Stanford University Press

Stanford University Press (SUP) is the publishing house of Stanford University. It is one of the oldest academic presses in the United States and the first university press to be established on the West Coast. It was among the presses officially admitted to the Association of American University Presses (now the Association of University Presses) at the organization's founding, in 1937, and is one of twenty-two current member presses from that original group. The press publishes 130 books per year across the humanities, social sciences, and business, and has more than 3,500 titles in print.

History

David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, posited four propositions to Leland and Jane Stanford when accepting the post, the last of which stipulated, “That provision be made for the publication of the results of any important research on the part of professors, or advanced students. Such papers may be issued from time to time as ‘Memoirs of the Leland Stanford Junior University.’” In 1892, the first work of scholarship to be published under the Stanford name, ''The Tariff Controversy in the United States, 1789-1833'', by Orrin Leslie Elliott, appeared with the designation "No. 1" in the "Leland Stanford Junior University Monographs Series.” That same year, student Julius Andrew Quelle established a printing company on campus, publishing the student-run newspaper, the ''Daily Palo Alto'' (now the '' Stanford Daily'') and Stanford faculty articles and books. The first use of the imprint "Stanford University Press" was in 1895, with ''The Story of the Innumerable Company'', by President Jordan. In 1915, Quelle hired bookbinder John Borsdamm, who would later draw fellow craftspeople to the press, including master printer and eventual manager Will A. Friend. In 1917, the university bought the printing works, making it a division of Stanford.

In 1925, SUP hired William Hawley Davis, Professor of English, to be the inaugural general editor at the press. In the following year, SUP issued its first catalog, listing seventy-five published books. University President Ray Lyman Wilbur established a Special Committee in 1927 comprising the editor, the press manager, the sales manager, and the comptroller in service of the press, whose "principal object is to serve in the publication of University publications of all sorts and to promote human welfare generally.”

The first press director, Donald P. Bean, was appointed in 1945. By the 1950s, the printing plant ranked seventh nationally among university presses with respect to title output. The head book designer in the late 1950s and 1960s was printer and typographer Jack Stauffacher, later an AIGA medalist.

In 1999, the press became a division of the Stanford University Libraries. It moved from its previous location adjacent to the Stanford campus to its current location, in Redwood City, in 2012–13.

Stanford Business Books, an imprint for professional titles in business, launched in 2000, with two publications about Silicon Valley. The press launched the Briefs imprint in 2012, featuring short-form publications across its entire list. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SUP debuted a publishing program for born-digital interactive scholarly works in 2015. That same year, it launched its trade imprint, Redwood Press, with a novel by Bahiyyah Nakhjavani.

In April 2019, the provost of Stanford University announced plans to cease providing funds for the press, drawing widespread criticism. Following protests from Stanford faculty and students, as well as the wider academic and publishing community, the subsidy for the 2019–20 academic year was reinstated, with additional options for future fundraising on the press's part to be discussed.

Imprints

Redwood Press

Redwood Press publishes books written for a trade audience, spanning a variety of topics, by both academics and non-academic writers.

Stanford Briefs

Stanford Briefs are essay-length works published across SUP's various disciplines.

Stanford Business Books

The Stanford Business Books imprint is home to academic trade books, professional titles, texts for course use, and monographs that explore the social science side of business.

Digital publishing

SUP's digital projects initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, advances a formal channel for peer review and publication of born-digital scholarly works in the fields of digital humanities and computational social sciences.

Notable series

Asian AmericaCold War International History ProjectThe Collected Poetry of Robinson JeffersThe Complete Works of Friedrich NietzscheCultural Lives of the LawCultural Memory in the PresentInnovation and Technology in the World EconomyMeridian: Crossing Aesthetics
founded by Werner Hamacher
Post*45South Asia in MotionSquare One: First-Order Questions in the HumanitiesStanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity

Stanford Studies in Human RightsStanford Studies in Jewish History and CultureStanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and CulturesStudies in Social Inequality

Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

Notable publications

*''The Tariff Controversy in the United States, 1789–1833'', by Orrin Leslie Elliott
**The first book published in the Leland Stanford Junior University Monographs series
*''The Story of the Innumerable Company'', by David Starr Jordan
**The first book published with the Stanford University Press imprint
*''Illustrated Flora of the Pacific States'', by LeRoy Abrams
*''Between Pacific Tides'' , by Ed Ricketts and Jack Calvin (1939)
**The 1948 edition would feature a foreword by John Steinbeck
*'' The Art of Falconry'', by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, translated and edited by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe
*''The Ancient Maya'', by Sylvanus Griswold Morley (1946)
*''Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist'', by William Walter Greulich and S. Idell Pyle
*'' The Complete Essays of Montaigne'', translated by Donald M. Frame
*''Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision'', by Roberta Wohlstetter (1962)
*'' Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949'', by Lucien Bianco
*''The Many-Splendored Fishes of Hawaii'', by Gar Goodson
*''The Sexual Contract'', by Carole Pateman (1988)
*''The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers'', 5 vols., edited by Tim Hunt (1988–2002)
**Stanford University Press would also publish ''The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers'', 3 vols., edited by James Karman (2009–15)
*'' The Epic of Gilgamesh'', translated with an introduction and notes by Maureen Gallery Kovacs (1989)
*''Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France'', by Natalie Zemon Davis (1990)
*''A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War'', by Melvyn P. Leffler (1992)
*'' Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life'', by Giorgio Agamben (1998)
*''The Life and Times of Pancho Villa'', by Friedrich Katz (1998)
*''The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship'', edited by Chong-Moon Lee, William F. Miller, Marguerite Gong Hancock, and Henry S. Rowan (2000)
**The inaugural title in the Stanford Business Books imprint
* ''Dialectic of Enlightenment'', by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (2002)
*''The Zohar'', 12 vols., translated with commentary by Daniel Matt (2003–17)
*''The Physics of Business Growth'', edited by Edward Hess and Jeanne Liedtka (2012)
**The inaugural title in the Stanford Briefs imprint
*''The Woman Who Read Too Much'', by Bahiyyah Nakhjavani (2015)
**The inaugural title in the Redwood Press imprint
*''The Burnout Society'', by Byung-Chul Han (Briefs, 2015)
*''Enchanting the Desert'', by Nicholas Bauch (2016)
**The inaugural digital project published by supDigital
*''Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court'', by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve (2016)
*''The Omnibus'' Homo Sacer, by Giorgio Agamben (2017)

Major awards

*Bancroft Prize (1962): ''Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision''
*Bancroft Prize (1993): ''A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War''
*René Welleck Prize, American Comparative Literature Association (1996): ''The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic''
*Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association (2000); Albert J. Beveridge Award, American Historical Association (1999): ''The Life and Times of Pancho Villa''
*Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association (2003): ''The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy''
*Gold Medal, California Book Awards, Commonwealth Club of California (2009): ''Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970''
*Nautilus Book Award (2010): ''Companies on a Mission''
*National Jewish Book Award, Jewish Book Council

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