A little historical perspective instills calm. Today, as in the past, a look at the characteristic products of most university presses will cure insomnia. Jargon still clots the language, learning still knots and gnarls the sentences, and footnotes or endnotes still supply a quarter to a third of the content of most university press books. Most of them, in fact, will find buyers in the mid three figures, and many will lose money for their publishers. And that is as it should be.
University presses, like other complex organizations, have many purposes.
But they receive tax exemptions because they vigorously promote the distribution of new and financially unremunerative forms of knowledge. I myself have cheerfully lost large sums of money for distinguished academic publishers in this country and abroad. But I have never had the slightest difficulty finding a university press to take on my large and unsaleable books. As long as this is true, footnotes are not in danger. In one respect, however, the Times story on footnotes was more than overdue.