Stanford University Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Stanford University Press began not with a grand institutional decree but with a condition. When David Starr Jordan accepted the presidency of Stanford University, he arrived with four propositions for Leland and Jane Stanford. The last of those propositions demanded that the university make provision for publishing the research of its professors and advanced students. That clause, written into the terms of Jordan’s appointment, planted the seed of what would become the first university press on the entire West Coast of the United States. How does an idea that started as a contractual footnote grow into a publishing house with more than 3,500 titles in print? And what happens when, more than a century later, the university that created it nearly walks away?

• 2. A Press Is Born

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  The year 1892 marks the true starting point of Stanford’s publishing identity. That year, Orrin Leslie Elliott’s The Tariff Controversy in the United States, 1789-1833 appeared bearing the designation “No. 1” in the Leland Stanford Junior University Monographs Series. It was the first work of scholarship published under the Stanford name. In that same year, a student named Julius Andrew Quelle set up a printing company on campus, publishing both the student newspaper, the Daily Palo Alto, and faculty writings.

  The imprint “Stanford University Press” did not appear until 1895, when Jordan himself published The Story of the Innumerable Company under that name. The craftspeople Quelle assembled gave the press a distinctive character from early on. In 1915 he hired bookbinder John Borsdamm, who drew fellow artisans to the operation, including master printer Will A. Friend, who would eventually manage the press. Two years later, in 1917, the university purchased the printing works outright, folding it into Stanford as a formal division.

  By 1925 the press had hired its first general editor, William Hawley Davis, a Professor of English. The following year, SUP issued its first catalog, listing seventy-five books already in print. University President Ray Lyman Wilbur then formalized oversight in 1927 with a Special Committee drawn from the editor, press manager, sales manager, and comptroller, whose stated mission was publication of university work and promotion of human welfare generally.

• 3. Craft and Character

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  Jack Stauffacher served as the press’s head book designer in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, a period when physical craft still defined a press’s reputation as much as its editorial choices did. Stauffacher was a printer and typographer who would later receive the AIGA medal, one of the highest honors in American graphic design. His tenure shaped the visual identity of the press during its years of significant national standing. By the 1950s, SUP’s printing plant had ranked seventh nationally among university presses measured by title output.

  The first press director, Donald P. Bean, had been appointed in 1945, giving the operation its first dedicated executive leadership. That institutional structure, director overseeing editor and production, allowed the press to scale its ambitions while maintaining the craftsman ethic Quelle had established decades earlier. The combination of editorial seriousness and typographic care gave Stanford publications a physical presence that matched their intellectual weight.

• 4. A Catalog of Consequence

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  Between Pacific Tides, by Ed Ricketts and Jack Calvin, first appeared in 1939. The 1948 edition carried a foreword by John Steinbeck, a detail that signals the reach of the press’s list into the wider culture of the American West. Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s The Art of Falconry, translated and edited by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, sits on the same list as Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision from 1962, which won the Bancroft Prize that year.

  Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract arrived in 1988, the same year the press began publishing The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a five-volume edition edited by Tim Hunt that would not be completed until 2002. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was published in 1998. Friedrich Katz’s The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, also from 1998, won both the Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association and the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association.

  The Zohar, a twelve-volume translation with commentary by Daniel Matt, launched in 2003 and extended to 2017. Natalie Zemon Davis’s Fiction in the Archives appeared in 1990. Melvyn P. Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power took the Bancroft Prize in 1993, three decades after Wohlstetter’s win gave SUP its first in that category. The depth of that prize record across history, political science, and literary studies reflects a list that never settled into a single disciplinary corner.

• 5. New Imprints, New Directions

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  Stanford Business Books launched in 2000 with two publications about Silicon Valley, among them The Silicon Valley Edge, edited by Chong-Moon Lee, William F. Miller, Marguerite Gong Hancock, and Henry S. Rowan. The imprint was designed for academic trade books, professional titles, and monographs exploring the social science dimensions of business. Its arrival reflected the geography of Stanford itself, surrounded by the technology industry the university had helped create.

  The Briefs imprint followed in 2012 with short-form publications spanning all of SUP’s disciplines. The inaugural title in that series was The Physics of Business Growth, edited by Edward Hess and Jeanne Liedtka. Three years later, in 2015, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided funding for a born-digital publishing program for interactive scholarly works in digital humanities and computational social sciences. That same year SUP launched Redwood Press, its trade imprint aimed at a general audience, with Bahiyyah Nakhjavani’s novel The Woman Who Read Too Much as its first title. The press also moved its physical operations from its longtime location adjacent to the Stanford campus to Redwood City during 2012 and 2013.

• 6. The 1933 Murder Case

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  In 1933, a sales manager at Stanford University Press named David Lamson was accused of murdering his wife, Allene, at their home on the Stanford campus. The case drew national attention, and among those who took up Lamson’s cause was the novelist and poet Janet Lewis. Lewis wrote a pamphlet arguing specifically against the use of circumstantial evidence to convict. Lamson stood trial four times. He was ultimately released. The case attached one of the stranger footnotes in American publishing history to an institution otherwise known for scholarship, and it left Janet Lewis with a subject she would return to throughout her writing life.

• 7. The Funding Crisis

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  In April 2019, the provost of Stanford University announced plans to stop providing funds for the press. The announcement drew criticism from faculty and students at Stanford and from the broader academic and publishing communities. The response was strong enough to change the outcome. The subsidy for the 2019-20 academic year was reinstated, and discussions about future fundraising options for the press were opened. The episode laid bare how precarious the finances of even a well-established university press can be, and how much the continuation of a century-old publishing program can depend on the organized protest of the scholars whose work it publishes. The press remains a member of the Association of University Presses, the professional body that has long represented academic publishing in North America.