c< *r&.d - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

n8
was held at the beginning of the present academic year. St. Andrews
University and the University of Aberdeen have also in recent years
issued publications in connection with celebration.
anniversary
The cost of manufacturing an edition of 1,000 copies of an octavo
volume of 500 pages is approximately $1,000. This estimate would
include the ordinary cloth binding. Volumes which contain cuts or
any considerable amount of mathematical formulae would involve
additional expense. Without a knowledge of the character of the
material to be published it seems impossible to give any more definite
estimate of cost. It would, however, seem safe to assume that ten
volumes of five hundred pages each would cost from $10,000 to
$12,000, and twenty volumes twice that sum, assuming, as the com
mittee has done, that 1,000 copies of each volume were issued.
It is difficult to say what return the University might reasonabty
expect to receive from the sale of such publications. That would de
pend partly on the character of the volumes and partly on the work
of the publisher in bringing them to the attention of the public.
The Yale publications to which reference has been made are published
by Charles Scribner's Sons, the Chicago publications are issued by
the Chicago University Press, and the publication of the Vassar semi
centennial volumes is in the hands of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In
each case the cost of publication, as the committee understands, has
been borne by the institution, the publisher simply acting as a selling
agent. The committee is unable to furnish any exact information
regarding the returns which have been received by other institutions
from the sale of these publications. It is known that a few volumes
in both the Chicago and the Yale series have had a considerable sale
and must have paid for themselves, and that for other volumes in
both series there has not been such an extensive demand.
It does not seem possible to report at this time on "
what volumes
the proposed series should contain,"
since this can only be deter
mined after definite inquiry has made clear what is the character and
extent of the material available for publication. The Committee
would suggest, however, that while these volumes should embody the
results of original thought and investigation, they should not be com
posed of collections of detached specialized studies such as might be
suitable for publication in the technical journals of the various
sciences. Each volume should have some unity of subject matter,
being either a treatise by a single author, or a collection of papers by
several writers with a common dealing field of investigation.
The members of the committee have made some informal inquiries
among their colleagues, and feel warranted in reporting that it would
probably be possible to obtain contributions from members of the
Faculty sufficient in extent and of the high scholarly quality necessary