Reading through Author Information Forms for the forthcoming lists, I’ve found two authors who are younger than me.
It’s the first sign of advancing age, I fear. And it’s a working hazard of publishing. Now I’m thinking about books in our Spring 2004 catalog, and reading reports for books that’ll be out in 2006 and 2007; time, as a courtesy, speeds forward, bringing the books into our hands, and passing them through the warehouse and away.
I already began to feel time creeping up on me when Jackson Rushing’s Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde went out of print; that book had just been published when I started at the Press. Now I’m seeing books go out of print whose initial query letters showed up after I started here.
(Okay, that statistic isn’t as impressive as it would’ve been twenty years ago. It used to be that you could expect a university press book to stay in print for at least ten years, often much longer. These days, that only happens with books that clearly get a lot of classroom use or an unusually steady level of bookstore sales. Instead of the old method of printing larger runs and keeping stuff forever, we’re printing smaller runs, and books have a bigger hurdle to justify reprints once they run out.)
Still, I’ve been working here for almost nine years. Longer than my son’s been alive. Longer than I lived in the city I still consider my effective hometown. Longer than my marriage lasted. Longer than my entire formal college education, pre- and post-bacc.
And I’ve been here barely a quarter the time of the most senior Press employee.
Next thing I know, I’m going to be looking at the Spring 2020 catalog and wondering where the time went.