You know his work: the cover for The Beatles’ ” White Album,” “Swingeing London,” depicting the arrest of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser (also the cover of Hal Foster’s forthcoming The First Pop Age) and most famously, “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” The latter piece is often identified as the first example of Pop Art, well before Warhol came on the scene. The New York Times reported that the artist died yesterday at the age of 89.

Thanks to Dan Hamermesh’s much-discussed op-ed in The New York Times on whehter there should be legal protection for the ugly in the workplace, many media outlets have come calling. Check out a recent interview with Dan on Fox News’s Fox & Friends.

I am rapidly coming up to speed on Silvio Berlusconi thanks to the upcoming publication of Maurizio Viroli’s book The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi’s Italy, so it seemed somewhat serendipitous that Frank Bruni’s oped in the NY Times today takes on Berlusconi and his bunga bunga parties. Yes, we all love to hear the lurid details of Berlusconi’s debauchery (lap dances by nuns!), but what Bruni does marvelously well in this article is explain why this matters for the US:

We shouldn’t just gape and laugh. His country’s path from glorious to ridiculous, paved in part by his carnal and legal distractions, threatens the financial stability of Europe, and benefits no one. Beyond that, Italy presents a cautionary tale for many immodestly privileged Western democracies that have been lulled by comfort into complacency; have let too much silliness create too much damage; and haven’t held leaders to adequate account.

Our is one of them. America is in some ways a petit guignol version of Italy. We also coast on the accomplishments of yesteryear. Also neglect our infrastructure. Also watch young people struggle. Also waste precious time while lawmakers behave in petty, self-serving fashions. Also let money corrupt politics.

Money is Berlusconi’s lance, his armor, his steed, his everything. A billionaire many times over, he uses it to engender loyalty, and his business empire reaches deep into the image-burnishing and opinion-manipulating realms of television, journalism and publishing.

And that is precisely the point that Maurizio Viroli makes in his new book. He argues that Berlusconi used money and influence to convert Italy into a nation of servile courtesans — operating a court system more reminiscent of the 18th century than the 21st. The Liberty of Servants has been seized on as a manifesto of sorts in Italy and PUP is proud to bring it out in English. This book was initially announced for a February publication date, but we have recently expedited the printing and are now publishing on October 5th. It should be available via internet retailers as early as next week.

Congratulations are in order for Sean Farhang, author of The Litigation State: Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the United States. The book was just named winner of the 2011 C. Herman Pritchett Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.

According to their web site, “The C. Herman Pritchett Award is given annually for the best book on law and courts written by a political scientist and published the previous year.”

This is the second big academic award for Farhang’s book. Previously we announced it was the winner of the 2011 Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association.

Congratulations again!

This week’s book giveaway is Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography: The Art of Avoiding Errors by Laurie Dahlberg.

This lavishly illustrated book establishes the towering influence of the scientist Victor Regnault (1810-1878) in the earliest decades of photography, a period of experimentation ripe with artistic, commercial, and scientific possibility. Regnault has a double significance to the early history of photography, as the first leader of the Société Française de Photographie (S.F.P.) and as the maker of more than two hundred calotype (paper negative) portraits and landscapes. His photographic and scientific careers intersected a third field with his appointment in 1852 as director of the Sèvres porcelain works.

Readers are treated to Regnault’s own beguiling pastoral, garden, and forest scenes; striking portraits of the scientists and artists in his circle of friends; quirky images of acoustic experiments; and an insider’s view of the Sèvres porcelain works. Regnault’s richly varied photographs also encompass perhaps the most extensive group of family portraits in early photography, and his romanticized landscapes reflect a moment when the rural outskirts of Paris were being aggressively suburbanized and industrialized.

Occupying a unique and powerful position in the overlapping spheres of photography, science, industry, and art, Regnault was elected president of the newly formed S.F.P. in 1855. By examining his intertwined activities against the backdrop of French photography’s nascent pursuit of institutional legitimacy, this book illuminates an important and overlooked body of images and the irregular cultural terrain of early photography.

“In Laurie Dahlberg’s Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography, you will find much to satisfy both curiosity about photography’s early technology and pleasure in his subjects. . . . A fascinating book, it combines stunning images with a thoughtful biography.”—Maggie McDonald, New Scientist

The random draw for this book with be Friday 9/16 at 3 pm EST. Be sure to “Like” us on Facebook if you haven’t already to be entered to win!

FACT: “Before 775/750 BC, which is the space of time considered by excavators to be the most likely period in which Rome was founded, there were no cities or states in the Mediter­ranean of a more or less constitutional character. From 775/750 BC to the fifth–sixth centuries AD, in the western Mediterranean, and much later in the eastern Mediterranean, a world based on the ‘ancient’ city-states was created—and then swallowed up by the Roman Empire. After the period of decadence of the Western cities between the fifth–sixth and tenth–eleventh centuries ad, during which protohistory seems to revive, the cities blossomed anew, never to fall again into decadence. A number of these cities achieved a degree of regional prominence, while others became centers and me­tropolises of large states.”

Rome: Day One by Andrea Carandini
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Andrea Carandini’s archaeological discoveries and controversial theories about ancient Rome have made international headlines over the past few decades. In this book, he presents his most important findings and ideas, including the argument that there really was a Romulus—a first king of Rome—who founded the city in the mid-eighth century BC, making it the world’s first city-state, as well as its most influential. Rome: Day One makes a powerful and provocative case that Rome was established in a one-day ceremony, and that Rome’s first day was also Western civilization’s.

Historians tell us that there is no more reason to believe that Rome was actually established by Romulus than there is to believe that he was suckled by a she-wolf. But Carandini, drawing on his own excavations as well as historical and literary sources, argues that the core of Rome’s founding myth is not purely mythical. In this illustrated account, he makes the case that a king whose name might have been Romulus founded Rome one April 21st in the mid-eighth century BC, most likely in a ceremony in which a white bull and cow pulled a plow to trace the position of a wall marking the blessed soil of the new city. This ceremony establishing the Palatine Wall, which Carandini discovered, inaugurated the political life of a city that, through its later empire, would influence much of the world.

Uncovering the birth of a city that gave birth to a world, Rome: Day One reveals as never before a truly epochal event.

“It has been assumed generally that the traditional founding of Rome by twin brothers Romulus and Remus 28 centuries ago should be classified as myth. This provocative examination by a highly regarded but controversial archaeologist suggests, however, that the story contains more than a grain of truth . . . he marshals considerable evidence, written and archaeological, to bolster his claims, and his conclusions certainly are startling and exciting.”—Jay Freeman, Booklist

We invite you to read the Introduction here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9397.pdf

Yes, we are a publisher of textbooks, trade books, field guides, and everything in between (even a few novels!). But what really distinguishes what we–and all our University Press colleagues– do is that we publish important books. Our membership organization, The Association of American University Presses, has just published an impressive Books for Understanding list of about 1100 titles from university presses that contribute to our understanding of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and their influence throughout the last decade.

This tremendous resource includes smart, revelatory books aimed at the general reader as well as targeted academic works from a variety of disciplines. It is a wonderful place to browse for reading recommendations or to use as a bibliography if you are a researcher or journalist. You can browse the complete list here: http://www.booksforunderstanding.org/september11/list.html

Books for Understanding is an initiative of the AAUP that was actually born in the early days following 9/11. As journalists and the general public rushed to learn more about what was happening and the key players in the terrorist attack, University Presses were suddenly inundated for requests for obscure books on the World Trade Center, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, and other relevant topics. Following the recommendation of Sanford Thatcher, then director of Penn State University Press, the AAUP created this bibliography to serve as a regularly updated resource for the scholarly and journalism communities. And in the subsequent decade, Books for Understanding has responded to “in the news” subjects like Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by providing an unparalleled bibliographic resource.

So, like I said, Books for Understanding is one more reason to appreciate University Press publishing and to be proud of what we do.

The Christian Science Monitor has posted their list of “20 Nonfiction Titles You Don’t Want to Miss” and Michael Dirda’s On Conan Doyle comes in at number 15! A total of three university press books made the cut (very exciting to be included among entries from Joan Didion and John Updike.)

Thanks to the CSM for an early recommendation!

Or at least the quest to have our books available anywhere and anytime. Here are some great shots of our books in far-flung places.

First up, the Beijing Book Fair. Our logo is up on the wall and there is a nice display of our books and catalogs here:

And here, a nice display of economics books snapped at the Maruzen store in Tokyo:

If you see Princeton University Press titles in a bookstore — snap a picture and send it to jessica_pellien@press.princeton.edu.

The questions come in many forms:

“Why is my book available on amazon.com before pub date?”
“Can we write about this book in June even though the pub date is July?”
“Why does amazon.com have October 21 listed as the pub date when the catalog says November?”

But at the heart of the matter is the strange and archaic practice of setting publication dates for books. Answering it requires a history lesson — a trip in the way back machine to a time before Amazon.com (was there ever such a time?), before you could ship anything anywhere in a day or two, and before press releases could be distributed with the click of a button. Yes, join me as we travel back in time to consider the origins of the publication date/bound book date controversy. This is the story that has been passed down to me via generations of publishers and publicists and I am pleased to share it with you all.

So what is the bound book date?

Bound book date is the day books are expected to materialize in our warehouse. This is literally the day the truck pulls up and unloads boxes of books. The warehouse crew then log this inventory and store it away in the proper place. Books are usually shipped out to bookstores and distributors who placed advance orders within a week.

And how is that different than a publication date?

The publication date is an artificial date set weeks later by (in PUP’s case, at least) the publicist overseeing media outreach for the book. The pub date usually trails the bound book date by 4-5 weeks.

But why would you need such a large gap between bound book date and publication date?

Well, there are two reasons. In ages long gone past, this cushion was necessary to accommodate the packing, shipping, unpacking, shelving process of getting a book onto a physical bookstore shelf. All of these processes simply took longer when things had to done manually and shipping times weren’t as quick. By setting the pub date 4-5 weeks after the bound book date, publishers could be reasonably assured that media reviews timed to pub date would appear when the books were actually available for purchase in stores all over the States. This gap also gives the media enough time to receive their review copies, and then read, write and publish their reviews. In a perfect world, everything — sales and media — would coincide on publication date.

Does this still make sense in 20XX?

Things have changed dramatically over the last few decades — shipping times are faster, the advent of internet bookstores means books are often available for purchase within a week or two of bound book date, and “media” has expanded to include bloggers and online versions of newspapers and magazines that work on shorter deadlines. Occasionally, books will be embargoed so that sales, bound book date, and publication date all occur on the same day (think a Harry Potter-like extravaganza at your local bookstore or your book arriving from Amazon.com on publication day), but for the most part we continue to use this out-dated bound book date/publication date system. While it may seem archaic, it also allows for delays in production, shipping from printers, or any of the other dozens of ways a book can be delayed in arriving at the warehouse. For the most part, this is a system the more traditional media are comfortable with, though we have begun accommodating earlier review and interview requests that occur in the window between bound book date and publication date.

So what do you think? Do artificial publication dates belong in the 21st-Century publishing world? What system would work better? Leave a comment below.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like this one.

We will publish 9 Algorithms That Changed the Future by John MacCormick at the end of this year. This fascinating book reveals the surprising history and uses of 9 major algorithms — equations that control how search items are ranked, how facial recognition software works, how your iPhone knows what you are trying to type when you’ve missed half the letters, among many other things.

While the book is still months away from publication, I thought everyone might enjoy this podcast. Back in March 2010, John spoke at the popular Lunch ‘n Learn series here at Princeton. You can listen to that talk here.

Enjoy!

Frankly, this trailer is missing something.. what could it be? Oh yeah, birds! Considering this is a movie about birding, there don’t seem to be enough birds in the trailer for The Big Year, nor do they really explain what a Big Year is. And to top it off, I have it on very good authority (via Birdbooker Report) that there is a bird mistake in the trailer–can you find it?

Ok, so the movie trailer isn’t perfect on the birding side of things, but all that set aside — it looks really fun and funny. Are you planning to see it on its opening weekend?