Happy to report that the first copies of our Spring 2010 catalogs just hit our desks this afternoon. Soon the books will be added to the Web site and we’ll post a link.

From GrrlScientist:

What better way is there to celebrate the Nobel Prizes by helping kids in impoverished classrooms throughout the nation begin their own pursuit of their dreams? By helping kids improve their science education, you will be helping them focus on the positive aspects of their lives and give them an outlet for their energy so they realize that they do have a future!

So, why am I posting about it here? Because if you click over to GrrlScientist, you may have a chance to win a PUP book:

In recognition of your kind gift to help others, Princeton University Press is offering 2 books with a value of up to $30.00 each as prizes to two of my DonorsChoose Challenge donors: one book will be awarded to the donor who gives the largest gift, and the other book will be given to a donor who will be randomly chosen by my parrots using a method that I have yet to develop (suggestions welcomed). This kind offer covers most of Princeton University Press’s trade science titles and guide books (view their catalogue PDFs here) and they also pay postage, so this costs you NOTHING! All that you have to do is send me your mailing address after making your donation and you will be automatically entered into this competition.

William McGuire (1917–2009) began his career as a newspaper reporter in his beloved home town of St. Augustine, Florida; it wasn’t long before he was offered a job offer by the New Yorker, where he served as a reporter and editor with distinction for many years. Bill was deeply committed to the causes of world peace and social justice, and it was in this spirit that he left this secure job in 1946 for a position as an “all-purpose writer/editor” in the office of the Secretariat at the fledgling United Nations.

But it was in 1948, when Bill accepted an offer from Kurt and Helen Wolff to work as an editor at Pantheon Books, that Bill found his life’s work.  At the time, Pantheon just happened to share a cramped walk-up office at 41 Washington Square with a new organization founded by Paul and Mary Mellon, to which they’d given the peculiar name of “Bollingen.”  It wasn’t long before Bill was recruited by the Bollingen group to edit the first titles in the Mellons’ ambitious publishing plan, and only a few months later he found himself on the subway ride home with the manuscript for Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces under his arm.  By 1951, Bill was named Executive Editor of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung.

It was our own good fortune that in 1967, when the Bollingen publishing group found its new home at Princeton University Press, Bill McGuire joined the Press staff as Executive Editor of the Bollingen list, which at the point had as many unpublished projects as published titles.  Not long after Princeton took over the series, Princeton announced the publication of a landmark book, The Freud/Jung Letters, brilliantly edited by William McGuire, which was quickly hailed as a monument in intellectual history. The Times of London wrote, “It is as if Voltaire and Rousseau, or Lenin and Trotsky…had written to each other everyday”; Psychology Today devoted an entire issue to the book.

In 1982 Bill announced his retirement, to take effect that December, following the publication of his indispensable history of the Bollingen enterprise, Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past. The Press threw a gala party to celebrate his career and bid him farewell, and presented him with a bound book of personal letters sent in for this occasion by such Bollingen luminaries as Joseph Campbell, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, Lord Kenneth Clark, and Mircea Eliade.

In the years following his retirement, Bill continued to research and publish on subjects related to Bollingen, including a history of the Bollingen Prize in poetry and its controversial award to Ezra Pound, in Poetry’s Catbird Seat: The Consultantship in Poetry in the English Language at the Library of Congres, 1937–1987; he also published a study of the novels of William Dean Howells, another native son of St. Augustine.  Bill remained a friend and advisor to the Press on all matters Bollingen through the last decades, and gave us invaluable advice on the publishing of Jung’s seminars and the groundbreaking electronic version of the Bollingen edition I Ching.

We will dearly miss our longtime friend, colleague, and author.

The Staff of Princeton University Press

 Our reps, distributors, and friends in Hong Kong, Aromix Books, recently sent this photo from the 2009 Hong Kong Book Fair.  They had a great week from July 22-28, with many people stopping by to say positive things about the Princeton University Press publishing program.  They liked the booth very much, from the decoration to the book selection.  I was just tickled to see our authors Bob Shiller, Ben Bernanke, and John Nash sharing a banner with Mao and Obama! 

Inside Higher Ed is expanding the number of blogs they publish and we’re pleased that one of our authors, Mary W. George, recently launched Keywords From a Librarian.

The blog, according to George, is written, “not from the dead, but from the depths, that murky blob marked library on your campus map, that innocent but somehow chilling link on your institution’s home page, that awkward corner of uncertainty in your otherwise confident professional psyche.”

In the introductory post, George solicits library research assignments “that don’t seem to be working.” In addition to analyzing these assignments, she promises the blog will contain “general musings on what it means to be an information seeker in today’s world; consideration of library research concepts and tools that deserve more attention in the curriculum; responses to some of the Frequently UNasked Questions researchers, especially novices, have about how academic libraries function or about how one discovers ‘what’s out there’; and occasional exhortations.”

The blog is a natural extension of George’s professional work as acting head of reference and senior reference librarian at Princeton University Library and also complements her recently published book The Elements of Library Research: What Every Student Needs to Know.

G. A. (Jerry) Cohen died of a stroke early on the morning of August 5. Poignantly, an advance copy of his newest publication, the pocketbook Why Not Socialism?, reached his office only a few hours later. Though he never saw it finished, he’d been delighted with its progress and especially with its cover, which shows the red rose of socialism rising up from the “Y” of the title’s “WHY.” It’s a fittingly positive image for an optimistic, or at least sunnily determined, work. Despite the very real obstacles in socialism’s way, Cohen writes: “I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.” It’s also a suitably uplifting image for Cohen himself.

Cohen was born in Montreal in 1941 to Jewish parents who worked in the rag trade, and was raised and initially educated in a staunchly communist environment. He always held fast to the egalitarian ideals of his childhood. Over his long academic career, mainly at University College London and Oxford, he became one of the world’s leading philosophical explorers and exponents of socialist ideas. Along with Jon Elster, he pioneered the application of analytical (he called them “no-bullshit”) methods to Marxism. And he produced penetrating analyses of the concepts of equality and justice that underlie socialism, and what they require of us if we care about them. With many articles and five books—most notably Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence and 2008’s Rescuing Justice and Equality—he became a giant of political philosophy, a thinker to stand alongside Rawls, Nozick, and Dworkin, with whose views he deeply and publicly disagreed.

He never wavered in his core convictions, but he did at least slow down in his academic life. In his final year, his only year of retirement, he said that he had done almost all that he wished to do, that he had few new ideas to work on and looked forward to a new phase of life, harvesting. At his valedictory lecture, he said that the line from Tennyson that he recited to himself almost weekly—“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—lately sounded better to him rewritten as: “To strive, to seek, to find, and then to yield.”

Obituaries (links below) make his place in the canon of political philosophy clear. They also make plain what an extraordinary man he was, crackling not just with intelligence, but a dazzling, almost superhuman wit that, mischievous as it could be, was cotton-padded by his exceptional personal warmth. He was a professional philosopher, but he could have been a professional comic, and was renowned for his regular stand-up routines in Oxford and for the entertainment that peppered his lectures. Two links below convey his combination of brilliance and zaniness (one is hard to hear, but it’s worth persevering, especially for his 10-minute imitation of a lecture by Isaiah Berlin).

He published two books with Princeton, Karl Marx’s Theory of History and Why Not Socialism? We’re lucky to have them on the lists. Those of us who worked with him are even luckier to have known him.

Obituaries:
The Times
The Guardian
The Independent
The Montreal Gazette
Crooked Timber
Crooked Timber

Jerry Cohen in action:
Jerry Cohen’s closing comments at a conference held earlier this year–Rescuing Justice and Equality: Celebrating the Career of G.A. Cohen
Jerry Cohen’s retirement speech in 2008

Additional links of interest:
Simon Tormey interviews Jerry Cohen for Contemporary Political Theory
Nicholas Vrousalis offers a “a rough summary of Jerry Cohen’s intellectual voyage”

(9/2/09 - we corrected the number of books in the piece above per the comment below)

We’ve finally jumped on the bandwagon and you can now become a fan of Princeton University Press via your facebook account. Search for our page there and fan us to receive notices of new blog posts, sales, PUP news.

Over at Foreign Policy, Dan Drezner recently posted his favorites for the short list of the International Studies Best Book of the Decade Award. His top five included three Princeton titles: A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark; Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity by Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales; and After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars by G. John Ikenberry.

You can see his entire list here. Which Princeton titles would make your top five?

Judging for the 2009 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show took place January 22-23 at the AAUP Central Office in New York City. Approximately 289 books, 292 jacket and cover design entries, and 7 journals were entered. From this pool of excellent design, the jurors chose 53 books, 1 journal, and 36 jackets/covers as the very best examples. We are proud to announce that four Princeton University Press titles were among these winners. We salute our stellar design team (and special thanks to Jason Alejandro for providing these beautiful photographs to showcase their collective talents).

Princeton University Press had four AAUP Selected  Entries:

SCHOLARLY  TYPOGRAPHIC
Shakespeare by Johann Gottfried Herder
(Translated, Edited, and with an introduction by Gregory  Moore)
Designer: Pamela Schnitter
Production Coordinator: Betsy  Litz

[Show as slideshow]

TRADE TYPOGRAPHIC
Privacy: A Manifesto by Wolfgang  Sofsky
Designer: Pamela Schnitter
Production Coordinator: Sharyn  Zasada

[Show as slideshow]

JACKETS  AND COVERS
A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and  Presidential Government by Sean McCann
Designer/Art Director:  Marcella Roberts
Production Coordinator: Sharyn  Zasada

[Show as slideshow]

Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned  Candy to Counterfeit Coffee by Bee Wilson
Designer/Art Director:  Lorraine Betz Doneker
Production Coordinator: Sharyn  Zasada

[Show as slideshow]

For more information visit the AAUP Web site.

Sharon Begley has a terrific piece on Newsweek.com about the just-published THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME 12, The Berlin Years: Correspondence: January-December 1921, edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, József Illy & Virginia Iris Holmes, and the Einstein Papers Project.  You can read this piece here.

Albert Einstein’s exploding global fame and budding Zionism came together in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps will never again, such a scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.

Princeton University Press, as volume 12 in its Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, is publishing his correspondence for this amazing and critical year of his life. It includes the full text of 169 letters he wrote this year along with 180 that he received. Also included is a detailed calendar of his year that draws on information from hundreds of other documents. All told, the volume presents an exquisite and rich tapestry of Einstein’s initial involvement with the Zionist movement and with the United States, which 12 years later would become his home.

Our complete Fall 2009 catalog is now available online as a PDF or through a series of web pages.

In the Letter from the Director for this catalog, Peter Dougherty writes:

A great editor once said that good publishing is always about something. At Princeton, what we’re about is meeting the challenge of creating a list with a singular personality, while drawing books from fields as different and divergent as applied mathematics, classics, natural history, and financial economics. We seek to publish a list that, as John Henry Newman described the work of education, “takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole.” We believe our Fall 2009 list meets this challenge with a special flair.

Princeton books have long been distinguished by intellectual originality and thrust, and nowhere on our fall list is this trait better displayed than in Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion after Idolatry or Avishai Margalit’s On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, or—from a wholly different part of the scholarly forest—Peter Paret’s The Cognitive Challenge of War: Prussia 1806.

Princeton books also frequently speak to several different audiences at once, both by bridging separate disciplines and through the kind of writing that makes the best scholarship accessible to general readers. In this catalog, Adrienne Mayor’s The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy offers an exciting story for readers interested in ancient history while also providing intellectual grist for scholars and students of classics and history of science. Similarly, Carlos Eire’s A Very Brief History of Eternity will engage not only readers interested in history and religion, but also philosophers and sociologists, and their students.

Finally, we are especially proud to publish titles that are both timely and timeless. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly will find readers among today’s banking and policy professionals as well as among economists and historians for a long time to come.