Précis Volume 18 Issue 3

The issue's lead article could have been entitled, "All you need to know about Open Access in plain language". The author is Sally Morris who in her recently completed ten-year tenure as chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers was credited with doubling the Society's membership. Her writing is a rare combination of authority, clarity and humanity.

Has Irish publishing shared in the Irish economic miracle of the past decade? In some ways yes, in some ways no, according to Fergal Tobin, publishing director of Gill Macmillan, in his comprehensive survey of the Irish book scene. "Whither Irish publishing: a late starter in search of the fast lane" is an admirable update and analysis.

Some names of book enterprises became so famous that they became part of the language-both in and outside our industry. In this issue we begin a series on how famous names originated, often told by the founders who started their eponymous companies. Not all of them are publishers. The first piece is by Tim Waterstone, who started the business bearing his name on a shoestring. His name has remained identified with the company-although he has long ceased to be the owner-and with its concept of bookselling. Waterstone's is now the third largest book chain in the world. Like many successful ideas, it was simple to define but hard to get off the ground and carry out.

Frances Pinter, a founder member of the LOGOS editorial board, started her own publishing house in the UK at the age of twenty-three. She designated herself "Managing Director" in order to get a work permit. She would, she says, have started her own imprint at some point in her career, because she is passionate about publishing. But in retrospect her start-up may have been premature, because she had to learn by doing-succeeding by her passion and hard work. She tells her story as part of our series "Publishing Entrepreneurs".

Creation of an encyclopedia of publishing has long daunted many publishers and editors, but not John Feather and James Dearnley of Loughborough University in the UK, who embarked in 2003 on an International Encyclopedia of Publishing which was to appear in both print and electronic formats. When the project was well advanced it was abruptly cancelled by the publisher, Taylor Francis. They relate the sad story of this aborted project, as a lesson in how publisher-author relationships can go wrong.

One of Britain's most distinguished university librarians, who retired from Cambridge University, reveals that books were his hobby as well as his profession in a scholarly description of his personal library, latest in our series "The personal library as doppelgänger". He began to buy rare books when, as a student, he could ill afford what were very modest prices compared with their values today.

Our long series (sixteen articles) relating the stories of publishers who were part of the forced exodus from Europe in the 1930s and '40s, is now completed by Edwin Beschler's essay on Walter Johnson and Kurt Jacoby, names indelibly associated with the Academic Press imprint. The series is slated to appear next year as a book, with additional contributions from Richard Abel, Henk Edelman and Gordon Graham, under the imprint of Transaction Publishers.

The Editor Emeritus assumes a rather tenuous reflected glory by referring to the fact that he and Adam Smith went to the same university (Glasgow): and that when he went up exactly two hundred years after Smith, The Wealth of Nations was still a textbook. He then reflects on the Scottish Renaissance, of which Smith was part, and asks "Who are today's Adam Smiths?"