The day may soon arrive when presses like Mazda are the only ones that will publish Festschrifts as Festschrifts. At Pendragon Press in Hillsdale, N.Y., Robert Kessler, the founder and managing editor, shares Mr. Jabbari's calm take on finances. Pendragon specializes in scholarly and reference books on classical music, and the books have honored, for example, a chief of the music division of the New York Public Library, an organ scholar-teacher, and Ruth Watanabe, who for 37 years headed the famed Sibley Library of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Mr. Kessler relies less on standing library orders than on the affection of friends and colleagues of the honoree. For larger, university presses, economic pressures are greater, and so, in turn, is the pressure they increasingly bring to bear on compilers of volumes that they do accept.
Younger people feel that that is too awkward.
But it isn't, really. But such efforts underwhelm many scholars. Diane Favro, a coeditor of Streets, can rattle off the names of several recently deceased and deserving academic architects who were not honored by a Festschrift, or anything like it, and who, in fact, now are rarely recalled. Of course, no one wants to be among the disappeared. Mr. Waters recalls a story De Man told him about Rene Wellek, a famous literary theorist of the postwar era.