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UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OF MISSISSIPPI
INSIDE
President’s Letter
Page 2
What’s in a Blog?
Page 2
Director’s Note
Page 3
Great Publicity
Page 3
Change Your Life!
Page 3
Spice Up Your Reading!
Page 4
BOOKFRIENDS
NEWSLETTER / Spring 2008
Fervor surrounding Egg Bowl clash powers
successful road trip for author William G. Barner
Nine days before the annual fracas
between State and Ole Miss, University Press launched a five-city
signing tour for The Egg Bowl that
included prominent store ads and
special promotional notices.
Visiting Tupelo and Gum Tree
Bookstore in Reed’s Department
Store was like old home week.
Fresh out of college, I had worked
five years in Tupelo for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal as a
cub reporter/photographer. Fortunately enough people remembered
my writing, and we had a warm reunion.
In Oxford, Off-Square Books’
signs enticed enough enthusiastic
football fans anticipating the next
day’s big LSU game to come inside
for a busy signing.
Greenwood’s Turnrow Books is
in a converted department store,
and it is beautiful.
BOOKFRIENDS Sunday evening
party at the beautiful Jackson home
of Susie and John Puckett was impressive. Among the approximately
sixty members of BOOKFRIENDS
were former Governors Ray Mabus
and William Winter, author of The
Measure of Our Days for University
Press.
Former lettermen guests were:
(Above) Author William G. Barner with Harper Davis, Mississippi State
1945–1948 (left) and Billy Stacy, Mississippi State 1956–1958 (center).
From State—HB Harper Davis, 1945–
48; FB/LB Joe Fortunato, 1950–52;
and QB Billy Stacy, 1956–58, and from
Ole Miss—HB/FB Laverne (Showboat)
Boykin, 1949–51, and FB Billy Ray Adams, 1959–61.
BOOKFRIENDS President David
Bowen, whose courses at State are always popular, did a great job of keeping the evening’s activities moving.
An appearance on Wilson Stribling’s “Mid-Day Mississippi” (WLBTTV) spread the word further on The
Egg Bowl. Then at Jackson’s Lemuria
a fascinating discussion of the rivalry
with fans made that evening’s appearance lively.
In Starkville, many fans seeking
warmth in Barnes & Noble Bookstore,
next to the Mississippi State stadium,
bought The Egg Bowl while waiting for
the actual Egg Bowl to start.
At each city on the tour, a stack of
autographed copies remained behind
as reserved copies for customers to
pick up later.
—Bill Barner, author of The Egg Bowl:
Mississippi State vs. Ole Miss
Four reasons to visit the University Press’s website
Not a regular visitor to the University
Press’s website at www.upress.state.
ms.us?
You’re missing out in at least four
ways!
Download Flyers
Right now you can download
our African American Studies flyer
as a 2 Megabyte PDF. “The Movement, the Music, the Miracles” and
a special offer are accessible via
a link on our home page. Look for
the image pictured at right. If you
despise downloads or dread your
dialup connection, call us for a copy
at 601.432.6205.
And keep visiting. In the fall we’ll
have available a tremendous flyer featuring our many Conversations with
Filmmakers titles and books in film
studies.
Check the Blog
At http://upmississippi.blogspot.
com/ we ask authors to open their
books to you. Or we ask our authors
questions, and the answers often reveal the intellectual and creative life
behind the making of a book. Please
see an example reprinted on page 2
under the headline “What’s in a blog?”
Join Email Insiders
You can join email listservs that
relay twenty-four different categories
of news about UPM’s books. We tailor
these messages to let insiders know
of publicity breaks, special offers,
blog entries, and many other book
happenings. Please check the categories at http://www.upress.state.
ms.us/about/booknews to find a fit
for your tastes.
Recruit another BOOKFRIEND
For those in BOOKFRIENDS looking to bring a like-minded acolyte into
the fold, the website has something
for you. This BOOKFRIENDS newsletter will be posted at http://www.
upress.state.ms.us/files/Bookfriends
Newsletter.pdf. Why not send the
link to a prospective BOOKFRIEND
today?
on SAle now!
AfricAn AmericAn StudieS
the movement, the music, the miracles
University Press of Mississippi
The Right Place for a Great Read
2008 Board of Directors
BOOKFRIENDS
Ouida Drinkwater, President
Judy Wiener, Vice President
Frank Alley, Treasurer
Elizabeth Alley Robert McArthur
David Bowen Nora Frances McRae
Jean Medley
Ann Brock
Jim Palmer
Preston Hays
Susie Puckett
Jane Hiatt
Elizabeth Raulston
Betty Hise
Sister Simmons
Elta Johnston
Ward Sumner
Howard Jones
Jan Taylor
Harriet Kuykendall
Susan Turner
Linda Lambeth
Deery Walker
Coleman Lowery
From the 2007 President of BOOKFRIENDS
I am delighted to have had the opportunity to serve as president of BOOKFRIENDS during the past year, and I
appreciate the friendship and support
from board, staff, and BOOKFRIENDS
members, who did much to help make
2007 a successful year for the University Press of Mississippi.
We will all carry with us a deep
respect and appreciation for the cultural, artistic, and intellectual contributions made to our state by UPM.
The high point of my term as president was our fall membership party,
hosted by Susie and John Puckett,
with Bill Barner’s book, The Egg Bowl,
as the centerpiece. Preparing for that
event, I learned much more about college and professional football than I
ever expected to, receiving a large
collection of newspaper clippings
and football data from the honorees
at our party. I had an enjoyable job
editing that material and interviewing
the players so that I could introduce
them.
I want to thank BOOKFRIENDS
members for their participation and,
from the board, Susan Turner and
her organizing committee who, along
with the UPM staff, worked so hard to
make our party a success.
Especially, however, I know all of
you join me in giving a warm and grateful “Congratulations and well done!” to
the director of the University Press of
Mississippi, Seetha Srinivasan, who
has done so much for the Press, for
BOOKFRIENDS, and for the state of
Mississippi.
After thirty years on the staff and
ten years as director, Seetha has
richly earned a long and enjoyable
retirement beginning on June 30. We
know that she will continue to make a
significant contribution to the cultural
life of Mississippi.
David Bowen
What’s in a blog?
Here are samples of what you’re missing if you’re not checking our blog at
http://upmississippi.blogspot.com.
Gardening Tips from Jo Kellum
Jo Kellum is a freelance garden
writer and landscape architect. Most
recently she has published Southern
Sun: A Plant Selection Guide and
Southern Shade: A Plant Selection
Guide. Both books are now available
from UPM.
Jo recently clued us in on the challenges that face Southern gardeners
and the best way to overcome the climate we live in.
Read below for her gardening tips.
Why is gardening in the South different than other parts of the country?
Sunlight in the South varies greatly
in intensity from winter to summer and
even from morning to afternoon. This
fact alone makes many national gardening resources less useful for Southern gardeners, as advice that ignores
this little truth, is advice of limited
value. Whether first-time yard owners
or experienced gardeners, Southerners need to
know which plants thrive
within which set of distinctly Southern conditions.
Knowing what we want
plants to do for us, how
big plants become, what
shape they grow, and
what conditions are
agreeable to them, are
critical to successfully
putting the right plant in
the right place. Gardening
in the South is quite a
beautiful challenge.
What advice would you give to
Southern gardeners?
The advice I’d give to new gardeners
is to consider the landscape as an ex-
tension of the house. In doing so, they
can learn to choose plants to fulfill functions just as they select furniture, artwork, paint colors, and rugs to do
certain things for the insides of their
homes. Next, I’d say, get to know the
conditions within your own yard. Are
you willing to make changes to make
challenging areas more hospitable to
plants, or do you need to choose plants
that can thrive in existing conditions?
Southern gardeners particularly need
to pay attention to sun and shade at
different times of day and within different seasons.
What is the most common mistake
amateur gardeners make?
The most common mistake among
amateur gardeners is making plant
selection decisions based on what’s
for sale on a given day at a given nursery. That’s how homeowners end up
with too much variety and not enough
unity in their yards, overgrown plants,
and plants that die because they’re not
right for the conditions where they’ve
been stuck in the
ground.
BOOKFRIENDS surround Billy Ray Adams (Fullback, Ole Miss, 1959–1961)
for an autograph at the Fall membership party that Susie and John Puckett
hosted in their Jackson home. BOOKFRIENDS buying The Egg Bowl: Mississippi State vs. Ole Miss at the party received author William G. Barner’s
signature and autographs from five State and Ole Miss football greats.
What is BOOKFRIENDS?
BOOKFRIENDS is a diverse group of readers, authors, bibliophiles, and
friends who believe books bring the best to one’s life and who wish to foster
the goals of University Press of Mississippi.
How can I join?
Call 601.432.6205 or email [email protected] for information.
When is the next event?
BOOKFRIENDS will sponsor a reception for the new book Growing Up in
Mississippi, edited by Judy H. Tucker and Charline R. McCord at Lemuria
Books in Jackson, Thursday, May 29, at 5 p.m.
Director’s note
Over the years, University Press of
Mississippi (UPM) has had the privilege of publishing work by such distinguished writers as Eudora Welty,
Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Douglas,
Ellen Gilchrist, Willie Morris, and
Stephen Ambrose. This spring Nobel
laureate Toni Morrison was added to
the list. In March, the press released
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, the first collection of
the novelist’s thoughts on a range of
subjects. Morrison is a public intellectual as well as a writer of fiction,
and What Moves at the Margin is
rewarding reading on a number of
levels, not the least being the quality
of the prose.
This spring two UPM books (Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe
Töpffer and Rodolphe Töpffer: The
Complete Comic Strips) and their
author David Kunzle were the focus
of a symposium at New York’s Parsons The New School for Design.
The books also brought another
“first” for the press when they were
reviewed in the New Yorker (26 November 2007).
As always, UPM seasonal catalogs feature a variety of general interest and scholarly titles with different
levels of appeal for regional and national markets, and I hope that readers will view the list for spring 2008
on our website.
KUDOS for UPM Books
I draw attention to the press’s
spring 2008 list with mixed emotions, for it is the last one with which
I will be directly associated. In June
I will retire from UPM, after almost
twenty-nine years of service. During this time, I have seen the press
grow from publishing about eight
titles a year with revenues of about
$180,000 to publishing sixty-five titles with revenues of over $2 million.
The press is strong in every aspect
and is nationally recognized. Every
time a book goes out into the world
with “UPM” on the spine, it makes a
powerful statement about intellectual
and creative activity in the state. The
press enjoys strong support among
its many constituencies and is fortunate to have a group such as BOOKFRIENDS who take an active interest
in its work. Thanks to the generosity
of BOOKFRIENDS and community
leaders, UPM has built an endowment valued at $2.5 million.
I feel singularly fortunate to have
worked at UPM these many years,
and my sadness at leaving is tempered by my great pleasure at the
stature of the press. I thank each and
every one of our supporters for what
they have done to make our successes possible.
Seetha Srinivasan, Director
University Press of Mississippi
O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
Page 188 of the April 2008 issue
of O: The Oprah Magazine carries a
review and the
cover image of
What Moves
at the Margin: Selected
Nonfiction by
Toni Morrison
in the section
called Biblio.
O: The Oprah Magazine says:
“Witty! Profound! Passionate!”
“Three brilliant writers have their
say. [Others reviewed are Michael
Chabon and Martin Amis]
“Toni Morrison could scribble on a
napkin, and we would read it hungrily.
The essays collected in What Moves
at the Margin (University Press of
Mississippi) may be modest efforts,
but they reflect a lifetime of passionate
engagement with our ‘star-spangled,’
‘race-strangled,’ America.
‘Literature,
sensitive as a
tuning fork, is
an unblinking
witness to the
light and shade
of the world
we live in,’ she
writes—heady music, fired by conviction, that keeps us reading for dear
life.”
O: The Oprah Magazine boasts a
circulation of 2,382,917 according to
ADWEEK.
BOOKFORUM
The front cover of the April/May
2008 BOOKFORUM, the heady companion to New York’s tony ARTFORUM, features comics artist Chris
Ware writing on “The Genius of Rodolphe Töpffer.” Inside Ware, creator
of the famous graphic novel Jimmy
Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth,
writes glowingly and at length about
University Press of Mississippi’s Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe
Töpffer and Rodolphe Töpffer: The
Complete Comic Strips. Ware writes
“Kunzle has returned to the discipline
he helped to found with not one but
two marvelous
books that focus
on the life and
work of Töpffer,
who. . . was the
first to codify the
visual language
of the comic
strip.” Ware goes
on to say “these
two remarkable books. . . should be
considered an indispensable part of
any art or literature library.”
Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete
Comic Strips was also reviewed in
the Washington Post Book World and
the New Yorker. And the New Yorker
reviewed Father of the Comic Strip:
Rodolphe Töpffer as well.
See Kudos, page 4
Want to Change Your Life? Open a Bookstore!
By Laura Weeks
Lorelei Books, Vicksburg
The construction dust had barely
settled when Lorelei Books opened
its doors for business in November
of 2006. My husband and I planned
on a 180-degree lifestyle shift when
we moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi,
from the Hampton Roads metro area
of Virginia. We looked forward to living in a smaller, less transient community located in the Deep South.
We were also intent on spending
less time in our cars.
We purchased an 1870s building
in Vicksburg’s historic downtown and
got right to work with renovations.
The end result was a 1600 square
foot loft apartment with a bookstore
below it. Traveling the 22-step staircase from loft to bookstore is a welcome change from the 40-minute,
one-way commute of my past!
The effort put forth by the city
administration and private citizens
to revitalize its historic downtown
played a critical role in our decision
to relocate to Vicksburg. The addition of an independent bookstore
was viewed by many as downtown
Vicksburg’s missing ingredient. Lorelei Books filled its niche among the
restaurants, museums, art galleries,
coffee houses, and antique shops
already lining Washington Street.
The first publisher to call on Lorelei Books was University Press
of Mississippi. UPM’s Marketing
Director, Steve Yates, visited in the
midst of construction mayhem and
remains in close contact two years
later. Steve helped us coordinate our
first author event. Several months
later, our bookstore was filled to
capacity for the sell-out signing of
UPM’s Katrina: Mississippi Women
Remember.
While the building was under renovation, I joined the American Book-
sellers Association and visited Mississippi’s independent bookstores.
Fellow ABA members have sent
plenty of good advice and authors
our way. The bookends received as
an “open for business” gift from our
friends at Square Books perfectly illustrate the esprit de corps among
independent booksellers.
Although Vicksburg is a popular
tourist destination, its strong suit
for Lorelei Books is local patronage.
Many Vicksburgers are committed
to first checking with the mom-andpop businesses before turning to
chain or internet retailers.
It’s no secret that the odds are
against independent booksellers,
but our optimism is bolstered by
the great people we meet on this
journey. A community which shops
local, independent booksellers who
support each other, and publishers
who value small bookstores become
the intangible rewards of a tough job.
Troy and Laura Weeks on the sales
floor in Lorelei Books, Vicksburg
Look for Lorelei Books
and other Mississippi
Literary Links
at http://www.upress.state.ms.us/
special/ms_literary_links
From sense of place to
spiced-up reading
As a BOOKFRIEND, you may have
noticed that for a year or so UPM
attaches a consistent phrase to advertisements, order forms, exhibit
backdrops, flyers, and even outgoing
staff email messages.
Our first campaign theme, “Refine your reading,” was replaced by
“Live to Read. Read to Live,” inspired
while promoting the Harley-driven
Bike Week
at Daytona
Beach: Bad
Boys and
Fancy Toys.
New Walter
Anderson
titles
and
DUNLAP prompted the next campaign phrase, “The Art of a Good
Read.”
These campaign themes percolate
from staff
interaction
with books.
Sometimes
the slogans
snap to in
a flash. In
other years,
the words are batted around until they
meld.
Our most recent campaign phrase
arrived by that process. Several
books that
celebrated
Mississippi’s sense
of place—
Must See
Missismust see mississippi
sippi: 50
Favorite
Places for example—advanced under
the catch phrase “The Right Place for
a Great Read.”
Books coming in the Fall of
2008 certainly carry sense of place
forward. Statewide, booksellers are
already buzzing about Jane Rule
Burdine’s upcoming photography
book Delta Deep Down.
But with the success of TABASCO: An Illustrated History and such
forthcoming titles as You Are Where
You Eat: Stories and Recipes from
the Neighborhoods
of New Orleans; New
Orleans
Cuisine:
Fourteen
Signature
Dishes and
Their Histories; and Garlic Capital
of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the
Making of a Festive Foodscape we
have to indulge a little. TABASCO:
SPICE UP
An Illustrated
YOUR READING
HIstory in hand,
wIth
how could we
resist launching
our lines under the phrase:
“Spice Up Your
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Reading!”
OF MISSISSIPPI
50 FaVoriTe PlaCes
TexT by
Mary Carol Miller
PhoTograPhs by
Mary rose CarTer
inTroduCTion by
greg iles
University Press
of Mississippi
3825 Ridgewood Road
Jackson, MS 39211-6492
1-800-737-7788
www.upress.state.ms.us
Kudos Continued
VINTAGE GUITAR MAGAZINE
Luthiers and ax men take note:
the slick and much collected Vintage Guitar magazine heaped power
chords of praise on Jeffrey J. Noonan’s The Guitar in America: Victorian Era to Jazz Age in the June
2008 issue. Says Vintage, “In many
ways, the book
opens a new
chapter on the
guitar in America, considering its cultivated past and
documenting
how banjoists
and mandolinists aligned their instruments to it in
an effort to raise social and cultural
standing.”
THE NEW YORKER
And in the March 31 issue of the
New Yorker we were delighted to see
Louis Menand devote quite a chunk of
his article “THE HORROR: Congress
investigates the comics” to our book
Fredric Wertham and the Critique
of Mass Culture and the work of
author Bart Beaty. Wertham was the
prominent psychologist whose books
and later testimony before Congress
sparked “The Comics Code.”
Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture and University Press of Mississippi are prominently acknowledged by Menand at
the beginning of his use of Beaty’s
scholarship.
“Beaty,” Menand writes, “makes
a strong case for the revisionist position. As Beaty points out, Wertham
was not a philistine; he was a progressive intellectual.”
Menand leans on Beaty for almost all of his exploration of who
Wertham was and what Wertham
was trying to do when the psychologist wrote in concern about the pro-
liferation and repetition of sexualized
images of violence against women
in the horror comics. “Ultimately,”
Menand quotes Beaty from our book,
“Fredric Wertham aligned himself
with the most defenseless portion of
postwar American society, children.
His critics have aligned themselves
with an industry that targeted racist,
sexist, and imperialist propaganda at
minors.”
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Matthew Kennedy, author of the
biography Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes
(part of UPM’s
Hollywood Legends Series),
took the stage
at Manhattan’s
Museum
of
Modern Art. He
introduced several films that
feature what MoMA billed as the
“Bombshell from Ninety-first Street.”
The MoMA retrospective on this hardworking Hollywood legend ran December 19, 2007– January 1, 2008.
AWARDS
Four University Press of Mississippi titles have been named to the
latest Outstanding Academic Title list
from Choice. Organ Theft Legends;
Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie; Pearl Harbor Jazz: Change in Popular Music
in the Early 1940s; and Ragged
but Right: Black Traveling Shows,
“Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz all share this
distinct and select honor. These outstanding works have been selected
for their excellence in scholarship
and presentation, the significance
of their contribution to the field, and
their value as important—often the
first—treatments of their subjects.
Non-Profit Org.
U.S. Postage
PAID
Jackson, MS 39205
Permit No. 10