Signs of intelligent life

A mainstream newspaper covering academic books regularly? That would be a dream come true, as far as this blogger is concerned. (I used to cover them regularly, though not in depth, in my former Ideas column, The Examined Life; I write about them sometimes for Brainiac. And Christopher Shea writes about academic press titles fairly often in his Ideas column, Critical Faculties. But neither of us write about academic press titles on anything like a weekly or even monthly basis.) Alas, such a heartening phenomenon doesn't seem likely, especially at a time when newspapers are barely even covering mainstream fiction and nonfiction. However, if it happened anywhere, one might well imagine, it would be in a city like Boston or New York.

Not so! In today's edition of his "Intellectual Affairs" column (for Inside Higher Ed), Scott McLemee reports that Roger Gathman's column "The Academic Presses" debuted on Sunday in a newspaper published in "a midsized city in Red State America": The Austin American-Statesman, to be precise. Like a character straight out of Richard Linklater's "Slacker," Gathman has lived in Austin since doing graduate work in the philosophy department at the University of Texas in the 1980s, McLemee reports. Since then, aside from writing for Salon, The New York Observer, The American Scholar, and other worthy venues, he's worked as a freelance editor and translator. Sounds like my kind of people.

In a comment posted to Inside Higher Ed, Gathman responds:

I hope university press people take note of this (rare) opportunity. I'm going to be looking for university press books that make a stir -- ones that might be mentioned in a science article in the NYT, for instance. Or a book by some researcher who figures in a Malcolm Gladwell article. Or a translation of some French novel that hasn't gotten its due.

PS: Gathman's first column is excellent, as good as anything in Lingua Franca, say, or Ideas. He's got one loyal reader already. (Well, I guess two, if you count McLemee.)