McFarland & Company

• 1. Introduction

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  McFarland & Company began in a small town in North Carolina in 1979, when Robert Franklin founded an independent publishing house that would come to defy almost every expectation about what academic publishing could look like. Jefferson, North Carolina is not New York. It is not a media hub. And yet, from this unlikely base, McFarland has grown into a catalogue of roughly 7,800 titles, all produced by a staff of about 50 people. How does a company that small build a list that large? And why does it print, on average, only 600 copies of each book? The answers reveal a publishing model almost entirely unlike the one most readers imagine when they picture a book company. This is a story about niche obsessions, library shelves, baseball history, and the quiet persistence of specialist knowledge.

• 2. A Publisher Built for Libraries

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  McFarland's primary customer is not the reader browsing a bookstore. Libraries are the main market the company focuses on, and that single decision shapes everything else about how it operates. When a publisher sells to libraries, the economics work even with modest print runs. A first run of 600 copies can sustain a title financially when institutions, rather than individual buyers, are the ones paying. The company also reaches enthusiast readers directly through mailing campaigns, targeting people who care deeply about narrow subjects. Chess fans. Military history readers. Film scholars. Baseball devotees. These are not mass-market audiences, and McFarland never pretends they are. By 2007, a regional newspaper, the Mountain Times, noted that the company was putting out roughly 275 scholarly monographs and reference titles a year. By 2015, a writer named Robert Lee Brewer reported that annual output had climbed to around 350 titles.

• 3. Baseball, Chess, and the Art of the Niche

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  Among all the subjects McFarland covers, baseball history holds a particular prominence. The company publishes two scholarly journals dedicated entirely to the sport. Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game focuses on the period from the sport's protoball origins through 1920. Black Ball: A Journal of the Negro Leagues covers all aspects of black baseball, including the Negro major and minor leagues and the era of play that preceded them. These are not casual magazines. They carry original research, archival discoveries, and revisionist histories that specialists debate for years. Clues: A Journal of Detection handles mystery and detective fiction across print, television, and film. The Journal of Information Ethics addresses questions in information science. The North Korean Review takes on the complexities of that country and the threat it presents to global stability. Each title reflects the same principle: find a subject with a dedicated readership that no one else is adequately serving.

• 4. The SABR Award Connection

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  The Society for American Baseball Research, known as SABR, presents an annual award that carries McFarland's name. The McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award goes to authors of the best articles on baseball history or biography completed during the preceding calendar year, whether published or unpublished. The award was not always called that. From 1987 to 2000, it bore the name of another publisher, Macmillan, before the sponsorship passed to McFarland. The list of winners stretches back to 1987 and reads like a roll call of serious baseball scholarship. Articles about Jackie Robinson, the Negro Leagues, the Black Sox, and figures as varied as Satchel Paige and Dizzy Dean appear across the decades. The 2025 award recognized Mark Armour's article on how Satchel Paige finally made the Hall of Fame, published in the SABR Baseball Research Journal in the fall of 2024. McFarland's own journals have hosted multiple winning articles over the years, with Base Ball and Black Ball appearing repeatedly in the winners lists.

• 5. Leadership and Continuity

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  Robert Franklin founded the company in 1979 and eventually stepped into the role of President Emeritus, a title that acknowledges his founding contribution while allowing new leadership to carry the company forward. Rhonda Herman now serves as president. Steve Wilson holds the position of Editor-in-Chief. A staff of roughly 50 people produces and manages a list of close to 7,800 titles, a ratio that underscores how lean the operation is relative to its output. The company has maintained its headquarters in Jefferson, North Carolina throughout its existence, never relocating to a larger publishing center. That geographic decision is itself a statement about the kind of publisher McFarland intends to be: rooted, focused, and committed to subjects that larger houses in larger cities tend to overlook.