will follow up with a shorter e-book, usually free, in which its author responds to reviews, new research, and readers’ comments. Then comes the hard copy. The first Digital Book Plus, Republic.com by University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, is about the impact of the Internet on a democracy.

The Press is also interested in companies called aggregators, who build up digital collections on one subject — say, Thomas Jefferson — and sell this collection to libraries. Students can then download in the dormitory from the library. Bollini is negotiating with several aggregators.

Bollini, who was hired from conventional publishing at Columbia University Press to run the business end of Princeton’s e-publishing, says that the industry still needs to adjust to new technology. “Authors put enormous value on having their work on paper,” she says. “People have to realize the inherent value is in the work, not on the paper.” The Press’s marketing director, Adam Fortgang, who was one of the driving forces behind the Press’s move into electronic publishing, agrees that e-books haven’t taken off yet, but says that projections indicate that in 40 years, 10 percent of all books will be published in e-form.

In addition to its forays into Europe and digital publishing, the Press is also expanding right here at home. Finishing touches are being put on a 12,000-square-foot addition to the venerable Scribner Building, which was built in 1908 and first expanded in the 1960s. The space is needed for the larger staff that Lippincott says is necessary to acquire and sell books to a broader market. “We’ve vastly increased the amount of money spent on each title in an effort to increase our sales in art history, economics, and science,” Lippincott explains. “It’s harder to acquire titles for a broader market and to sell them. We used to have half a person in publicity; now we have six and a national accounts manager.”

Despite the angst over Lippincott’s business decisions, the Press today is in solid financial shape. Currently it publishes about 200 books a year, a figure Lippincott expects to rise to 250. In 2001, 10 Press books, including history professor emeritus Arno Mayer’s The Furies and former president William Bowen *58’s book The Shape of the River, won academic prizes. (Ten percent of the Press’s authors are Princeton professors, the same percentage that’s always prevailed.) And along with Yale, Harvard, Chicago, M.I.T., and California, the Press remains one of the largest — as measured by annual sales — and most prestigious university presses in the country. The sofas, it appears, are there to stay.

Ann Waldron is a frequent contributor to PAW.

On the Web: www.pupress.princeton.edu.