 |
|
     |
By David Littlejohn As an undergraduate at Cal, James H. Clark ‘59 worked as a waiter at Larry Blake’s Rathskeller. When one of his regular lunch customers there asked him what he planned to do when he graduated, Clark, a psychology major, confessed that he had no idea. The man pitched college textbooks to Bay Area professors, and he suggested that Clark do the same. “You just go around and knock on doors and give out free books,” he was told. Clark followed his suggestion and was hired in 1960, unaware that the man got a $100 bonus for every new rep he brought in. Three years later, shortly after I joined Berkeley’s English department, Jim Clark was a bright-eyed young sales representative for Prentice Hall. Laden with catalogs and samples, he stopped by my office in Dwinelle Hall to ask whether I might be able to use any of his company’s books in my courses. At the time I was a very junior faculty member, and texts for the classes I was assigned to teach tended to be chosen by my elders and betters. The only exceptions were a few courses in 18th-century English literature, in which Prentice Hall had nothing to offer. But then Clark asked if I was working on anything his company might be able to publish. Since no one had ever asked me this before, I began gushing to this beaming, bespectacled stranger about an idea I had for a popular biography based on Samuel Johnson’s letters. Clark seemed to catch my enthusiasm as if it were a disease. “Not that I knew anything at all about Johnson,” he admits almost 40 years later. “But it sounded to me like an intriguing idea. And that was always the heart of the book business for me--someone’s passionate idea or vision about a project.” He carried his enthusiasm back to New Jersey, where Prentice Hall published my first book a year and a half later. Earlier this year, Clark retired after 25 years as director of the University of California Press, having fostered its growth in sales from $2 million to $20 million a year, and having transformed it from a highly respected academic publisher into one of the top five university presses in America--essentially neck and neck with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Chicago. The University of California Press now publishes between 150 and 200 new titles each year (as well as a large number of paperback reprints), and currently has 3,416 titles in print. It is the official publisher of the writings of Mark Twain and Martin Luther King Jr., and produces opulent art history volumes that cost hundreds of dollars. The Press also gave birth to two books that went on to become epic best sellers: Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds (1961) and Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan (1968). After selling (and buying) books out of his Berkeley base for four years, Clark moved east to Prentice Hall’s home office, then shifted in 1969 to the college division of Harper and Row. Six months later he was its vice president and publisher, a position he held for several years. Why did he give this all up? “Actually, I had an epiphany,” Clark says. “We had a sales meeting for 150 people at the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii. As head of the division, I got the Rockefeller Suite. Fresh towels came every 15 minutes. And I asked, ‘Is this it? Am I happy?’ The epiphany was realizing that making money wasn’t really what I was interested in.” In 1976, Walter Lippincott, a colleague of his at Harper and Row (and now director of Princeton University Press) had learned of the retirement plans of August Frugé, the feisty, opinionated director of the University of California Press, who had been at Berkeley since 1944. “If you want to go back to California,” Lippincott advised, “this is probably the best job you can find.” Not everyone on the Berkeley campus was immediately thrilled with the appointment of this Manhattan hotshot to serve as head of “their” scholarly press. Erich Gruen, professor of history, recalls: “I was quite apprehensive. I had been rather close to Frugé, a great friend of the classics--he had even learned Greek--an erudite man, and one who had shepherded two of my books through the Press. The appointment of Jim, who came from a commercial press and who had no record of direct interest in the classical world, naturally created concern. Many of us worried that he would shift the trajectory of the Press, put more emphasis on ‘marketability,’ and let some of the more traditional disciplines slide.” But Gruen soon learned that Clark was fully aware and appreciative of the Press’s strength in books on ancient Greece and Rome--still one of its most respected fields. And Clark later supported Gruen’s proposal for a new series on Hellenistic culture and society, in which 37 books have been published since 1990. “His reading of proposals and even manuscripts,” says Gruen, “was acute, intelligent, and usually right on the mark.” In fact, what surprised many writers for UC Press was that Clark read so many proposals and manuscripts himself--something very few publishing house directors have the time or inclination to do. “That may have been one of my problems,” says Clark. “I was always happier discovering new books than administering.” Neil Henry, associate professor of journalism, had a chance to compare Jim’s behavior in this regard with that of his counterparts in New York. Sensing commercial possibilities for his dramatic memoir, Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for His White Family, Henry’s literary agent set up meetings for him with a number of editors in Manhattan. “I got a couple of decent offers in New York, but it was clear that few of the editors or others I spoke to had read the book. One admitted he hadn’t read a word, but wanted to see me to envision how I might perform on Oprah.” At his first meeting with Clark, by contrast, Henry says, “I was amazed that he obviously had read the entire thing, as he went on and on about his favorite passages. Jim Clark was the reason I chose UC Press to publish my book.” Berkeley historian Robert Middlekauff, who had previously published with Oxford, says that he gave Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (1996) to UC Press because of his admiration for Clark. Gene Brucker, another Cal history professor, praises Clark for taking on two of his books when the original publishers let them go out of print. “He overwhelms them with sweetness,” is Brucker’s explanation for Clark’s remarkable success with potential adversaries. “He’s so affable, people get converted. He’s the sort of person who I don’t think ever holds a grudge. I’ve never heard him bad-mouthing anyone.” English professor Frederick Crews, whose friendship dates back to Jim Clark’s days as a traveling book salesman, concurs. “Being head of a great university press didn’t change Jim in the slightest,” says Crews. “He always kept his ego in the background. I never heard him utter a negative word about anyone. Jim really wanted to learn from others; his humility and good nature went all the way down. That he was also, in his quiet way, enormously competent is confirmed by the growth of the Press under his leadership.” The University of California Press was established at Berkeley in 1893 to publish specialized scholarly monographs written by Cal professors for other professors to read. In time, it began publishing actual books, some of them--like the Kroeber and Castaneda titles--written by non-professors and readable by non-experts. By the 1950s, books had displaced monographs. As other campuses were established, the Press came under the Office of the President, although its headquarters remained in Berkeley. This year’s spring and fall catalogs of the University of California Press list 191 new books, of which 40 (21 percent) were written by UC faculty. The UC percentage was once considerably higher, but now that the Press has moved wholeheartedly into the publication of general-interest books--the only way an academic publisher can break even today--it must cast its net more widely in order to compete with other prestigious publishers. Today, UC Press is at least as strong as any other U.S. publisher in a number of carefully cultivated fields: anthropology and urban sociology; contemporary Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and the Near and Middle East; California generally; classics; environmental conservation; and film studies. The Mark Twain Project (now at volume 35) and the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers (which it stole away from Stanford) came after an impressive line of similarly prestigious, multivolume undertakings: The Sermons of John Donne (10 volumes), The Work of John Dryden (20 volumes), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (11 volumes), The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers (10 volumes), and the UNESCO History of Africa (8 volumes). Three broad changes can be seen in the titles published by the Press over the past 25 years, which may say as much about American culture as about the Press or Jim Clark. First, many of these books are devoted to aspects of popular culture (boxing, card sharks, porn films, comic books, soap operas, Star Trek, country music, beauty pageants) no university press would have touched in earlier years. Second, works dealing with serious social and personal problems often have taken the form of first-person memoirs--like Neil Henry’s search for his white ancestors; Frederic Tubach’s and Bernat Rosner’s popular joint autobiography written “from opposite sides of the Holocaust”; and Robert Hine’s Second Sight, a UC professor’s account of 15 years of total blindness between periods of partial vision. Jim Clark believes that these were directions in which much of serious American scholarship and good writing had moved in the past two decades. The Press was just keeping up, he says. The third change is toward what can only be called “muckraking.” Dozens of UC Press books since 1980, including some of the most popular, have been devoted to re-examining recent American history: exposing deception, greed, and corruption in our government, professions, and corporations. Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, published earlier this year, and Stanton Glantz’s The Cigarette Papers of 1996 are but two recent examples. Clark gives credit for at least half of such titles to executive editor Naomi Schneider, who, he says, was always looking for ways “to expose the underside of the Establishment.” But he also concedes that writers of books like these were naturally attracted to--and belonged at--a place like Berkeley. “If we didn’t print them, who would?” Recently married to Isabelle Nabokov, a French-born anthropologist from Princeton, Clark decided that the time had come to step down. He remains a consultant to UC Press, ever on the lookout for authors and manuscripts. Lynne Withey, Ph.D. ‘76, his associate director, was named to succeed him this fall. “I could never have been an academic,” Clark says today. “When I came back to Berkeley as director of the Press, I used to walk through the campus; the sun would be shining, and I’d say to myself: ‘I’ve never been happier.’ I had come back to Berkeley in an editorial role, affiliated with a place I adore, in a capacity I was most comfortable with. Where else can you meet great people who tell you what they’ve been working on for the last 20 years--and then publish their books? “I won’t miss the daily inbox, the budgets, the politics, the personnel problems. What I will miss is the ordered access I always had to interesting people. I now have to work harder to go out and find people that I enjoy being with. For 25 years, that was part of the job.” David Littlejohn ‘59, professor emeritus of journalism, is an arts critic for the Wall Street Journal. |
 Jim Clark Photo by Thor Swift
| |||||||||||
| About
CAA Contact
Us
Update
your Address CAA Career Opportunities Privacy Policy |
©2008 California Alumni
Association. All Rights Reserved For questions about CAA: info@alumni.berkeley.edu Technical inquiries: web@alumni.berkeley.edu
|
Alumni House Berkeley, CA 94720-7520 Toll-Free: (888) CAL-ALUM Phone: (510) 642-7026 Fax: (510) 642-6252
|
