IU Press celebrates 60th anniversary

IU Press, considered one of the largest public university presses, turned 60 this year and plans to celebrate with customers around the world.

“Our customer base is all over the world,” said Laura Baich, electronic marketing manager at IU Press. “We do have a lot of local and regional interest, but really our books have a global reach.”

Since 1950, IU Press has been an award-winning academic publisher specializing in the humanities and social sciences. The company publishes about 140 new books each year and contains a backlist of about 2,000 titles.

Herman B Wells, IU’s 11th president, founded the press as part of IU’s post-war growth spurt.

“The press is another one of those many features of IU that is a consequence of Herman B Wells,” said James Madison, the Thomas and Kathryn Miller professor of history at IU. “It was Dr. Wells that made sure that the press was here. We owe him in many ways a great debt.”

To celebrate the anniversary, IU Press held a one-day-only online sale Feb. 17, the date Bernard Perry was hired 60 years ago as the first director of IU Press. The sale offered customers a 60 percent discount on all regularly priced books, journals and DVDs.

“We were actually totally surprised by the response we got,” Baich said. “It went really well.”

Baich said the company planned to have only one sale, but because of the overwhelming customer interest, it will hold another in the fall. However, the date of the second sale is yet to be determined.

IU Press also offered a contest, “60 Days of Giveaways,” on its blog. The trivia contest asked one question each day about the history of the press, and blog posts with the correct answer were given the chance to win a prize.

“It was my idea to do the trivia concepts to educate them about the history of the press,” Baich said. “I went through all these articles and brochures and catalogs and came up with the questions. I learned how other people view us. I learned a lot about where I live, too.”

Baich said she loves books and likes working around them.

“So obviously this is a great place for me,” she said. “I have a degree from IU in English, and I’m attracted to anything books. I applied for tons of jobs everywhere. It just luckily worked out that this was the place that first wanted to take a chance on me.”

Madison began working with the press about 30 years ago and has published five books through the company. He has also served on numerous committees for the press, including the Press Advisory Committee, which helps the director and staff consider what books to publish and think about the subjects the press wants to emphasize.

“Among university presses, it’s really one of the largest and one of the best,” he said. “They do a good job of publishing books, of publishing good books, all of the things to an author that are very important.”

Madison said his experience with the press overall has been a good one.

“They’re good people who really care about books, who really care about scholarship,” he said. “This is about new knowledge, which is really what scholarship is. Communicating new knowledge to readers — that’s what’s important to me and other authors. That’s why you want a good press, because that’s what they do.”