The University of Minnesota Press is marking a significant milestone this year: the 100th anniversary of its founding on July 16, 1925. The celebration got going earlier this month, with a party at the James Ford Bell Gallery inside the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library on June 25 that drew 140 people and launched an exhibit of UM Press books, photos, and other memorabilia from its archives. “Local Roots, Global Reach: A Century of the University of Minnesota Press” is open through October 3.
“The party was a lot of fun. It drew a lot of people,” said Doug Armato, UM Press director since 1998. “We had authors, customers, university types, a lot of press staff past and present.... It was a real success.” The press will also host another centenary celebration this fall in northern Minnesota, during the Grand Marais Art Colony’s North Shore Readers & Writers Festival in November. UM Press senior acquisitions editor Erik Anderson also noted that every book launch slated for this year will also celebrate the press’s longevity.
Today, UM Press—which was initially founded to publish pamphlets and bulletins—publishes 85 frontlist titles each year, about one-third of them trade and regional titles. There are currently 3,800 UM Press titles in print, a mix of scholarly monographs with an interdisciplinary emphasis, trade fiction and nonfiction, a children’s book publishing program, and regional titles including a number of books by local Indigenous authors, including the James Beard Award–winning The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Minneapolis restauranteur Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley. The 2018 cookbook remains one of the press’s evergreen bestsellers, with more than 100,000 copies sold. The press’s all-time bestseller remains Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton, originally published in 1983, which Armato says nearing 500,000 copies sold.
The press also publishes 15 academic journals and maintains the Manifold digital publishing program, which was launched in 2017 and allows scholars to create multimedia digital editions of their books. UM Press employs 35 people and its revenues are approximately $8 million each year, with the trade and regional list netting about $2.8 million of that amount.
“In the time I've been at the press, through a lot of effort by a lot of people here, that list started out at around $150,000 a year,” Armato said. “When I got here, I said, we really should grow this, but there's only so many authors around. But that has never been a problem here—Minnesota is just so loaded with great authors and committed readers. You publish a book, and someone says, ‘Here's the next one I want to write, and here's the next one after that.’”
Armato also ascribes the “remarkable” success of the press to “a great staff, a very creative staff,” adding that even with the scholarly releases, he and his staff are “very focused on individuals and who’s going to read our books; we try to make them attractive and exciting.”
Two decades ago, Armato and marketing director Emily Hamilton decided to approach running UM Press as a “half independent press and half university press,” so that each division had its own distinct identity, Armato said. “We really tried to do both of them a little bit differently,” he noted, “not to be a scholarly press that does some regional books or some trade books, but to totally inhabit both of those identities.”
Two of the press’s acquisition editors are dedicated editors for trade and regional titles, Armato pointed out. “That's a real commitment,” he said “but it's also paid off for us tremendously.” Last year, for instance, UM Press published Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, by Shigeru Kayama, translated by Jeffrey Angles—the first English translation of the original Japanese novellas. It was a lucrative acquisition, Armato said, that came about because the translator had previously worked with the press on three or four scholarly books. The press also publishes novels by Peter Geye, who previously published with Knopf, and Margi Preus, a runner-up for the 2011 Newbery Medal.
Erik Anderson, one of the two editors acquiring trade and regional titles, noted that it’s “a remarkable thing to publish trade books from the foundation of such an impressive scholarly list. So many of our trade authors acknowledge that a part of our strength as a trade publisher is the depth of our commitment to scholarly endeavors. The foundation we bring to our trade list really begins there, and that's a very unique and special thing for us and for writers.”
“We've really worked hard to get the kinds of books that attract readers,” Armato said, “I remember Heather Skinner, our publicity director, saying at one point, ‘You know, our books are really getting fun to read.’ This was 16 years ago. They really are. It wasn't always our strength, but we've made it our strength.”
