We are extremely pleased and thrilled to see our collaboration with the esteemed international news and commentary provider Project Syndicate and our new book THE PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE WORLD ECONOMY go live on their website.  They bring some of the world’s most distinguished voices to a global community that includes 431 leading newspapers in 150 countries. 

Together with the great folks at Project Syndicate, we’ve created a “Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy ” feature that appears on their homepage.  Click on the Wiki to find out the answer to the word of the day–or Terms of Trade!

I know. It sounds like a set up for a bad joke, but the answer is they are both proud owners of The China Diary of George H. W. Bush.

The Examiner site reports that Yao Ming twittered about receiving a gift from former President George H. W. Bush–a copy of his 2008 book. The book is a day-by-day account of President Bush’s time in China as head of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing . The entries from 1974 and 1975 capture the culture (biking around Beijing) and the political conflicts (most famously with Henry Kissinger) of the era.

An interesting series of comments on the cover design for This Time Is Different by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff over at the Book Design review. What does the cover suggest to you?

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.