Rice University Press Catalog

Craig Saper, ed., Words (2009). In January 1931, Bob Brown worked with Nancy Cunard's Hours Press to publish Words—two sets of poems printed in a single volume. The book was subtitled "I but bend my finger in a beckon and words, birds of words, hop on it, chirping." One set of poems was printed in 16-point Caslon Old Face, a classic font style used in all Hours Press publications. The other was relief-printed from engraved plates at less than 3-point size (perhaps, according to Cunard, less than 1-point). Because the subtitle was also printed in the microscopic text, archives, libraries, and bibliographies often mistakenly omit it.

Although Brown was, for Cunard, "at the very center of his time, a zeitgeist in himself," they printed only 150 copies, and the book passed into relative obscurity. It is generally mentioned only as a footnote in discussions of Cunard's life or in reference to Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, Brown’s better-known anthology of experimental texts by modernist writers, including Cunard herself. Over time, this experiment in blurring the distinction between text on the one hand and its design and presentation on the other has become a major prophetic work. Noted Brown scholar Craig Saper brings Words back to light, with a thorough explication of its meaning and role in literary history.

Walter M. Widrig, The Via Gabina Villas: Sites 10, 11, and 13 (2009). A detailed accounting, abundantly illustrated, of the first project in history to uncover twelve centuries of life at a single site, The Via Gabina Villas sheds new light on the soul of ancient Rome. For centuries, this vital record lay hidden and unknown in the unexcavated remains of villas buried beneath the outskirts of the city. Beginning in 1976 and working carefully for fourteen years, Walter Widrig and Philip Oliver-Smith excavated three villa sites fourteen kilometers east of Rome along the ancient Via Gabina. Their work revealed twelve centuries of economic and social change in the Roman campagna and thus provides important new perspectives on Roman history.

Craig Saper, ed., The Readies (2009). Before there was Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, there was Bob Brown. Back in 1930, Brown foresaw the day when reading would be done on devices that brought with them a tendency to smash and recombine language into a kind of grotesque shorthand. With one foot in the avant-garde camp of Marcel Duchamp, Kay Boyle, F. W. Marinetti, and Gertrude Stein, and one foot in the more practical efforts to invent new forms of book storage and retrieval, Brown exerted a considerable influence on some of the most important literary and artistic figures of his time. The Readies—a parodic, playful announcement of Brown’s imagined invention of a new reading machine that would require writers and readers to reduce language to “smashum” words and to eschew use of bulky adverbs, adjectives, and countless other unnecessary words in the new age of streamlined communication—now stands as one of the most remarkable examples of accidental prophecy in the history of literature. Rice University Press is bringing The Readies back to light as part of its Literature by Design series, with a fascinating Afterword by Craig Saper, one of the world’s leading scholars on texts and technology.

Jerome McGann, ed., The Black Riders and other lines (2009). The 1895 publication of Stephen Crane's The Black Riders and other lines was a milestone event in the history of American letters. Crane's was the first American book to be printed with a clear Modernist design — a look devised with the conscious intention to echo the sense of his text.

Rice University Press is bringing Crane's breakthrough volume back to life in this new facsimile edition, part of our Literature by Design series, with an enlightening Afterword by the noted scholar Jerome McGann. Dr. McGann carefully explicates both the poetry and its presentation, leading the reader through an interpretation of the work that is also an interpretation of the pages themselves, along with a thorough account of the state and motion of the publishing industry in 1890s America.

Nancy Allen, Art Museum Images in Scholarly Publishing (2009). Suggesting that "perhaps the time is right for museums to consider changing their licensing policies," noted librarian and art historian Nancy Allen presents a rigorously researched history of art museum policies regarding published reproductions of images in their collections. As Allen makes clear, museum policies have not adjusted to the realities of the electronic age. With digitization drastically reducing the cost of high-quality reproduction, and with museums facing a series of court decisions taking away their right to copyright reproductions of original art, it is clear that traditional licensing practices need to be updated in order to function appropriately in a digital world. Allen lays out a convincing argument for the loosening of institutional restrictions, particularly for scholarly publishers.
ISBN: 978-0-89263-021-9

Johanna Drucker, ed., Le Petit Journal des Refusées (2009). In the late nineteenth century, when the San Francisco artist and writer Frank Gelett Burgess published this one-of-a-kind sixteen-page pamphlet, printed on wallpaper, trimmed to a trapezoidal shape, and full of parodic referenes, he was making a critical argument about cultural networks and industries as well as creating an original and unique piece of humor. Purporting to be a publication consisting of works rejected by at least three other journals, Le Petit Journal des Refusées was really the work of Burgess and a few of his friends. This entertaining pamphlet would provide only passing interest if it were not for the remarkable degree of self-consciousness with which it exposed the social nature of aesthetic production. Le Petit Journal stands now as an engaging and thought-provoking artifact of late nineteenth-century international cosmopolitan culture. Noted scholar Johanna Drucker brings Le Petit Journal back to light in this new facsimile edition, brilliantly explicated by her Afterword detailing the intellectual ferment of the time. This is the first volume in the new Rice University Press series, Literature by Design: British and American Books 1880-1930. Books in this series foreground the vehicle of the book and the visible nature of language itself. Literature by Design titles incorporate facsimile reproductions of the original editions — all of which are noteworthy for the role design and typography played in shaping readers' responses — along with new critical material by leading contemporary scholars.

Marcia Brennan, Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson (2009). For years, the work of Elliot Wolfson (one of the world’s leading scholars of Jewish mysticism) has been taking the form of poetry and painting, and he has composed a compelling, mysterious body of such work that calls not only for serious treatment by critics and scholars, but also for new critical genres. With Flowering Light, Marcia Brennan takes just such a bold, imaginative step. The first to examine Wolfson’s scholarship, poetry, and painting as a single, integrated body of work, Brennan also effectively invents a new form of scholarship. Flowering Light is at once a critical work—an explication of the scholarly, painted, and poetic works of Wolfson—and a mystifying, mystical work of art in its own right: “a work of conceptual art,” in the author’s own words, “that resonates with the capacity of mystical envisioning to create imaginative worlds.”

Stephen A. Fredericks, The New York Etching Club Minutes: November 12, 1877 through December 8, 1893 (2009). The last half of the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous artistic ferment in New York. By the end of the century, the city had emerged as one of the great arts centers in the world. Artists of the time were constantly forming collaborative organizations to help them promote their work and to learn how to use the endless new technologies that were emerging at the time. One of the foremost groups of the 1880s was the New York Etching Club, which included among its members some of the foremost painters of the day. Meeting monthly, the group explored the newfound art of etching, producing over a span of some twenty years an impressive array of etchings, and helping develop and define the art of artist printmaking. In The New York Etching Club Minutes, New York artist printmaker Stephen A. Fredericks has reproduced the club's minutes, augmenting them with reproductions of the club members' etchings and abundant annotations—the result of his ten years of research into the New York Etching Club. The result, in the words of New York Public Library Curator of Prints Emerita Roberta Waddell, is "an enlightening study of a largely unsung chapter in nineteenth-century American art history."

I. J. Good, The Good Book: Thirty Years of Comments, Conjectures, and Conclusions (2008). As a child, I.J. Good was a mathematical prodigy; during World War II, he was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park; after the war, he helped lay the intellectual foundation for modern Bayesian statistics. Although his scientific reputation rests on his significant contributions to contingency table analysis, hierarchical modeling, and density estimation, Jack Good’s friends also relish his lighter publications. For more than twenty-five years, he produced an obscure series of columns for the Journal of Statistical Computing and Simulation. This book reprints the first 142 of those. Some are startling, some are recondite, and some will make the reader laugh. Together, they provide a three-dimensional view of one of the most influential minds in twentieth-century statistics.

Herbert L. Fred, MD, MACP, and Hendrik A. van Dijk, Images of Memorable Cases: 50 Years at the Bedside (2007). Widely praised for its unequalled collection of medical images, this book is an indispensable resource for medical professionals and students. Dr. Fred, one of the world's foremost medical educators, presents 154 cases, challenging the reader to make his or her own diagnosis before turning the page to see the actual diagnosis. Images of Memorable Cases has been called "wonderful," "marvelous," "splendid," "beautifully illustrated," and "truly a collector's item" by reviewers. "Medical writers would greatly benefit from having this well-written, exciting book in their medical libraries," says the American Medical Writers Association Journal.

Kevin Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit's Long Struggle for Survival (2008). Mr. Guthrie's exhaustive history is an object lesson in nonprofit governance. Covering everything from budgeting to archival practices, and replete with charts and graphs illustrating investment performance, endowment value, operating budgets, and all manner of nonprofit financial management, The New-York Historical Society tells a riveting story of one nonprofit's life on the edge, while offering invaluable instruction on nonprofit management in general. New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc praises Guthrie's book as "compelling reading. With exceptional lucidity, he tells the complicated history of an important cultural institution, and draws conclusions that will be important for all of us responsible for managing the affairs of our nation's private libraries and museums."

Sarah C. Reynolds, Houston Reflections: Art in the City, 1950s, 60s, and 70s (2008). A collection of thirty-eight interviews with artists and other figures who were instrumental in growing the Houston arts scene from its nascent beginnings to its present-day vitality, Houston Reflections is an important source of information for anyone interested in this city's arts during the thirty years covered in this volume. Alison de Lima Greene, Curator of Contemporary Art & Special Projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, calls the book "an indelible record of this dynamic era...a brilliant archival project that will be a resource for generations to come."

Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann, Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age (2006). A lucid analysis of the daunting problems besetting those writing and trying to publish Art History books in a world where tools both for delivery and for reading are increasingly digital.