Penn Press Log

Sister Carrie, the Pennsylvania Edition Publishing Anniversary

"On this day in 1981 the University of Pennsylvania Press issued their edition of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, in which some 40,000 words are restored to the text and various changes to the original manuscript are reversed. Far from settling the issue, the Pennsylvania edition provided yet another chapter to one of the most famous and controversial stories in American book publishing."--Today in Literature, April 17, 2013

Around the World with Penn Press

You may not need a map to see that scholarly publishers like Penn Press contribute to the world's knowledge and understanding, but it does provide an interesting perspective.

As part of the Univeristy Press Week celebration, Penn Press has created a special Google map to show the reach of our authors and publications. In the Fall 2012 season alone, we touched every continent except Antarctica. (Oh, well. Maybe next season.)

View University of Pennsylvania Press Influence Map in a larger map

For links to other university press maps and details on University Press Week events, visit www.universitypressweek.org.

This Week's New Books: Matching Organs with Donors, Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Not in This Family, Sweet Liberty

Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants Marie-Andrée Jacob 248 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth | ISBN 978-0-8122-4432-8 | $65.00 | £42.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0650-0 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the Contemporary Ethnography series This sensitive ethnography reveals the methods and mindsets of doctors, patients, donors, and sellers in Israel's living kidney transplant bureaus. Matching Organs with Donors describes how these actors identify and adjudicate suitable matches between donor and recipient using terms borrowed from definitions of kinship.

Now in Paperback Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending Elizabeth L. Eisenstein 384 pages | 6 x 9 | 24 illus. Cloth  | ISBN 978-0-8122-4280-5 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper | ISBN 978-0-8122-2216-6 | $26.50 | £17.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0467-4 | $26.50 | £17.50 A volume in the Material Texts series The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

Now in Paperback Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America Heather Murray 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4268-3 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2224-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0740-8 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series Not in This Family shows how gays and their heterosexual parents both have animated each other's sensibilities, consciousness, and even culture and politics. Author Heather Murray suggests a reciprocal family life and complicates the notion of gay banishment.

Now in Paperback Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus. Cloth 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4172-3 | $39.95 | £26.00 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2227-2 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0356-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Early American Studies series Sweet Liberty offers a history of Martinique and its relationship to metropolitan France during the final years of slavery in the French empire. It argues that an Atlantic-world approach reveals how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the ocean.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

I’d Like to Thank the Academy—and the Copyeditor

I’d Like to Thank the Academy—and the Copyeditor
A Guest Post by Caroline Winschel

After I had been working at the Press for about six months, I was visiting my mother and noticed a familiar spine on her bookshelf: it was a copy of Kirsten A. Fudeman’s Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities. Because my mother is neither a medievalist nor a reader of monographs, I asked her why she had the book.

“Because it has your name in it!”
Of course. Thanks, Mom.

When a book is first published, the advance copies that arrive in our office are carefully inspected by our production manager before they are deemed suitable for distribution and sale. By the time I get a copy, it’s already received her seal of approval, and there’s nothing left for me to check. I like to think that this justifies what I do check: the acknowledgments. Following the model presented by many of my senior colleagues, I flip to the back matter and scan the assembled thank-yous for my name.

Even when I’m not skimming for the sake of my ego, I like reading an author’s acknowledgments. There’s something very satisfyingly voyeuristic about seeing to whom—and how—an author offers her thanks. One of the very first books I worked on at the Press referenced a number of my college professors in the acknowledgments; although the author’s experience at our shared alma mater had been decades before mine, I was heartened to learn that she’d faced some of the same withering stares during her honors seminars. Another author, fresh out of grad school, had hidden jokes throughout his acknowledgments, and I still wonder if he invented the person who was identified only by his or her initials—and I wonder what foul thing the initials stood for!