The Bog of Lost Scholars

At work, I’m in the middle of my usual round of tasks for a new seasonal list — start preparing the books’ pages for our website, code the excerpt files, update the ONIX database so we can schlep our information to distributors, the usual.

HTML-coding the excerpt files is both one of the more fun and one of the more tedious parts of the process. I get to skim the introductions of all the books as I work, which is helpful (it’s rare that I get the chance to really READ anything we publish!), but some books are more…scholarly than others. One of the ones I recently coded was so tedious, I had to relieve my boredom by making frequent editorial comments to my officemate. “A discussion among monks under a vow of silence is more interesting than this book!” Others are fairly well-written, and get me thinking about subject areas that don’t normally cross my path. (Ethnography and The Prisoner? Interesting comparison….)

Advance copies of the Fall 2003 catalogs are scheduled to arrive the last week of April, so I’ll have a nice and busy next month. Then we start getting into our long awaited website redesign….

Among the many useful projects of the Association of American University Presses is their Books for Understanding bibliographies for various subject areas in the news. Right now, they have an extensive and growing list of books relating to the Iraq war; if your reading list wasn’t long enough already, here’s where to add more!

One of my favorite parts of my job is staffing the Press’s booth at scholarly meetings. Recently I did the College Art Association and a shift at the Maya Meetings.

College Art Association is the scholarly association for art historians and art teachers. The exhibit hall’s fun to browse; besides publishers, many paint and art supply manufacturers exhibit there. Two years ago when they were in Chicago, I almost memorized the Pebeo representative’s spiel (they make a red, blue, and yellow that are pure enough colors to be used in color mixing classes, and they also have a line of good-quality reasonably priced gouache [basically, opaque watercolor paint] which they hope to get more art teachers using for their students.) This year, I was surrounded by book publishers, but that was pleasant as well.

The Maya Meetings are an annual workshop on Mayan glyphs and language; since it’s in town, folks at the Press sign up for three-hour shifts. There’s only two exhibitors, us and Scholar’s Choice, a company that brings books from many presses to exhibits. The challenge of working the Maya Meetings is that it’s like the traditional description of military service — long periods of boredom interspersed with brief intervals of terror. There’s almost no one in the exhibit room while the sessions are going, but once the break starts, PHOOM!

It’s kind of fun going to these meetings and observing the kinds of people who show up. College Art was full of people dressed in black, or trendy-looking outfits; buzzcuts or dyed hair, and backpacks or classy black bags. The Maya Meetings have people in khaki, or Guatamalan textiles, or denim, or neat but practical-looking shirts; there’s lots of ponytails and nifty woven bags.

(My favorite meeting for people-watching was the joint meetings of the American Philological Association and the Archaeological Instititute of America – the classicists and the classical archaeologists. It’s amazing how easy it was to tell them apart. The classicists tend to be more formally dressed and groomed; the archaeologists tend to be suntanned and to have longer hair. If they’re wearing sandals, they’re an archaeologist. If they’re wearing a tweed jacket, they’re a classicist, unless they’re wearing it with blue jeans and a t-shirt, in which case they’re an archaeologist.)

The worst part of a meeting is definitely the tear-down afterwards. I don’t mind the set-up; I’ve long learned that I won’t see the best way to arrange the books until the next morning, so I just get everything out and ready to move around. Tear-down, though — by then, I’m exhausted, and I just want to get these damn stands and books and supplies in boxes, put the stupid labels on, and get OUT of the place. It’s almost enough to make me cringe at the sound of packing tape.