ing academic readership. As John Lukacs writes in his memoirrnConfessions of an Original Sinner,rnScholars no longer read much, not even each other’srnbooks. They will read some books; more often, articles;rneven more often, reviews; and the latter only in certainrnpublications. . . . We are in the presence of a situationrnthat has few precedents in the past, surely not in the historyrnof the West…. Not only have common people lostrnthe time and the inclination for reading; so have manyrnacademics.rnThe result is that the 100-odd university presses in Americarnaccount for something like 15 percent of the titles publishedrnannually here, but for fewer than two percent of the publishingrndollars earned. In the face of this discrepancy and of a scholarlyrnworld in utter disarray, these presses have had increasingly tornquestion their purpose, and in many instances to change theirrncourses.rnTen years ago Ken Arnold, then the young director of RutgersrnUniversity Press, caused a stir by suggesting at a nationalrnmeeting of university presses that his colleagues followrnhis lead and stop publishing specialized monographs at all, recognizingrnthat they simply did not sell. Many of his older colleaguesrnwere scandalized. One of them, the director of an IvyrnLeague press, grumbled to me, “What about prestige?” He wasrndoubtless thinking of an old standard of a university-pressrnbook’s success: not sales, but the number of bibliographies inrnwhich the book subsequently appeared, a standing that wouldrntake years to tiack. Arthur Rosenthal, the director of HarvardrnUniversity Press, put it succinctly: “A primary purpose of a universityrnpress is to function as a natural outlet for information,rntheory, speculation, and methodology that will influence humanrnendeavor and enrich understanding in generations torncome.”rnSuch leisurely attitudes and measures are no longer current;rnbottom-line thinking is. Although many press directors wouldrnperhaps disavow it, they have in the main followed Arnold’srnsuggestion: the academic monograph is very nearly an artifact,rnand the monographs that are published are usually issued inrnspecialized, heavily subsidized series edited outside the house.rnThe only money that is to be made in special-interest publishing,rneven the purest of scholarly editors agrees, is in publishingrnthose fantastically expensive textbooks for captive audiencesrn(in, say, medicine or astrophysics), or in publishing the kinds ofrnbooks university presses once held in disdain —cookbooks,rnbooks of poems by creative-writing faculty, New Age tomes,rnnovels.rnThey have good reason to think so, for publishing many ofrnthese books has indeed paid off. The University of New MexicornPress, for instance, was able to finance many worthy scholarlyrnbooks in the years after it published Forrest Carter’s Educationrnof Little Tree, a putative memoir, in the back-to-the-landrnvein, of life among the Cherokee. The University of CaliforniarnPress similarly bankrolled many projects through the proceedsrnfrom worthy if not especially scholarly books like Ishi, Last ofrnHis Tribe; Habits of the Heart; and The California Wine Atlas.rnAnd university presses such as Hawaii, North Carolina, NewrnEngland, and Mississippi have engaged in vigorous programs ofrnregional publishing, competing with small commercial housesrnto produce works of local culture and of fiction set just outsiderntheir door.rnMany other university presses are increasingly either turningrnwholeheartedly to tiade publishing, hoping to recruit so-calledrnmidlist authors recently, and unceremoniously, downsizedrnfrom the trade houses after having committed the sin of notrnwriting blockbusters; or they are chasing after academicrnwills-o’-the-wisp, establishing programs of publishing in fieldsrnlike “queer studies” and “whiteness studies,” which share withrnthe celebrity memoirs and diet guides of the trade world only arnguaranteed few weeks in the sun—but which can, the hoperngoes, stir up enough immediate interest to sell a short run andrnturn a modest profit.rnThat those ephemeral fields are intellectual laughingstockrnseems to bother few editors. New York University physicistrnAlan Sokal demonstrated the bankruptcy of their approach inrnMay 1996, when the fashionable postmodern journal SocialrnText published a heavily (and inventively) footnoted piece ofrnhis arguing that scholars could produce what he called a “liberatory”rnphysics by unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity.rnThe problem was that this unification cannot be accomplishedrnunder the laws of physics, at least as they are nowrnunderstood; Sokal’s paper was peppered with mathematical absurditiesrnthat would have tipped off the knowing reader, but fewrnreaders possessed enough knowledge about science to get thernjoke. Stung when Sokal’s thinly disguised hoax was exposed,rnthe editors nonetheless continued their anti-scientific cant, crying,rnin the words of one French literary theoretician, that scientists,rn”deprived of the fat budgets of the Cold War, are seekingrna new menace…. It is no longer the war against the Soviets,rnbut the one against ‘postmodern’ intellectuals from overseas.”rnAmong the loudest voices decrying Sokal’s experiment werernthe editors and authors of Duke University Press, perhaps thernnation’s leading outlet of postmodernist theory.rnPresses pursuing postmodern lists might do well to study thernexample of Routiedge, a U.K.-based commercial publisherrnthat established a list a few years ago in the then-boomingrnfield of “cultural studies.” The list grew spectacularly and thenrncollapsed with the decline of interest in that ill-defined field.rn(Routiedge, fighting back from the edge of financial disaster, isrnnow publishing more books in ancient history than in postmodernify.)rnThose houses, and presses stiiking out in all directionsrnof the trade list, would also do well to heed the words of retiredrnUniversity of California Press director August Fruge, whornwarns, “It is not possible to move outside one’s area of competencern—area of acceptance by the book trade—and get any butrnsecond-choice manuscripts.” The better authors, that is, willrntake their work to established publishers who can do the most tornfurther their careers, leaving it to the tenure-seeking and thernsecond-tier to fill the lists of the up-and-comers.rnAnd to publish such authors, with few exceptions, is to courtrnmediocrity, and worse. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s Why I Can’trnRead Wallace Stegner (University of Wisconsin Press) is arnprime example. The author, a Sioux feminist, asserts, amongrnother things, that Indian history should be written by Indiansrnalone, and she exhorts her readers to “resist the argument thatrnthe American Mother Earth, the native earth, should be legitimizedrnas receptacle for the male colonist’s seed.” Cook-Lynnrndismisses writers like John Updike, “a white, male member of arnprosperous and efficient Euro-American (i.e., white) capitalistrndemocracy,” and the late Michael Dorris, a mixed-blood, forrnhaving written negatively of the alcoholic Sioux mother of hisrn28/CHRONICLESrnrnrn