The Purpose and the Cost, 5/2/99 (original) (raw)
Why the Oxford University Press must concentrate on the things it does best
The Times Literary Supplement Commentary article by Keith Thomas, 5th February 1999
click for full-size scan
This was the defence of Oxford's shameful poetry-axing eventually forced out of OUP Finance Committee chairman Sir Keith Thomas. Arguably it should be 'Exhibit A' in the event of any proper hearing (by a court, say, or by the Charity or Inland Revenue Commissioners) to review OUP's tax-exemption. Copyright permission for AKME's reproduction of the article was granted by the TLS but refused by Thomas, on the grounds that "it is already in the public domain and easily available to all interested persons". Well, exactly. - A. M.
It is said that being published by the Oxford University Press is like being married to a duchess: the honour is greater than the pleasure. OUP is a cultural institution of enormous prestige and worldwide influence. It publishes a vast range of canonical literature and related reference works for readers of all ages and capacities. There can be few subscribers to the TLS who do not possess an Oxford book, or an Oxford Companion or some Oxford World's Classics. As guardian of The Oxford English Dictionary, the Press is effectively the custodian of the English language, which, as the leading publisher of English Language Teaching (ELT) courses, it disseminates throughout the world. OUP is a major school publisher, while the scale and quality of its scholarly publishing are unsurpassed. OUP USA is by far the largest university press in North America, just as OUP India is the subcontinent's leading academic publisher. The Press's local publishing programmes play a key educational role in many parts of the world.
It is OUP's very centrality to cultural life which has made its recent decision to give up commissioning contemporary poetry so unpopular. To some people, it is as if the National Gallery had announced that it proposed to stop buying pictures. There has been much correspondence in the press, a motion in the House of Commons and a discussion in the House of Lords. The TLS has suggested that the end of the poetry list is part of a larger story of general decline, claiming (NB, January 22) that the Delegates have decided to "phase out" the Clarendon Press and that, in an informal poll of academics, "few had a good word to say about OUP's editorial and production standards".
As the chairman of the OUP's Finance Committee, which, under the University's Statutes, has direction of the finance and management of the business, I share the responsibility for the recent decision on poetry. I believe that it was the right decision, not because I do not value contemporary poetry (as it happens, I buy and read a lot of it), but because I believe that it is not OUP who should be publishing it. There are limits to what a university press can and should do in the publishing circumstances of the late twentieth century; and those limits need to be more widely appreciated.
Like all British publishers, OUP is currently facing difficult trading conditions. Some of these difficulties stem from circumstances which may be relatively temporary: weak local currencies and falling demand in many parts of the world in which OUP does business, notably the Far East, Eastern Europe and Latin America; the Brazilian devaluation is just the latest in a long series of such developments. Other difficulties are here to stay. During the past few years, there has been a truly spectacular increase in the degree of consolidation in the world's publishing companies. In the last six months alone, Bertelsmann, the German media company, has acquired Random House (one of the leading trade publishers), Springer (the leading German publisher of scientific journals) and 50 per cent of barnesandnoble.com (the second largest on-line bookseller). In college publishing, the creation of Pearson Education, which merges Prentice Hall with Addison Wesley Longman, brings into existence a business with revenues in the US alone of $2.5 billion. In academic publishing, ELT, law and medicine, the same process of consolidation has taken place, while in trade publishing (the area into which poetry falls) the market is dominated by three players, Penguin, Random House/Transworld and HarperCollins, all of whom are owned by multinationals (respectively, Pearson, Bertelsmann and News International).
Thomas the Bank Engine: OUP photo, 1998
With a turnover of £280 million, OUP is at best no more than a medium-sized publisher, with the additional disadvantage of having its sales spread right across the world. The new publishing mega-businesses have almost every advantage in terms of economies of scale, access to investment, specialization in particular markets and influence with the retailers. OUP has to compete with HarperCollins in dictionaries; with Penguin in Worlds Classics and paperback reference; with vast science and legal publishers, like Reed Elsevier and International Thomson; and with medical publishers, like Harcourt General. At the other end of the publishing spectrum, there is competition from tiny firms who have the advantage of low overheads and extreme specialization. The cut-price policy of Wordsworth Classics, for example, has embarrassed Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics, both of whom charge more for a higher-quality product.
Meanwhile, the bookselling trade has also been falling into ever fewer hands: in the United States it is dominated by the superstores, while in the UK Waterstones have merged with Dillons, Menzies Retail has been taken over by W H Smith, and Books Etc by Borders. This consolidation of the retailers presents an even greater challenge to publishers like OUP, as these huge chains are able to extract a mounting rate of discount. In the Autumn 1998 number of The Author, Tim Hely Hutchinson, managing director of Hodder Headline, reports that, on average, UK trade discounts have risen by five percentage points in the past ten years. During the same period, OUP's discounts for UK trade paperbacks have increased by ten percentage points.
Academic publishing has become much more difficult than it was in the 1960s, when publishers pursued academic authors with their cheque-books, literary agents happily marketed PhD theses, and every commercial publisher had an academic side. In those days, a monograph could be expected to sell 1,000-1,500 copies. Today, it is doing well if its sales reach 500. (It is also much less likely to be reviewed in the TLS.) Dwindling library budgets are increasingly absorbed by journal subscriptions and mounting expenditure on IT, leaving less money for books. Worse paid than they used to be, academics are more heavily burdened with administration, and their domestic obligations take up more time. They have neither the money with which to buy many monographs, nor the leisure in which to read them. Increasingly, therefore, the commercial publishers have retreated from academic publishing.
University presses exist to publish high-quality academic work for which there is no other outlet. In North America, there are over one hundred such presses. Virtually all are subsidized by their parent universities. OUP by contrast, is not subsidized, but has transferred over £50 million to Oxford University during the past five years. American university presses often specialize in specific areas - for example, Yale in art history and MIT in cognitive science. OUP and CUP are unique among university presses in being both unsubsidized and active over virtually the whole range of academic disciplines. Whenever they appear to slacken in their commitment to a particular area of study, they can be sure that there will be an immediate chorus of protest from the constituency concerned.
OUP's primary objective is to disseminate learning by publishing academic works of the highest quality. At the same time, it has to make a reasonable financial return to its owner, while also reinvesting in the business in order to ensure its future growth. It is currently contributing no less than £5 million per annum to the costs of the editorial work involved in the preparation of the third edition of The Oxford English Dictionary and the New Dictionary of National Biography. These are the world's largest research projects in the humanities. No other publisher would even contemplate such a subvention, and OUP would not be in a position to make one, were it not for its profitable worldwide programme of educational and ELT publishing, and its careful management of the rest of the list.
It is in this context that the Press's role as a literary publisher and cultural institution should be understood. The Companions, Oxford Books, World's Classics and shorter dictionaries aim to be profitable ventures, which will help the Press to sustain its primary academic role. Of course, they are also cherished for their own sake. The Delegates want to disseminate literature and science to the widest possible reading public. But, in present-day circumstances, it is not easy for the Press to succeed in publishing non-specialized books at a high discount for the general market; and the case for such publishing has to be judged by results. That is why the Delegates, in their recent reorganization of trade publishing, have agreed not just to give up commissioning contemporary poetry, but also to add no more titles to the Popular Health series, OPUS Books, Oxford Archaeological Guides and Past Masters (as the now redundant general editor of the last-named series, I am naturally disappointed that there has been no move to defend it by the Bishop of Oxford or by Lord Baker of Dorking, who was interestingly described in the recent Lords debate as "perhaps the most distinguished anthologist in this House").
The Press's reductions in trade-book publishing have involved redundancies for five full-time and one part-time member of staff. This figure should be set against over 4.000 job losses which have occurred in the British publishing industry in the past two years. The leading poetry publisher, Faber, laid off thirty-four full-time staff and three part-time last August. Routledge has just been taken over by Taylor and Francis, and has made 100 people redundant. By the standards of ordinary commercial publishers, the Press is exceptionally loyal to its staff.
The Oxford poetry list is a relative newcomer to OUP's trade publishing. It began in the 1960s and it has never even faintly threatened Faber's primacy in this area. It has been losing money for years, even when its income for rights is taken into account; indeed, the meagreness of that rights income is a telling index of the relative lack of interest which the list has attracted. The sad truth is that much of the list's renown is posthumous, a product of the recent agitation. None of OUP's canonical twentieth-century poets, like Basil Bunting, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney and Keith Douglas, whose collected editions we shall continue to publish, should be numbered in this list, for Oxford was not their primary publisher.
In recent years, most commercial publishers have given up publishing new poetry. To ask OUP to continue this task is to invite it to subsidize creative writing, to behave as if it were an outlying department of the Arts Council, which disburses over £1 million annually for the support of poetry. Writing poetry is a valuable activity, but it is not an academic one and not part of OUP's primary purpose. We gladly publish scholarly editions or popular reprints of established poets, but it is not our task to engage in talent-spotting among the present generation. The OUP's only editor for contemporary poetry is part-time and freelance. No one else has any expertise in the area; and, because we do not publish fiction, drama, or other forms of new creative writing, we are ill-placed to market and sell poetry. It is not surprising that the Press's poets have complained for years about the marketing of their books, or that none of the many Oxford academics who write poetry publishes it with us. OUP could only market poetry effectively if it were to devote much larger resources to the task, at the expense of its other lists.
Our poets will therefore be better off with a publisher who specializes in their field. If it proves to be the case that the publication of contemporary poetry is not always economically feasible, that is a problem for those public bodies which exist to encourage arts and literature. It is not the responsibility of a university press like OUP, which has no shortage of other good causes to sustain in a difficult world. We are indirectly subsidizing Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford English Texts, Birds of the Western Palearctic, many series of Oxford monographs and similar learned publications.
It has been said that the amount of money saved by giving up contemporary poetry was too small to justify dropping the list. But, for a publisher like Oxford, contemporary poetry has a high opportunity cost, involving, as it does, diversion of managerial time, capital and marketing resources from our core activities. Giving up the contemporary poetry list, like giving up other parts of the trade list, is painful for OUP, but it is necessary both practically and symbolically. It means reasserting our strategic priorities and accepting that we cannot be good at everything. It is an earnest of Oxford's intention to concentrate on those parts of the business which are integral to its purpose, and to make them commercially successful. There will always be tension between financial and academic priorities. But it is certain that a reduction in the Press's commercial effectiveness would diminish its academic effectiveness as well. OUP has a responsibility, to its staff, its customers, its authors and its owners, to concentrate on what it can do best. One of the subjects it does well is contemporary music. OUP's music department has over twenty people who specialize in publishing and promoting the music repertoire, and theirs is a flourishing business: whereas the rights income from OUP's contemporary poetry list was between £3,000 and £6,000 a year, that from the contemporary music list is in hundreds of thousands.
What then of the TLS's other charges against OUP? It must be confessed that our authors are right to say that standards of production have dropped. Over the past thirty years, the production standards of every commercial publisher have visibly declined. Rising costs have meant that, like everyone else, OUP can no longer afford buckram bindings, thick cream paper and hot-metal typesetting. Oxford World's Classics nowadays are less attractive to some of us than the little blue hardbacks of the past which one can still find in the second-hand bookshops. Yet one has only to glance at Richard Jenkyns's Virgil's Experience or Joanna Selborne's British Wood-Engraved Book-Illustration, 1904-1940 to cite two recent titles at random, to see that OUP is still producing beautiful books. Oxford's editorial standards remain exceptionally high; and they are enforced by a legendary copy-editor who can read forty different languages. The Clarendon Press imprint will indeed be less frequently employed, as the international business moves towards a more consistent Oxford style, but the academic quality of our books will be unaffected, and the Clarendon Press imprint will still be available to authors who desire it.
"I own it seems to be a very narrow notion, and unworthy the dignity of the University, to consider the Press in a mere trading light, as an engine for raising money." It was, nevertheless, with such considerations in mind that the great lawyer William Blackstone effected a reform of the Delegacy of the Press in 1757, which was to lay the foundations of OUP's future greatness. Two hundred and forty-two years later, it is still necessary to consider the Press in a trading light, however narrow a notion that may seem to some. It is greatly to its credit that OUP is regarded as a national cultural institution. But it is in a fundamentally different position from bodies like the BBC or the Arts Council, because it is not funded with public money; it is entirely self-financing, and it has to trade at a surplus in order to invest in the future.
It will never be possible to resolve the tension between OUP's scholarly, cultural and commercial roles to everyone's satisfaction. Meanwhile, the Delegates of the Press have the responsibility of ensuring that OUP continues to be in a position to publish its huge academic and educational list (currently running at some 4,000 titles per annum), to invest in great scholarly enterprises like the OED and the New DNB, and to make a reasonable return to the University. In interpreting that responsibility, they may have incurred the odium of the Royal Society of Literature, but perhaps they will also receive the gratitude of posterity.
Sir Keith Thomas is President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Click for the next item in Oxford's 1998/9 Poetry Fiasco, or for Andrew Malcolm's TLS reply to the above article, or for the next item in the Charity Reform series.
CLICK FOR:
THE AKME CHARITY REFORM AND PUBLIC BENEFIT INDEX
THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT OUP'S 'CHARITABLE STATUS'
THE OXBRIDGE COLLEGE ACCOUNTS INDEX AND OUP ACCOUNTS INDEX
THE MALCOLM vs. OXFORD CASE INDEXES: I (1984-92) AND II (2001-02)
THE HISTORY OF AKME AND OF THIS WEBSITE
THE AKME OXFORD CUTTINGS LIBRARY
e-mail: akme@btinternet.com