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U of C Press director Morris Philipson retires;
construction on new press building begins
With the retirement of longtime director Morris Philipson and a
move to a new home, the University of Chicago Press is looking at
some big changes over the next two years.
Philipson, AB’49, AM’52, head of the Press for 32 years,
announced in July that he will retire at the end of the current
academic year. A committee of faculty members and Press staff, headed
by Divinity School professor Wendy Doniger, has begun a national
search for Philipson’s successor.
“The University of Chicago Press is one of the treasures
of our University, and Morris Philipson deserves much of the credit,”
said President Hugo F. Sonnenschein. “In more than 30 years
as director of the Press, he has built an organization that is the
envy of the scholarly publishing world.”
Yale University Press director John Ryden summed up the view of
many colleagues. “The University of Chicago has always set
the standard in American scholarly publishing,” he said. “In
his long tenure, Morris Philipson raised that standard and made
the list deeper and richer. He has been a model to all of us in
university publishing.”
When Philipson joined the Press in 1967, it printed 140 new books
each year and published 23 journals, grossing $4 million in sales.
Output has grown to 261 books and 50 journals annually, grossing
$40 million in sales.
“This is exactly what I was made for,” said Philipson,
who has served longer than any director in the Press’s 107-year
history. “From the time I started working for any publisher,
this is the only job I ever really wanted.”
Philipson is known for publishing translations, reissuing out-of-print
books, and supporting ongoing, large-scale projects. Some of the
major projects of his tenure include Christianity, Social Tolerance,
and Homosexuality, a 1980 American Book Award winner; the 31-volume
The Complete Works of Giuseppe Verdi; and the 1991 multivolume
dictionary Mythologies. In 1982, the Press received the Publishers
Weekly Carey-Thomas Award for Creative Publishing for The Lisle
Letters, a collection of more than 2,000 16th-century letters
from Viscount Lisle, the illegitimate son of Edward VI.
That same year, Philipson became the first academic publisher
to win the PEN American Center’s Publisher Citation, which
stated that he had “raised the University of Chicago Press
to its place as the best university press in the country.”
Philipson, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University,
has edited ten books and written five novels, as well as short stories,
nonfiction works, and more than 50 articles and reviews. In retirement,
he plans to write more fiction, travel, and work as a consultant.
He’ll miss the move to the Press’s new building, which
should be completed in 2001. The books division of the Press now
occupies the third and fourth floors of the Administration Building,
while the journals division has offices on Woodlawn Avenue, on Stony
Island Avenue, and in the Hyde Park Bank Building. The new building—to
be located at 60th Street and Dorchester Avenue, north of the University’s
steam plant—will consolidate operations and should allow for
continued growth.
“One of the ways we are expanding is through electronic publishing,”
said Philipson. “We have increased our staff by 25 people,
a 10 percent increase over two years, and more space is needed to
accommodate that kind of growth.”
Robert Shirrell, AB’71, manager of the journals division,
explained that the Press now issues 11 of its 50 journals in electronic
form as well as in paper and expects to more than double that number
in the next two or three years, requiring more staff and more space.
“In the coming decade, we believe our ability to handle all
aspects of electronic publishing—review of articles, editing,
production, distribution, marketing, archiving—will be critical
to our role in serving scholars.”
Groundbreaking began this summer on the four-story building, which
will house book publishing and journal operations on three floors;
a yet-to-be-named tenant will use the other floor. The Press’s
distribution facility in the Pullman neighborhood will remain separate
from the Hyde Park operations. Larry Booth of Booth Hansen Associates
will design the new building’s exterior, while the interior
architect is Frank Torchia of Torchia Associates.
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