As a tribute to AAUP’s University Press Week, Texas A&M University
Press and 24 other university presses are partaking in a nation-wide blog tour.
These blog entries highlight the importance of university presses as well as
their influence and contribution to readers everywhere. We are pleased to have
author Loren Steffy guest blogging for us as part of the University Press Week
blog tour. The tour continues today at
Georgetown University Press. A complete blog tour
schedule can be found here!
“The value of a university press, like an ancient shipwreck, can't be
measured in dollars or commercial success.”
Loren Steffy’s
publishing relationship with Texas A&M University Press began with his late
father J. Richard Steffy – an electrician and shipmodeling enthusiast with no
formal education, who ultimately changed the emerging field of nautical
archaeology in the 1970s.
Here, as we celebrate
University Press Week the Houston
Chronicle business columnist and author of The Man Who Thought Like a Ship, describes his personal journey as
an author with Texas A&M University Press.
My career as an author began with a smirk.
I was having dinner with
one of my father's former colleagues, and he asked if I had considered writing
a book about my father's amazing journey from a small town electrician with no
formal college training to the world's foremost authority on ancient ships.
I told him I thought it was a great story, but outside of
the field of nautical archaeology, my father was an unknown. Who, I asked,
would publish such a story? He replied with a wry grin but he said nothing.
The next day I got an email from an editor at the Texas
A&M University Press. She said she'd heard “through the grapevine” that I
might be interested in writing a book about my father. If so, the press would
love to publish it.
Now it was my turn to grin. Many years before, when I was
still in high school, I told my father I intended to be a writer someday. He told
me when I had something I thought was good enough, I should let him know. His
contacts at the A&M Press would be able to help me get published.
My father developed a long-running relationship with the
Press during an academic career that took him from non-degreed lecturer to
MacArthur Foundation fellow to emeritus professor. He wrote two books for the
Press and contributed to numerous others.
I quickly realized there was no better home for my book. The
editors knew my father's work, which was a huge advantage. My father rebuilt
ancient ships that had been rotting on the bottom of the sea for centuries.
It's an arcane field, but one with which the editors were already familiar. I
didn’t have to explain, for example, that nautical archaeology was not treasure
hunting or that my father had no interest in the
Titanic or that he never searched for Noah’s Ark.
My book,
The Man Who
Thought Like a Ship, was published as part of an ongoing series of nautical
archaeology books. The editors at the Press not only understood the field, they
knew how to target the marketing for the book – what associations to approach,
when key conferences were held.
After the book was published, my father's smirking colleague
told me how happy he was it had all worked out. It was, he said, the perfect
fit. I couldn't agree more.
As if to underscore that point, the book's publication
prompted an important discovery. My father got into nautical archaeology as a
hobby. He built models of ancient ships using techniques that would later
become the basis for his research methods.
I wrote about one of his earliest models, an Egyptian ship,
in the book, but I never knew what happened to it. I discovered some letters in
my research that indicated it may have been donated to a museum in Philadelphia
and later discarded.
After the book was
published, I was contacted by a woman in Philadelphia who'd worked with my
father years ago. She offered to check with museums in the area to see if the
model might still exist.
A few days later she called to say it was sitting in a
storeroom, where it had been for almost 50 years. The museum had been unsure
what to do with it. I arranged to travel to Philadelphia, pick up the model,
and return it to Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M. Beginning
in the spring of 2013, it will be used to help students, who still study my
father's work, better understand how he developed his methods.
Without the publication of the book, this rare find – one of
only four of my father's models that still exist – might have been lost
forever.
The value of a university press, like an ancient shipwreck,
can't be measured in dollars or commercial success. Commercial publishers may
deal in popular books, in books that can make money. University presses
specialize in the books that
need to
be published – important stories that might otherwise never be told.
My father's story is one of scientific discovery, but it is
far more than that. It's the story of a man who dared to pursue his dreams.
It's a tale of perseverance, of failure, of heartbreak and of achievement. It
is, in other words, a human story. Without a university press, it never would
have been told.
Dr. Richard Wainerdi has
experienced a lot during his 28 years as President of the Texas Medical Center.
However, he not foregoing everything he loves. In an interview with Houston
Chronicle medical reporter Todd Ackerman, Dr. Wainerdi admitted he is “going to
keep [his] hand in a lot of different things…but at 81 years of age and 28
years as president, [he thinks] it’s time to turn the reins over to someone
else.” 
Texas A&M University Press
author, Frederick C. Elliott, documents many of the changes TMC has experienced
over the years in his book The Birth of the Texas Medical Center: A Personal
Account (Texas A&M University, 2004). His book reveals the human side to
this dynamic organization. Dr. Wainerdi said “Dr. Elliot’s book provides a
unique perspective of the creation of the Texas Medical Center. His insight
into this historically significant process is of great value to all of those
who want to understand how what is now the largest medical center in the world
came into being. He was more than simply an observer, he was a vital participant
and leader in all that occurred.”
