A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON MY WAY TO THE PUBLISHER

            Way back when there was a title of some thing or other called “A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON MY WAY TO THE FORUM”. I want to poach off of that title to share a bit of silly stuff about the trials and tribulations of trying to get a book published in scholarly circles, especially when you are a new kid on the block. I had some luck with an article or two when I first began trying to be a scholar. But books were an entirely different thing all together.

            I started out by catching the attention of a little-known outfit called Burgess Publishing. The young Editor had been a philosophy major as an undergraduate and thought my two manuscripts were great. One was Essays on Kierkegaard and the other was Philosophy and Religion: Some Contemporary Perspectives. These were collections of articles by first -rate scholars, but I did manage to sneak one essay of my own into each of them. The next year I conned Eerdmans Publishers to do my first book containing my very own thoughts and titled The Possibility of Religious Knowledge. They got Martin Marty, the Editor of the Christian Century, to write a small blurb for the back cover and he said some nice things about my insights and willingness to credit the folks I had drawn ideas from. I used these books successfully as texts in my own courses.

            I must admit that my efforts in all these concerns were greatly encouraged on the day when one fellow participant at a big scholarly conference went past me, turned back and, and looking at my name tag, asked “Are you the famous “Jerry Gill?” I laughed and replied something like “I’m the only one I know of.” It does a great deal for one’s ego to have experiences like that, but it doesn’t really amount to much in the long run. I kept writing essays and books as I grew as a teacher, and eventually I began to receive more positive feedback from colleagues and friends. Mostly I was enjoying teaching so much that I considered publishing strictly a side-line. I certainly never worried about the “publish and perish” gig.   

            My next effort was to try to poach off of the very successful series of published of books by Macmillan titled “New Theology” in which I had had an article published the year before. I had the idea of doing a parallel series of books called “Philosophy Today” which gathered together important articles in current scholarly journals for philosophically inclined readers. The Macmillan editor called me up at home from New York and after a few minutes of chatting about the series idea he simply said: “Well frankly Mr. Gill, no one up here seems to know who you are.” I did my best to assure him that I knew my stuff and they did in fact agree to publish my first group of other people’s articles on various philosophical themes. They actually did three such volumes and they were very popular. I was off and running.

                 Along the way, while attending a professional philosophy conference where publishers display their latest products, I stopped by the Westminster Press booth to browse a bit. The editor was not very friendly until he recognized my name on my “name tag”. He said he had read several of my written efforts as a young graduate student at Stanford. He was very embarrassed at not having recognized my name right-off and wanted to know if I had any recent manuscripts to share for publication. Naturally, I did and to make a long story short he agreed to read my latest effort which I had titled “Reasons of the Heart”, a book aimed at defining a fresh way to approach the field of philosophy of religion.

     He was afraid that my proposed title would sound too “emotional”, etc. and suggested “On Knowing God” would be a better title. We haggled about the title for a couple of weeks, but since “beggers can’t be choosers” I finally agreed to his title, a decision that I have regretted ever since. I thought his title sounded too devotional, but he was the editor. The book did well enough, and I have been able to use it in a number of classes over the years. As a friend of mine used to say: “You lose some and others are rained out.” This was more of a tie.

            Over the years since then I have met and fared well with a number of editors. I even got a couple of books published abroad, two by British companies and one in Greece, For Crete’s Sake.” Don’t bother to try to buy it, since it is long out of print. Over the years I struck up relationship with a fellow named Keith Ashfield at Humanity Books in New York and he seemed to really like my writing, so he published several of my other efforts, notably Native American Worldviews, which I am happy to say got several good reviews by anthropologists. Humanity Books also published my Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor. About that same time the University of Arizona Press editor became quite excited about my If A Chimpanzee Could Talk, a collection of essays about language acquisition.

     My Ph.D. dissertation on the thought of Ian Ramsey an Oxford Professor was published by Sheldon Press in London and that was a fine opportunity for me to dedicate it to my Professor who had become a good friend. Along the way I made friends with David Ray Griffin a scholar and Professor at the Claremont Graduate School and Editor of the SUNY University Press series on Process Philosophy. He agreed to publish my book on Michael Polanyi’s thought in that series. This meant a lot to me because I had come to see Polanyi as one of the foremost thinkers of the Twentieth Century.

            There have been a few other publications, but the most important and the one with the most interesting story was what I consider my most significant book, Mediated Transcendence. I had submitted the manuscript to Mercer University Press and waited over a year to hear from them. I wrote to them, because I had heard that they had hired a new editor, one Susan Carini, but she had no record of their office ever having received what I considered to be my most important work. A few months later my wife Mari and I were driving to Florida and stopped bye at the Mercer University Press office in Georgia to inquire further. Although they did have a record of my submission, they did not know what had happened to it.

After a diligent search Susan Carini found my manuscript behind several others on the bottom shelf of her office bookcase. Needless to say, she was very upset and apologetic. It seems that the previous editor had set my manuscript aside and it had been essentially “lost”.  Susan gave the manuscript to the head of the Philosophy Department at Mercer University and asked him to read it soon. He did so and concluded that not only was it well written, but it was very clearly worthy of publication. So, the next year Mediated Transcendence, was published and has been deemed worthy of careful study by a number of scholars. So, as you can see, it always pays to follow up on every lead when tracking down your own scholarly hunches. Be sure to follow up every contact and to “pick up every stich.”           

I’m so sorry to prolong this but I just realized that I have failed to mention perhaps my most important book, The Enduring Questions, an anthology introducing the major issues and thinkers in philosophy for introductory courses and published by Wadsworth. When in graduate school one of my professors was Melvin Rader, a well-known scholar and political activist. I used his book by the above-mentioned name for several years during my early years as a professor. Years later a travelling book salesman informed me that the book had gone out of print and the editor was looking for someone to re-edit it. I offered to submit a proposal as to how it should be done. Lo and behold, my proposal was chosen from among several others, and I went on to do three more editions of Professor Rader’s fine book. This was the only book I ever made any real money on because it became very popular. Unfortunately, this book too has gone out of print. I was very honored to have been chosen to edit it and to have it be so successful.