the minnesota review n.s. 48-49 (1998)

Jeffrey J. Williams

Editorial Instinct: An Interview with William P. Germano

William Germano joined Routledge in 1985, overseeing the inception and growth of its New York office; he is currently Vice President and Publishing Director. Previously he was editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press.

Jeffrey Williams: It seems to me that publishing is one of the major institutional channels or mediations of whatever it is that we do in the humanities, cultural studies, theory, and so on. The first thing I want to ask about is what you see as the institutional role of the editor. Frequently editors are seen as carrying out a service function-in effect, as a kind of servant. I find this a mystified if not snobbish view, and would say that editors are very much intellectual producers. What do you see as the role of an editor?

William P. Germano: In terms of the academy, it would be very difficult to argue that one of our functions is not a service function. But along with that comes a lot of power. We have the happy, onerous responsibility of searching for and selecting the "best available work" in the fields in which we're publishing. I can only speak for myself, but I think there's as much pleasure involved in being part of conversations about ideas as there is in writing, at least for those of us who have continued in this mad line of work. If the books come out, and the books are good, and the books are used, and they help people think and teach, that's wonderful. But I'm more than a little skeptical of seeing it written into some larger project.

Williams: What are some ways that you can foster or catalyze conversation?

Germano: Always trying to find out what people are really interested in as opposed to what they may be writing. It's particularly difficult for people at the beginning of their careers, when for various, perfectly understandable reasons of self-preservation they may wish to pursue a project that's very limited and which will make a legitimate contribution to scholarly research, but which will not travel very far. Working in a house such as this, I have an enormous latitude in saying to people, "Yes, but what are you really interested in?" And that's a question I'd like to get to as quickly as possible once I feel that there's the opportunity, or this is a person who I think might be right for a project he or she may not even have thought about yet. I think one of the things that we can do at Routledge is give people permission, although I don't know whether all publishing houses see it that way. Part of what I do is validate people's enthusiasms.

You might be working on a project which your department doesn't really give you much positive feedback on. You might be at a place where it's not really possible to find colleagues who are excited about what you are excited about, and it might be just one step out of line with your discipline. It could be work by a person who's re-thinking the history of his or her discipline. Maybe someone's brought gender theory into an area of the social sciences where it may not have been developed or given much play. We're able to say, "You're really excited about this, and we can see that there's a market for it. Why don't you take the book in this direction?" Or, "The first half of this proposal is wonderful, but the rest doesn't interest you so how can it interest anyone else?" Or it could be someone whose writing may fall in one vein, but always wanted to do a book on something else. If it's outside of your discipline, it's very tough to get permission from disciplinary structures. You could find someone who has just joined a department of anthropology and who wants to write a book on musicals, and it turns out to be full of information and enthusiasm and ideas, and he or she can write like a dream. It might be very hard to find a structure within an institution that would validate that enthusiasm.

Williams: It's not just the departments that people work in but the way that publishing is construed, no? So, as a commercial publisher, that is one thing Routledge has over standard university presses?

Germano: It's one difference.

Williams: Just to go over some of the nuts and bolts of publishing, how do you actually come upon something? Do you meet people at conferences? Do have things referred to you?

Germano: Massive amounts of material comes in the mail here. But I rely just as much on meeting people, hearing people, hearing about people. Word of mouth is extremely important. The journals can be useful. There's that felicitous moment where you've picked up an article by someone you haven't heard of, and then the next week have her name mentioned to you as this brilliant new person, a new assistant professor in x teaching at y university, and you get on the phone and discover she's working on a project and hasn't got very far, and you have an opportunity to talk to her early. That's a lot of fun. As a publisher, I am continuously grateful to the people we have published and who will recommend people to us.

Williams: How many things do you see every week, or how many things come in?

Germano: I've stopped counting! You'd have to include not only inquiries from scholars but from nonacademics as well, then agents, then other publishers seeking to license rights in North America. Let's say a thousand projects?

Williams: And how many of those do you do?

Germano: Maybe forty.

Williams: I can envision people immediately responding that the institution is closed off, that it's a system of institutional connections and privilege that begets connections and privilege. On the other hand, it's only natural that you listen to the people you know, and that you can only deal with a certain number of people in a year.

Germano: I certainly like to work with authors who want to work with me a second time, but every list has a lot of "new faces." One tries very hard to be as open as possible, and I think we are. We do get inquiries from people at small places as well as big places and places with a lot of money and without a lot of money. We also publish work, occasionally, by scholars or non-scholars outside of the academy, particularly in our theater list. I do a very practical list in theater, and it doesn't have any academic requirement. I'm doing a book with a stand-up comic next spring, Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy by Jay Sankey, and I think it's a great book for our theater list, and it just came in the mail. The author isn't an academic, though I think what he has to say would also be useful to academics.

Williams: I know your list fairly well, and you do publish a range of things, even in a sense forging publishing fields of cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, and so on. Do you see that as part of your charge as an editor? On the other hand, it's very much a market-based system, no? How does that affect your list?

Germano: My range isn't a charge, it's an opportunity. I also have a lot of enthusiasms. I'm not sure I can get very far into this question, but it's my job to pick up the best work that I can possibly get my hands on and get it out there as well as I can. And that's the banal essence of what I do for a living. In order to reach that goal, I want to keep myself as open as possible to all sorts of inquiries from all sorts of folks. A great idea can be any place: it can be at the most remote campus of a state university as well as at one of the major research institutions. The question is: is it shaped right to reach markets? There have to be readerships for a book, whatever kind of book it is. We don't just publish ideas, we publish sellable presentations of ideas.

Williams: Do you deal largely with the humanities list?

Germano: Routledge is a land of many fiefdoms, and the group I run is responsible for literary and cultural studies, anthropology, religion, philosophy, theater, classics, and film. And, as you know, feminist work, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and studies on race are being produced and investigated in all disciplines. People who work here or in our London office may generate work in those areas and disciplines. My UK colleagues Talia Rodgers and Rebecca Barden publish a lot of what you see on the Routledge humanities list. Then as now, the bulk of our books come from the UK and UK authors. If they weren't there, we couldn't do this.

Williams: I'm curious to press you on the question of what you call the best ideas. We've mentioned some of the things you look for, but can you give more of a sense of your criteria?

Germano: I usually urge people to resist all generalizations about publishing, including this one. There are any number of hunting-gathering metaphors that might be appropriate. I'd use the metaphor of a truffle hound; you want to have some sort of organic instinct about projects. I suspect what we mean by instinct is good taste, a lot of experience, enough work on market research so that you've internalized certain basic principles, an enthusiasm for learning about the fields and learning about what people need, all of which results in some ease of decision-making. If you've learned how to do it, and you have some facility, then you'll be able to look at a project and not break out in a cold sweat, saying, "What do I do with it?" You either make the decision that you want to pursue it, or you make the decision that, for any number of reasons, you don't feel you'll be able to carry it through to contract and successful publication. And that may mean that you will turn down many good books. I believe firmly that you've got to turn down many good books in order to work well. If you did everything that was nearly good, you would lose sight of the fact that you have a lot of different obligations, and one of them is to make sure that you produce very good books that are also able to sustain their costs. Whether you're a not-for-profit publisher or for-profit publisher, it's the same basic principle. There are no for-loss publishers.

Williams: One editor I know prefers the more neutral term "readership" to market.

Germano: "Readerships" are there, but markets are also there. I think "market" is important because you're not simply talking about the end reader-the person sitting in the metaphorical leather chair with the metaphorical pipe. If you're going to be producing books that you want to have in very un-metaphorical bookstores, you need to think about bookstores as part of this series of hurdles you need to pass before your book ever falls in the hands of your friend, your semblable, that reader who is the one you want to reach.

Williams: What's your take on the general changes now besetting publishing? Some people think academic publishing is in crisis, or less apocalyptically it's going through significant change, and part of that change is increased market pressure. That's a change that, by all reports, has certainly affected Routledge with pressure for a higher profit margin. Do you think this is accurate and do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? What do you see ahead for publishing? Is publishing being reconfigured or is it business as usual?

Germano: First let me say that Routledge is in fine shape. But then I'm not sure which of those twenty questions I should try to answer.

Williams: Sorry, that's a bad habit of mine. How would you assess the changes in academic publishing?

Germano: Well, I think the changes are describable under a number of headings. With the tremendous opportunity of electronics, everyone wants to take the earliest opportunity to exploit the net, and many people are putting their toe, sometimes a whole foot, in the water. As an industry we share an intense anxiety about electronic publishing. Then there's the changing constellation of bookstores. Retail outlets exert pressure upon the small stores, and the decline of a number of extremely important independents affects particularly the areas of women's studies and gay studies, among others. The ascendancy of the chains-Borders and Barnes and Noble-they are immensely important. I think it would be sobering indeed to interview the head of Barnes and Noble and inquire what he sees as his role in the dissemination of intellectual material. I think we're also faced with the fact that we all publish too many books, there isn't enough space to house them in libraries nor do libraries have the budgets to buy them, people don't have the time to read them, and there is the suspicion that a great many books get published merely because scholars are told they have to publish books in order to be tenured and to be promoted. I think those are the open secrets.

How else are things changing? I'm really much less struck by the micro-changes of which editor's at which house and which house has a larger list than it did last year because, in the grand scheme of things, it's really not very important to how publishing is changing. The university presses and we, along with Beacon and a number of commercial houses that remain deeply committed to intellectual publishing, have a remarkable commonality of interest. The larger issues are the retail outlets, electronic publishing, and simply the amount of time people have. Do you have a lot of time to read?

Williams: I hate to confess this but I rarely read books through anymore. I mean, I read a tremendous amount of material, but I read a lot of introductions and an odd chapter, rarely a book through.

Germano: Confession time. I was recently asked at a conference how many pages a week I read, and I found myself admitting that depends what you mean by "read." Probably thousands of pages, much of it with enormous speed and superficiality as I'm determining whether a manuscript is or is not worth my spending more time on. Reading a printed book published by someone else is a rare pleasure now.

Williams: Given the shift in publishing and what I know of various sales figures, a whole bunch of books fall out-say, books that might sell five hundred to fifteen hundred copies. I have to wonder if this particularly affects books that represent oppositional or leftist work, though left books have a market too. Now there's pressure even on university presses for their books to sell two thousand or twenty-five hundred copies, which is much higher than it had been before. Is this a bad thing or an inevitable thing? and do you think that it governs the topics that are being published?

Germano: I think you've got about six questions in that one-you're improving. It certainly affects books with no political agenda whatsoever. Try to publish a book-length essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins these days. Seamus Heaney could, but who else? The literature market is a sadder place than the market for progressive social thought.

Do people buy for pleasure or only for need? Economic pressures make it less and less possible to do a marginal book, the kind of book which is perfectly intelligent, perfectly well done, but it just lacks big authority, doesn't command its subject or it doesn't have pizzazz, or it doesn't have new facts. I'm trying to avoid the word theory because that holds some history. With pizzazz you might do something that someone else has done or many people have done, but maybe it will be so beautifully written that an editor will cry out, "Why can't more professors write this way?" I've published many books that I thought were just beautifully written, and they just grabbed me because they were so nicely written. What this doesn't guarantee is that a book will sell. Among the false generalizations: the well-written book will sell; the book written entirely in disciplinary gobbledy-gook will sell; books that are written as simply as possible will sell because they reach a large audience. There aren't any comforting truths about what will guarantee that a book is going to sell. As far as things that drop out, there's the marginal and there's the mediocre book. Many books are just someplace in the middle. The stores are flooded with such books and the market responds by saying, we only want or are willing to buy the best book on whatever it might be.

You have to give people either what they need or what they will enjoy reading, and some books will be both. But you have to watch disciplines to find out which ones are growing and which ones are declining because there would be some sort of limit to the number of people you can get to. If the field has dried up, you simply can't through force of will and the availability of interesting projects in that area make the field a publishing success.

Williams: There's an assumption that academic publishers are now striving for a general readership, but that's actually a misnomer. It's for the most part an academic readership, but it's an interdisciplinary academic readership. In other words, not just people in English for a lit-crit book, but people in anthropology, history and so on, because there aren't that many people who walk into Barnes and Noble off the so-called street and buy Page duBois' Torture and Truth, which you've published.

Germano: I think that it's the slippage, the messiness of academic disciplines that is part of the opportunity and anxiety of publishing at the moment. Interdisciplinarity is a word that gets used a lot. I don't think it's an unalloyed good, but I certainly think it provides tremendous opportunities to rethink what disciplines may be about. You go to the MLA, as you well know, and find many more people engaged in projects in which literature is a minority component than people who are writing books exclusively in the confines of the Republic of Norton. That's a nice place to live, I suppose, but I don't see a lot of people writing books just on, say, Joseph Conrad. Most people I know would rather reread Joseph Conrad than read a book about Joseph Conrad.

Williams: I'm going to shift gears a bit. I'm curious about your background. Many editors I know have Ph.D.s in Lit, as you do, so could you say something about that?

Germano: I think it's entirely a generational thing. There are a bunch of editors and press directors who have been around for a while, among them my friends Bill Sisler and Lindsay Waters at Harvard and Bill Regier [recently appointed director at Illinois], who all have Ph.D.s in either English or Comp Lit. I think it's generational because we got into this line of work at a moment when the academic job market was particularly appalling and this seemed to be what some people, in all innocence, imagined they could do as an alternative career. I don't think a Ph.D. is an important thing to have for the purposes of being a publisher in scholarly work, but then again I may have the wrong vantage point from which to make that judgment.

Williams: When I worked at Routledge in 89-90, four of the editors had Ph.D.s, I think one in philosophy, and three in lit.

Germano: Let me see, one in philosophy, two in lit, and one, I think, in bio-chemistry. I think it's just a kind of historical accident. We get amazingly good people to apply.

Williams: Where do they come from?

Germano: Sometimes they come from other publishing houses, sometimes they're fresh out of college, sometimes they come from large schools, sometimes small schools, but I'm amazed at how good they are. Not only that, but they're a wonderful way of connecting with the zeitgeist. If I want to know what twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three year olds might think about an author or a subject, I can ask them. It's not the only basis for decisions, of course!

Williams: They're largely trained in lit, humanities, cultural studies . . .

Germano: Working with me, yes. We probably get a lot of people who are trained in the humanities or what I think of as the most humane of the social sciences, i.e., not people whose first love is quantitative analysis. We also get people who come for a very specific reason. We've had people who have come because of feminist philosophy. We've certainly had a lot of people come because of gay and lesbian studies, or gender studies in general. Sometimes I've had to explain to an eager job candidate that working at Routledge doesn't mean daily phone chats with Donna Haraway. But if you get it right, you create a certain kind of community.

Williams: I don't know if everybody realizes that there are so many young people in publishing, by and large.

Germano: I think it can be a shock for people who've never been in a publishing house to see how young the staff is.

Williams: Just one more thing about background. I'm interested in the idea of career and how people fashion their careers. You started working in publishing while finishing your Ph.D. at Indiana when?

Germano: I left Indiana in 78 and I got my Ph.D. in 80, but I was working at Columbia from 78 on.

Williams: You started as an editorial assistant at Columbia?

Germano: I worked on a Social Work directory. I did some work as a line editor, as sort of a copy editor in-house. I worked on some reference projects and I began negotiating paperback rights from other houses, and then I began working with the humanities list there.

Williams: You eventually became editor-in-chief?

Germano: Yes, in the early 80s. I left to come to Routledge in 86. I'm not quite sure about fashioning careers. Are they fashioned or do they happen?

Williams: Well, there are institutional channels that fashion our careers. I think in publishing there are certain distinct steps that get you absorbed into what Bourdieu calls a legitimating body.

Germano: At least you didn't say divinities that shape our ends.

Williams: At Columbia, what kind of books did you work on?

Germano: A big range of humanities books, including feminist studies and theory.

Williams: What was your Ph.D. in?

Germano: English. I worked in early seventeenth-century literature.

Williams: Were you interested in theory when you were in grad school?

Germano: Not until I was in publishing. I wasn't a theoryhead at all. I remember meeting some other graduate students when I was at the press, and we began talking about things that should be read. I was not involved in a heavily theoretical program when I was in graduate school, so being off-campus and working in New York was a chance to read a lot.

Williams: A few more questions. Some people characterize Routledge with all the bad words associated with fashion-that it's trendy, its books are on whatever the latest thing is, implying that they're not serious, they're not good academic books. On the other hand, there are a lot of people I know, roughly in my academic generation, who, if you look at their shelves, have a lot of Routledge books, probably more than any other publisher, especially in cultural studies. How would you characterize Routledge, and how would you respond to the detractions?

Germano: Well, I think that when people decide that they want to be shocked and appalled, they fix upon non-traditional material. As an example, I think Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests is a brilliant book. If one wishes to find crossdressing unsavory, then one may wish to avert one's eyes. And that's a reader's choice, but I think that there's an enormous market for brilliantly done work in cultural studies. I also think that, beyond the work of scholars I very much admire on our cultural studies list, Routledge also produces a tremendous array of what might be called traditional scholarship, although I don't think the distinction between traditional scholarship and "cutting edge" or advanced or new scholarship should be pressed as inexorably as it often is. We have a great list in philosophy, in religious studies, in political science, in sociology, in economics. I'm constantly amazed at how big our list is.

Williams: I'm curious to know what you see on the horizon. I guess I'm asking you to divine the future, but one does that in publishing-a book that you sign tomorrow might not come out for three or four years. What kind of projects would you like to do?

Germano: Ah, the wish list. The pressures of the market, the pressures of people's reading time, the pressures of the competition for attention with electronic dissemination. . . . I'm hoping that we'll see shorter books, better written books, books written from the heart, that people feel, "Oh I've got to write this book." Less work that has to be done merely because "if I don't get another manuscript out for publication by next June, I can't be promoted to step four." I'd love to see our best minds writing more books for less advanced people, people who are at the top of their fields doing more for lower readerships because they know so much. I don't mean dumbed-down books, nor is this some sort of coded message that Routledge is not interested in longer works. We're doing many big books next year. But, that said, I think that the unit of reading time is getting shorter and shorter, and I am very open to short manuscripts. I also think more synthetic work, work that tries to take bites off bigger patches of fields and write new histories of human experience.

Williams: Are there any topics or sub-fields that you see as particularly promising? that you'd really like to see a book in? What do you see as the next move or change?

Germano: I don't know what the next move is, or whether there is a next big thing on the horizon right now. All I can tell you is I hope I'll know it when it hits my desk. I'm interested in all sorts of things. In my areas, I'd love to see more good work on twentieth-century American experience, social experience, material culture, work with its feet in history, work using anthropology. I wish we could get more people who are wonderful in anthropology or wonderful in cultural studies or religion to think about writing outside of their field. But if they want their books to be reviewed, they need to work on their writing, really, really hard. I think that's one of the things tough to get.

Williams: Twentieth-century American experience?

Germano: Yeah, I'm very interested in the experience of families, of the lives of children, although it doesn't mean anything if I'm interested in it if the books don't sell. Questions about religion or belief: I would love to see more people engaging those questions from every disciplinary perspective or intellectual armature. Visual studies, the interface of science and its interlocutors in science studies. I'm tremendously interested in music; a list on opera I'd do in a minute. Popular music as well, and popular music's relation to culture and identity, and, if we can use the word, pleasure. Books on big questions, books on love. We always need books on things that are important to people's lives. I'm sure there's more money in cat calendars, but this is more important.

[This interview took place on 28 August 1997 in Bill Germano's New York office. It was conducted and transcribed by Jeffrey Williams]