Thank you to former UIP director Laurie Matheson for her thoughtful guest post, remembering recently deceased former UIP director Richard Wentworth.
I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing, on November 3, of Richard Wentworth, former director of the University of Illinois Press. Dick was a very important mentor for me throughout my time at the Press: encouraging me, still a graduate student, to apply for a full-time position in marketing; gracefully transitioning to me, as a young acquisitions editor, his lists in history; and continuing to track and encourage me during my own tenure as director, notably participating with me and Bill Regier in a directors panel (broadcast on CSPAN Book TV) for our centennial celebrations in 2018. Among the qualities I will remember are his passion and intuition as an acquisitions editor; his modesty and quiet demeanor, though he could become very animated when recruiting an author or advocating for a project; his ability, although he often seemed forgetful, to pull out key statistics at the right moment; and his sly, understated sense of humor, which so often took me by surprise.
In memoriam, I offer an interview Dick gave me when I was working on Presstime, a newsletter that Judy McCulloh had started as part of her work on development for the Press. This piece, entitled “A Place in History,” appeared in Spring 1999.
Laurie Matheson
The turn of the year marked the end of an era at the University of Illinois Press with the retirement of director and editor-in-chief Richard Wentworth. Highly respected in the academic community and famous within the Press for his manual typewriter, still in daily use, and his nearly lifelong allegiance to the Dodgers, Dick Wentworth has established the Press as a leading publisher in American history, especially labor and African American history. He has also cultivated extensive and reputable lists in poetry and sports history. Among dozens of significant and award-winning books, he has been involved with four winners of the prestigious Bancroft Prize in history. Presstime is pleased to share some of his thoughts from a recent interview:
What do you consider to be your legacy to the Press?
I suppose that the most important thing that I did was introduce the notion of establishing series of programs in specific areas that we could build on. It’s really important for small presses to have some areas in which they can be one of the best.
I came from the Louisiana State University Press, which was very strong in southern history. From that it was logical, I thought, to move into African American history in a significant way. That was an area that had gotten very big in the late sixties, but the sales slowed about 1970, about the time we started the Blacks in the New World series, so there was less competition at that stage. And with August Meier’s editorship we were able to establish a position probably at the top of the subject area, or very close to the top.
The labor history developed from the black history area. We published a book by Herb Gutman, one of the three big names in labor history, and then we talked about a labor series, and he discussed this with the other two leading figures, who were David Brody and David Montgomery. I heard later that Sheldon Meyer at Oxford was about to start a series, but when we lined up the three top people they didn’t proceed with it. And that is the one area where I think we have been clearly at the top among all the scholarly presses or among all the presses, actually.
How did you get started in publishing?
I started at Oklahoma and had gone there after four years in the Air Force with the idea that I would be a sportswriter. They had a good journalism program there, but I discovered when I had an internship on the Oklahoma City Times that I wasn’t cut out to be a reporter.
Then I discovered university press publishing. I got an assignment in my sophomore year to do a story on the university press, and they had a fellowship program. So after I graduated I stayed on for a year to work on a master’s, which I never completed, just to apply for that fellowship. It was a twelve-month fellowship, and it paid $1500, but it was a very good entree. At least four of the people who have gone through that program have become directors at university presses.
I went to Wisconsin as a copy editor and spent a year there, and then one of the previous fellows, Don Ellegood, who was director of LSU, asked me if I would be interested in moving down there as the sales manager. So I did all of the marketing at LSU for three years, and then I lucked out in the timing. First I was offered the job of sales manager at Michigan, and Ellegood made me assistant director to keep me at LSU. Ellegood moved to Washington and I was acting director for a few months. Then I was offered the position of assistant director at Indiana, and that was at a time when there was a search for the directorship at LSU. When that opportunity at Indiana came up, I mentioned it to the head of the committee and he said to the other people, “Let’s go ahead and give him the job.” They had four directors who were candidates, but they just decided let’s go ahead and take the guy we’ve got already. I’d only been doing editorial work for maybe six months. So I was extremely fortunate to get that job at age 33.
What do you regard as your most important achievements?
The thing that I’m proudest of as far as Illinois is concerned is a book in western history that we published in the late seventies, The Plains Across. A 900-page dissertation with 200 pages of single-spaced footnotes. It was clear to me, as I told the author, John Unruh, that it was going to have to be good to be published at that length, and it was so good. It turned out to be a very important book, one of the most important in western history, winner of seven awards.
Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century has now sold over 18,000 in cloth and close to 35,000 in paper, and that was an idea that I had come up with. It was simply the notion that we get the best people who were already familiar with the persons (in most cases they were working on or had already written biographies of them) and have them write thirty-page papers for the general reader, and that was extremely successful.
Bob Hemenway [author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography] was very influential and he advised me early on to get the rights to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was probably the best single thing we’ve done in a long time. I contacted the publisher, Lippincott, four or five times before they finally let us have a five-year contract. They were hoping to sell it to a mass-market house and were not able to interest one, and finally just gave up and went ahead and signed the agreement with us, and then renewed it for five more years. We sold 75,000 in the last year we had it, and over 350,000 in all. Then Harper & Row purchased Lippincott and they picked up all of Hurston’s books that other publishers had licensed. We lost a quarter of a million dollars in sales in that one year by losing that book. I was pretty disgusted to see a comment in Publishers Weekly from a Harper & Row editor that they had rescued Hurston’s books from the obscurity of university press lists.
What do you think about the future of scholarly publishing?
I was at a conference in Washington in October 1997 when somebody stood up and said monographs aren’t important, nobody reads them and they’re not important except for getting promotion and tenure. A good many of what I feel are the best books we have published at Illinois are first books, revised dissertations. You can work on dissertations forever, and then you sometimes work on revising them forever. And thereafter scholars never spend as much time on any one book as they did on that one, so sometimes this is the best thing that they do. So I think scholarly monographs are extremely important and presses need to continue publishing them. I just hope that we’ll be able to continue to do so.
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The Presstime piece also included a poem by Miller Williams, who made a surprise appearance at the retirement reception for Dick and read several of his poems, including this one, composed especially for the occasion:
On the Retirement of Richard Wentworth, January, 1999
We’ve come together here to mark the end
Of the luminous, long career of a good friend.
As one of the fortunate who, since books began,
Were privileged to be published by this man,
There’s much that I want to say, but I’d be remiss
If I left unsaid one thing to say about him –
There’s not a greener laurel to lay on a leader than this,
That he did it right so we could do it without him.