Fall 2011 - The Johns Hopkins University Press

InPress
FALL
2011 Volume 9 Number 3
In Print
News From
The JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Life of a Book
By Claire McCabe Tamberino
This occasional series for InPress walks readers through every step of the
bookmaking process, revealing just how much work goes into the art and
business of turning a good idea into a great book.
Part 2: Manuscript Editing
At the end of the first installment in our Life of a Book series, we learned
how Hopkins editors acquire the roughly 200 books the Press publishes every
year. The next stop on our bookmaking tour: manuscript editing. It is
at this crucial stage that Press copyeditors transform rough manuscripts into
polished prose fit for public consumption.
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PubliShed by the JohnS hoPkinS univerSity PreSS
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South Central review vol. 28, no. 2, Summer 2011
Summer 11
South Central Review
Here is a greatly simplified explanation of the editing process at the Press.
Authors under contract submit a final manuscript, including any artwork
and permissions, which is then carefully prepared by acquisitions staff for
editing. The project is assigned to a copyeditor, who reviews the manuscript
word for word, clarifying the prose, eliminating repetition and grammatical
errors, and fixing typos along the way. The author then reviews the
marked-up manuscript and answers queries the copyeditor may have. The
copyeditor resolves any outstanding issues and prepares the manuscript for
design and production.
All of this may seem straightforward, but there is a real art to copyediting.
After months, years, even decades of working on their books, authors often
cannot see the forest for the trees. It is the job of our talented and dedicated
copyeditors to tease out the real essence of a book and ensure that an author’s
intended meaning, tone, and ideas are clearly and accurately conveyed
to readers. “Manuscript editing is a key part of the value scholarly publishers
add to the projects they undertake,” notes JHUP’s editorial director, Greg
Britton. “More than just fixing commas or getting nouns and verbs to agree,
a good copyeditor can refine and tighten a writer’s language. In doing so,
the editor helps bridge the gap between author and reader. When done well,
these subtle changes can work magic.”
Manuscript editing, like the rest of the publishing world, has had to adapt
to changing technologies and evolving trends in readership. For generations,
copyediting was done with colored pencils on paper manuscript. In the 1980s,
computer technology began to transform this work, allowing changes to be
made directly to the electronic version of the original manuscript. Less than
a decade later, almost all manuscripts arrived at the Press as word-processed
electronic files and were edited on screen. Now, the end product of a manuscript
editor’s careful attention is likely to appear not only in a printed book
but also in electronic editions, on e-book readers, and in online collections.
The methods of manuscript editing may have changed over the years, but the
practice is still as essential as ever. “You write to communicate to the hearts
and minds of others what’s burning inside you,” the author and editor Arthur
Plotnick once observed, “and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.”
Project MUSE Beta Site beta.muse.jhu.edu
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E-books are coming to Project MUSE! Visit
the beta site to browse and search over 300
sample e-books from 27 distinguished university
presses, fully integrated with MUSE’s current
content from over 500 scholarly journals
in the humanities and social sciences. The full
UPCC e-book collections are scheduled to
launch in January 2012 and will feature more
than 12,000 scholarly books from 65 publishers.
Read more on page 2.

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Commentary from JHU Press Director Kathleen Keane
During the summer I had the privilege to attend two interesting conferences
that focused on the written word. Each brought together literary scholars and
publishers, but each prompted a very different conversation about texts, how
they will be published, and how they might be used.
In early June, the JHU Press hosted the Eliot Prose Summit, a working meeting
to review the status of our landmark project The Complete Prose Works of
T. S. Eliot, which the Press will co-publish with Faber and Faber. The project
involves seven of the world’s leading Eliot scholars, under the general editorship
of Ronald Schuchard, working to identify and annotate all of Eliot’s prose
in a definitive critical edition to be published online. This massive undertaking
has much in common with the great works of scholarship our Press has published
over many generations. Yet the volume editors have the added burden
of anticipating how their work might be used in our digital age. How should
this traditional sort of work appear online? How will the content be searched?
What sorts of features and functionality should it offer?
More recently, I attended the Scholarly Communications Institute sponsored
by the Mellon Foundation and hosted by the University of Virginia Library.
The new world we inhabit was even more apparent. At this conference, scholars,
librarians, and technology specialists shared insights about numerous “digital
humanities” projects that use powerful new technologies to archive, analyze,
and “data mine” literary works. The results are machine-driven, offering surprising
new ways to read and understand traditional texts.
Both conferences reinforced the notion that digital publishing takes imagination,
forethought, and a lot of careful planning, as we navigate technical processes
such as file encoding and designing user interfaces. But both also showed
that scholarly material—the text—remains at the heart of all our endeavors.
Whether we open a printed book or a database, we do so because we are inspired
by a particular work or driven to understand it better. While technology
may be changing the ways scholarly publishers fulfill their mission, it doesn’t
change the mission itself: to share knowledge and to meet the demands of the
inquisitive mind.
think
we’ve been extremely fortunate
in the first two years
to have gotten so
many distinguished
writers to appear in
the magazine. One
of the things that The
Hopkins
In Conversation
With Mark Denny
Author of several books published (and copyedited)
by the JHU Press, including, most recently,
Gliding for Gold: The Physics of Winter Sports.
How do you see the role of a copyeditor in a book project?
Copyeditors ensure a more polished and finished book, and
give the author confidence. For authors of nonfiction, it’s especially
important to get the facts checked, and copyeditors are a great help here.
Fortunately, I have not made any huge blunders, so far as I am aware, but many
minor mistakes have been fixed by good copyediting.
How important is it for authors to set aside their ego in the editing process?
Crucial. I remember being so offended by the many cuts and alterations made by
the JHUP copyeditor of my first book that I referred to her as “The Butcher of
Baltimore.” There is no doubt, however, that the book was improved as a result.
What have you learned from working with copyeditors?
The short answer is: how to write. I still e-mail Carolyn Moser, who has
copyedited five of my books, with questions about grammar, or American colloquialisms,
or any number of details concerning putting together a manuscript.
She even advises me about preferred font types and layout for graphs and charts.
Although the author’s name ends up on the cover, it really is a team effort, isn’t it?
It is, and I always make sure that the copyeditor is duly acknowledged. The
copyeditor is the person I work with most closely and most extensively on
any book project. The other editors make a significant contribution as well, of
course, at a later stage of production, but the copyeditor is the one who helps
to shape the book.
—Brian Shea
New Journals and Books for Project MUSE
Some 30 new journals have been confirmed to join Project MUSE’s highly regarded
collections for 2012. Among the new additions are Land Economics and Journal of
Human Resources, both from the University of Wisconsin Press, Journal of Religion
and Popular Culture from the University of Toronto Press, Cultural Politics from Duke
University Press, Indonesia from Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program, Journal
of Dramatic Theory and Criticism from the University of Kansas, German Studies Review
from JHUP, and several titles from longtime MUSE participant Penn State University
Press. Details are available on the MUSE website at muse.jhu.edu.
Sixty-five publishers are confirmed to
contribute books to Project MUSE’s new
e-book collections, developed in conjunction
with the University Press Content Consortium
(UPCC) and slated to launch in January
2012. UPCC e-book collections on MUSE
will provide libraries, researchers, and students
digital access to over 12,000 scholarly books, fully integrated with MUSE’s electronic
journal content, using a platform that enhances discovery and is easy to use. A beta
site with over 300 sample books and MUSE’s streamlined book+journal browse and
search functions is available for preview at beta.muse.jhu.edu through the end of 2011.
Further information on MUSE e-book collections, including the complete list of 65
participating presses, is at muse.jhu.edu/ebooks.
—Melanie Schaffner
New Websites Highlight Full-Service Journals Marketing
Showcasing its range of publishing and marketing services, the Journals Marketing
Department has developed new websites for scholars in Chinese history and dramatic
theory. In late May, a new website for the Society for Qing Studies, publishers of Late
Imperial China, debuted at qing_studies.press.jhu.edu. A little more than a month later,
a virtual timeline to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Association for Theatre in
Higher Education went live at press.jhu.edu/timeline/athe. The association publishes
Theatre Journal and Theatre Topics.
—Brian Shea
Book Design Awards
Book and jacket designers as a group are unsung heroes of the book publishing world. It
takes special skill, artistry, and unflagging patience to design a book properly, and we here
at the Johns Hopkins University Press are honored to work with a group of dedicated
professionals who know how to craft an attractive, readable, and unobtrusive design. Happily,
we’re not the only ones who notice these sorts of things.
Six JHUP books won prizes in the Washington Book Publishers 2011 Design and
Effectiveness Awards competition. Daniel O’Quinn’s Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic
Imperium, 1770–1790, and The Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus, by Guillaume
Apollinaire, and in a new translation by X. J. Kennedy, won first-place honors for typographic
text and typographic cover, respectively. Second-place prizes went to A Patient’s
Guide to Heart Rhythm Problems, by Todd J. Cohen, M.D., for technical text, and to Maritime
Maryland, by William S. Dudley, for illustrated text. James R. Spotila’s Saving Sea Turtles
and C. Renée James’s Seven Wonders of the Universe That You Probably Took for Granted won
third place in illustrated and typographic text, respectively.
At the 25 th Annual New York Book Show, the Book Industry Guild of New York honored
three JHUP books. William Dudley’s Maritime Maryland took first place among professional
scholarly books, Walter G. Ellison’s Second Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Maryland and
the District of Columbia took first place among professional reference books, and Railroads
in the African American Experience, by Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., won an award of merit in
general trade nonfiction.
Next time you pick up a book, take a moment to really look at it. Examine the cover, the
page design, the art. If it’s a Hopkins book in your hands we’re sure you’ll be impressed.
—Brendan Coyne

Fall 2011
Press Calendar Talks Book Signings Events
September 18
Reception & Book Talk
Home Front Baltimore
With JHU Press author Gilbert Sandler
2:00 p.m. @ The Baltimore Museum of Industry
Popular local historian Gil Sandler launches his new book on wartime
Baltimore at the BMI’s beautiful waterfront campus. Admission: Free,
please R.S.V.P. to Gena at gmorris@thebmi.org or 410-727-4808, ext.132.
For directions and detials, visit thebmi.org.
September 23–25
The Baltimore Book Festival
Book Sale, Talks, and Book Signings
with various JHU Press authors
Noon to 7:00 p.m. @ The Peabody Library in Mount Vernon Place
The Press returns to the Baltimore Book Festival in partnership with JHU’s Sheridan
Libraries with a book sale, author signings, and special programs in the stunning
Peabody Library. Admission: Free. Visit the Press’s online calendar for more details:
press.jhu.edu/news/upcoming_events.html. Visit the festival at baltimorebookfestival.com.
October 11
Hopkins Club Lunch & Book Talk
Shrink Rap: Three Psychiatrists Explain Their Work
With JHU Press authors Dinah Miller, M.D., Annette Hanson, M.D.,
and Steven Roy Daviss, M.D.
12:30 p.m. @ The Johns Hopkins Club
Everything you ever wanted to know about psychiatry—plus lunch! Join three
psychiatrists for an enlightening discussion of their profession and their new book
from the Hopkins Press. Admission: $20; Hopkins Club members contact the Club
to make reservations; non-members contact Jack Holmes to attend as a Friend of the
Press.
October 19
Reception & Book Talk
Annapolis, City on the Severn
With JHU Press author Jane Wilson McWilliams
6:00 p.m. @ The Maryland State Archives
The JHU Alumni Association and the Maryland State Archives host a talk by
Jane McWilliams on her new history of the state capital, Annapolis: City on the Severn.
Admission: $15 for Friends of the Press and dues-paying members of the JHU Alumni
Association. Reservations required; call the Alumni Association at 800-548-5481 and
identify yourself as a Friend of the JHU Press.
November 1
Hopkins Club Lunch & Book Talk
Outdoor Sculpture in Baltimore
With JHU Press author Cindy Kelly
12:30 p.m. @ The Johns Hopkins Club
Curious about the monuments of the Monumental City? The former director of
JHU’s historic houses discusses her acclaimed new guide, which Baltimore Magazine
called “immediately indispensable.” Admission: $20; Hopkins Club members contact
the Club to make reservations; non-members contact Jack Holmes to attend
as a Friend of the Press.
November 11
JHU Press Night at the Ivy Bookshop
Reception and Book Signing
With various JHU Press Authors
7:00 to 9:00 p.m. @ The Ivy Bookshop, 6080 Falls Road, Baltimore
Enjoy refreshments and the opportunity to meet the Press’s local authors—and get a
jump on your holiday shopping—when this popular independent bookshop hosts its first
JHU Press Night. Admission: Free. For directions and details, call the Ivy at 410-377-2966.
How do you
support the
Press?
Become a Friend.
From publishing innovations to
award-winning scholarship, keep up
with what’s new at America’s oldest
university press. Use the envelope
provided to become a Friend of the
Press. Stay connected and help
advance scholarly publishing at
Johns Hopkins. Read more at
press.jhu.edu/friends
or contact Jack Holmes at
410-516-6928 or jmh@jhu.edu.
Make a connection.
Visit the Press online: press.jhu.edu
Place an order:
Books: 1-800-537-5487
Journals: 1-800-548-1784
Follow the Press on Twitter and Facebook:
Search for JHU Press
Learn about Project MUSE:
muse.jhu.edu
Visit our booth at academic meetings:
press.jhu.edu/news/
upcoming_events.html
Donate to the Press online:
press.jhu.edu/friends
Join the InPress mailing list or make a
comment: inpress@press.jhu.edu
Get a discount: InPress readers can receive
a 25% discount on books when ordering
directly from the Press. By phone or online,
refer to discount code “INP.”
December 7
Reception & Book Talk
The 36-Hour Day, 5th Edition
With JHU Press author Peter V. Rabins, M.D., M.P.H.
6:00 p.m. @ The Owens Auditorium in the Koch Cancer Research Building,
Johns Hopkins Medical Campus
The JHU Press and JHMI’s Department of Psychiatry celebrate the new edition of the
Press’s best-selling book, long considered “the bible” for families caring for a person
with Alzheimer disease. A reception and book signing precedes a talk by the book’s
coauthor, Dr. Peter Rabins. Admission: By invitation.

Press Photo Gallery
JHU Press Renovation
For Press authors and friends who are unable to visit us in Baltimore, here is one more look at
the recently completed renovation of the Press’s main building. To schedule a visit to the Press
or arrange for the “Life of a Book” tour (which explains the publishing process and highlights the
Press’s notable history), contact Jack Holmes at 410-516-6928 or jmh@jhu.edu.
8.
1. The renovation preserved features of the
1897 former church building, including the
banister in the lobby. 2. A large portrait of
Daniel Coit Gilman, JHU’s first president and
the Press’s founder, overlooks the first-floor
hallway. 3. New displays about the Press’s
history are installed near the Gilman portrait.
4.
4. Changing exhibits of artwork by JHU Press
staff are featured on the terrace level, including
a painting by graphic designer Susan
Ventura. 5. A panel at the new back entrance
displays the colophons the Press has used
from 1878 to the present. 6. A large conference
room on the terrace level now hosts most
Press meetings. 7. Glass cases in the staff
lunch area allow changing displays of Press
publications and other materials. 8. The lobby
features an updated entrance, a new reception
desk, and artwork from Press publications.
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InPress
FALL 2011 Volume 9, Number 3
InPress is the quarterly newsletter of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Editorial Committee: Greg Britton, Becky Brasington Clark, Colleen Condon,
Brendan Coyne, Jack Holmes, Kathleen Keane, Melanie Schaffner, Brian Shea,
Claire McCabe Tamberino
Contributors: Kathy Alexander, Alicia Catlos, Christina Cheakalos, Julie McCarthy,
Robin Rennison, Deborah Stein
Photography: Colleen Condon, Will Kirk, Jay VanRensselaer
Designer: Susan Ventura
With comments or suggestions, or to add your name to our mailing list, contact:
InPress
Office of the Director
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Endnote
Barbara Lamb
Former Managing Editor, JHU Press
I became the managing editor at JHUP 35 years ago and retired 10 years ago. One
might think that over that span of years technology would have made radical changes
in what a manuscript editor does. Interestingly, that is not the case. As managing
editor I had been assigning manuscripts for electronic editing for a dozen years, but
until I began freelancing, I’d never edited a complete manuscript electronically. To
my surprise, I found that I loved editing on screen. Technology has indeed changed
how editors do their work, but it has not changed the work they do. Manuscript
editors seek to ensure that a manuscript reads clearly and cleanly, always in the author’s
own voice. They labor to make all attendant apparatus—notes, bibliography,
tables, appendixes, illustrations, legends—complete, comprehensible, and consistent.
I am fortunate to have a skill that offers challenging work with a variety of authors
on many different subjects. No two book manuscripts are alike, and each provides a
new adventure.