Stanford University Press Blog

Accent on Quality

How the Press went from a printer to a publisher, all with the help of the “Press Gang.”

"The Press Gang." 1929. Photo from the Stanford University Press archives.

One year after the founding of Stanford University, an enterprising printer from the Pioneer Class set up a campus print shop and began running university publications and odd jobs off of his second-hand press—equipment that he purchased with crowd sourced funds from the Stanford faculty. This humble print shop, started by Julius Quelle and encouraged along by Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, would become the forerunner of today’s Stanford University Press, now celebrating its 125th year of publishing. While Quelle’s shop produced one of the earliest books in the Press’s history—and the first to bear the Press imprint as it appears today—it was not until 1915, when Quelle hired a talented bookbinder from Leipzig, that his modest press had the capability to publish and masterfully bind lengthier books of Stanford faculty and affiliates. That bookbinder, along with a master pressman, a part-time English professor, and another university president, would inaugurate a new and ambitious era in the Press’s history.

These industrious individuals—the “Press Gang”—would put Stanford University Press on the map with verve and diligence.

The bookbinder in question was John Borsdamm, a name that still rings bells in bookmaking and book arts circles today, whose works can be found in the White House Library (not to mention myriad private collections) and by whose hands or under whose direct supervision each Stanford book was bound for thirty-five years. Borsdamm would serve perhaps one of the longest tenures in Press history and see it through one of its most transformational periods, forming a link between its early days as a small job shop under the stewardship of Quelle and its later incarnation as a fully staffed, well-oiled publisher. For it was only a year after Borsdamm was hired that a new president came to the helm at Stanford: Ray Lyman Wilbur. Early on in his post as president, Wilbur penned a letter to his business manager avowing that, “the wisest thing we could do about our printing is to buy out the University Press.” Accordingly, in 1917 the Board of Trustees offered Quelle just shy of ten thousand dollars for his press and its equipment; Quelle took the deal and returned to New York where he continued working as a pressman. Borsdamm, meanwhile, stayed on with the press, which, now under university management, was rehoused in a new, larger facility to which Quelle’s equipment was moved, there to be joined by a new fleet of linotype machines, a Miehle Press, and, of course, new bindery equipment for book production.

The Bizarre Tales of Yiddishland

Trawling through the Jewish dailies of yore reveals a world of outlandish goings-on.

by EDDY PORTNOY

This cartoon originally appeared in a 1930 issue of Moment, a daily newspaper printed in Warsaw, and offers commentary on rampant street violence in the city. Caption reads: "Conceptual battle between porters. Involves brutal and cutting argumentation."

Even on its scrappy margins, idiots, psychics, brawlers and criminals do not play a particularly significant role in Jewish historiography. This isn’t because such figures don’t exist among Jews, but more because the general trajectories of Jewish historiography, with the obvious exception of the Holocaust, tend to emphasize upward mobility. Unless they wound up as success stories, the lives of those in the lower echelons of the Jewish societies haven’t served as a major research interest for most historians in this field. There is a minor literature on Jewish gangsters, but it’s also contextualized as a distinctly one-generational, upwardly mobile phenomenon.

Historiographical research norms in the Jewish corner of the field tend to lean heavily on organizational life, as well as on figures such as politicians, artists, writers, scholars, and at least a few rabbis, among others of this ilk. This stands to reason, not only because these are doubtlessly among the leading types played in any society but also perhaps more importantly, this cast of characters typically leaves a longer paper trail than your average person. Figures like the aforementioned criminals, psychics, brawlers, et al, seem to do their best not to leave much data in their wakes for historians to plumb.

But when I began to explore the urban interwar Yiddish press as a graduate student, I discovered a huge amount of data on average and below average Jews situated in societal depths, a bizarre chronicle of common folks in a Yiddish cultural context, people whose striking stories wound up in the papers mostly because something in their lives had gone terribly wrong.

By trawling the Yiddish newspapers of New York and Warsaw, I found a chronicle of a Yiddishland about which I hadn’t been taught.

The Patriotism of the Poor

Americans who have the least nevertheless tend to love their country the most.

by FRANCESCO DUINA

CC0 via Pixabay.

America’s poor have plenty of reasons not to love their country. By most measures, they face bleak prospects and their government offers them the least support of any other advanced country on earth. Their chances of upward mobility are slim, the gap between their earnings and those of richer Americans continues to grow, and they work exceedingly long hours for very little. They have access to very limited social services and support.

It would be very reasonable for Americans to not love their country—to be resentful, rise up, and demand changes to the social contract of the country. Instead, America’s poor embrace and idealize their country.

Their patriotism runs deep and exceeds in many cases that of the poor in other advanced countries and that of richer Americans. It not only entails a love of country but a belief in its superiority and greatness. America, they feel, is a better nation than most.

The patriotism of poor Americans runs deep and exceeds in many cases that of the poor in other advanced countries and that of richer Americans.

This is a deeply felt and resilient sort of appreciation: while the patriotism of many richer Americans has waned since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, for instance, that of poorer Americans has remained steady and, by some measures, even increased.

Embracing Daughters in China

Breaking with centuries of precedent, village families are embracing a singleton daughter.

by LIHONG SHI

Photo by Trey Ratcliff. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.  

In late 2015, China announced the end of its controversial one-child policy, a law that was on the books for thirty-five years, during which time most Chinese families were limited to having only a single child. One of the most consequential aspects of this decades-old policy was the preference it created among Chinese households for sons—a bias with both socioeconomic and cultural underpinnings and drastic demographic consequences. Today in China, men outnumber women by over thirty million—but this stunning statistic obscures a significant and rarely acknowledged shift in Chinese society.

In the mid-1980s, China relaxed its one-child limit to allow rural couples in most regions to have a second child, if their first child was a girl. The policy was designed to give families another chance to have a son. And yet surprisingly, in recent years, many couples have voluntarily forgone this opportunity and have willingly accepted a singleton daughter. Was the preference for sons over daughters waning? And if so, why? Between 2002 and 2012, I conducted long-term ethnographic research in a rural community in Northeast China to understand this emerging reproductive pattern.

In the mid-1980s, China relaxed its one-child limit to allow couples to have a second child if their first child was a girl. And yet surprisingly many couples have voluntarily forgone this opportunity.

Where Are You From?

How place determines race for racially in-between immigrants.

by NEDA MAGHBOULEH

Immigrants to the United States waiting for medical examination, circa 1912. Public domain via Wikipedia.

July 4, 2002, was a particularly humid Independence Day in Boston. It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I had stayed on campus to work, and for the first time my family had come to visit me in New England. That year, we found ourselves among the thousands of revelers who descended in undulating waves down to the banks of the Charles River to see the fireworks. My mom and little sister scrambled onto the first available patch of grass while I unrolled a blanket I had snatched off my twin-size dorm room bed hours earlier. My aunt unpacked almonds, cantaloupe, and soda from a plastic shopping bag; my dad, ambling slowly, as he does, brought up the rear.

As we fanned ourselves on the blanket, my parents discussed how twenty years earlier to the day they had boarded a Fourth of July flight to Portland, Oregon, with me, at nine months old, in tow. We were striking out on our own, away from New York City, where I was born and where, as new immigrants from Iran, my parents worked in a Persian rug store owned by my dad’s extended family.

For a long time, where an immigrant was “from” defined his or her ability to become an American.

That morning in Boston I was the last to notice the white woman on the next blanket over who was staring at us in disgust. She stared at my dad in particular, who in a bit of confusion politely smiled back at her between his bites of cantaloupe. She whispered something in her companion’s ear; they rolled up their blanket and left, flip-flop sandals smacking up and down against the ground. We didn’t see or think about the women for a few minutes until two men in sunglasses and cargo shorts began to walk in wide circles around our blanket. “Oh my God,” my mom whispered to me in Persian. “The cops are watching us.” The July humidity was already intense, but it began to feel suffocating. Within seconds, a uniformed police officer and his K-9 approached us.