Pressing matters: A Q&A with new Yale University Press director Niko Pfund

On July 1, Niko Pfund assumed the directorship of Yale University Press, succeeding John Donatich, who led the book publisher — among the world’s oldest and largest academic presses — for more than two decades before retiring last June.

A veteran of scholarly publishing, Pfund joined from Oxford University Press, where he worked in New York as global academic publisher and president of Oxford’s U.S. division.

In this Q&A, he discusses his early months at Yale, the special role of university presses, the value of strong book titles, a recent Press bestseller, and how he’s been thinking about AI. He also shares the benefits of his (flexible) one-book-in, one-book-out rule at home.

We met in his high-ceilinged, book-lined (of course) office in the Press’s headquarters across from the New Haven Green.

The conversation, from late September, has been condensed and edited.

Does this feel like your office yet?

Niko Pfund: It certainly feels like my professional home. In terms of being in New Haven, in terms of the welcome that I’ve received, it’s been extraordinary. I’m struck by how enthusiastic everybody seems to be about being at Yale. I was saying to my boss the other day that I was worried that she might think I’m undiscerning because I feel like I’m just moving from highlight to highlight. 

I saw the recent New York Times Book Review of “Storyteller,” Leo Damrosch’s new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, just out from Yale. That must have been a pleasant surprise.

Pfund: Damrosch is what is known in publishing as a house author, having published several books with us. As the saying goes, we want to publish authors, not only books. And Leo Damrosch embodies that as well as anyone. In addition to its scholarly contributions, a book like “Storyteller” serves to reintroduce the author of “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” and “[Strange Case of] Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” to a new generation of readers.

I imagine appearing in traditional book reviews, especially well-known ones, is still valuable to publishers and to authors, even in the age of BookTok and celebrity booklists.

Pfund: This is a Yale Press book [gestures] — “Anger, Fear, Domination,” by Bill Galston— about dark passions and politics. David Brooks just devoted a full page in The New York Times to the ideas in this book. That kind of attention serves as a launching pad of sorts, a springboard, for further reviews. Our job as publishers is to signal boost the arguments and the research of our authors, and you have to figure out how to do that in as effective and persuasive way as possible. And nothing is more effective than the sincere engagement of critics and opinion makers. You want a provocative encounter between a reviewer and a book, between a prospective reader and a book. And a good, strong title does a lot of that work for you, so that’s the first step. 

Authors must sometimes come to the publisher with not just an idea for the title of their book but a fairly deep emotional investment in that title…

Pfund: Absolutely. A French sociologist I published years ago advocated doggedly for the phrase “Ethnographic Notebooks” in the subtitle. Another author, a biographer, was adamant about including the word “lachrymose” in his title. Ethnographies are a marvelous form of scholarship, and lachrymose seems to me almost onomatopoeic in its evocation of sadness. But those words are, for a trade audience, like garlic to a vampire. Most general interest readers don’t know what ethnography is. Our job as publishers is often to mediate, to serve as interlocutors of a sort, between the book-reading public and our authors, and to do that in a way that doesn’t vulgarize the work but makes it accessible and inviting.

Even though you’re running an entire organization, it sounds like you get in the weeds as you need to.

Pfund: That’s one of the genuinely fun things about this job. The heart of any book publishing house is the editorial meeting. In these meetings, we are hopscotching back and forth between arts, humanities, science, social science, law, and across a wide range of subjects, from art and architecture to history and politics, and you accordingly draw on the brain trust of the Press, on this collection of subjectivities, and through conversation and debate arrive at a consensus. The metaphor I constantly return to is the marketplace of ideas: a bazaar of sorts whereby competing ideas and perspectives collide, with ideally the most persuasive winning out, regardless of who’s making the argument. That, to me, is an unfailingly interesting process.

More generally, my responsibility here is to position the Press for the future, so that it can continue to do what it has done so well in an era where the monolithic nature of print, which governed everything in publishing for half a millennium, has fragmented within 25 years into not just different formats — audio, e-books, et cetera — but different models — open access, inclusive access, all these different means of spreading the word about your content. I think the biggest challenge is going to be ensuring that we are providing the work of our authors to as many people in as many formats and via as many models as we can, while remaining self-sustaining.

You have spent most of your career at university presses: Oxford, NYU, now here. How do you see the role of the university press in today’s broader publishing ecosystem?

Pfund: The thing that animates me as much as anything these days is that university presses, of which there are about 160 worldwide, remain unapologetically and earnestly committed to trying to discover and reveal the truth, to shed light on our world. This of course dovetails perfectly with Yale’s motto of “lux et veritas.” There is no ideological project at work. As mirrors of the academy, they should have no ideology themselves beyond the foundational academic values that inform colleges and universities. When I was an editor at NYU, I commissioned a collection of essays expressing skepticism about hate speech codes, which one of the professors there objected to as one-sided. I encouraged him to consider a volume of essays coming at the issue from a different perspective, and an entire book series came from that conversation. 

People like me who run these institutions steward them for a relatively short period of time, so it is critical to adhere to core principles. And those core principles revolve around the peer review process, which is, again, a marketplace of ideas. Before any book is placed under contract, we solicit a variety of pre-publication reviews from experts in the field, which are then considered by both the Press and its publications committee. To be clear, when you go to three people and you ask them for their opinion of a work, what you’re getting is a cross-section of expert subjectivities, and your role, as publisher, is to smooth those into some form of consensus, or at least a general assessment of the project’s importance and contribution.

You’re referring to faculty, scholars, on whom you draw to help review the manuscripts.

Pfund: Exactly. We are generalists as publishers. We must, as university presses, rely on the specialized expertise of scholars to help us assess manuscripts. There’s also a hidden aspect to this: let’s say there are six university presses involved in a bid — California, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, NYU, and Yale — and three commercial houses. And a commercial house ends up landing the project. Regardless of who publishes it, that manuscript has benefited from, probably, eight to 10 pre-publication reviews commissioned by the university presses. That all accrues to the benefit of the book, and of its commercial publisher. Now, this isn’t intended as sour grapes, as moaning about capitalist competition, but it is to highlight this invisible dividend that university presses — and, crucially, scholars — provide to serious non-fiction publishing.

You have known about this press for a long time. You’re on the inside now. What matches the impression that you had? And what’s come as a surprise?

Pfund: I’ve arrived at Yale just as there’s been this notable convergence of good news. We just finished a great sales year. Our new distribution relationship with Norton is off to a good start. Shortly after I started, one of our books made it onto the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for five weeks. We just learned that we have a long-list finalist for the National Book Award [Hamid Ismailov’s novel “We Computers,” subsequently named one of five short-list finalists]. I feel like at some point, my honeymoon will come to an end, but in the meantime, there’s been a lot of things that have come together that have worked out really nicely. And which I feel I can unabashedly brag about since I personally had nothing to do with them. 

What I’ve been unsurprised by is the amount of care that is devoted to the books and the authors. This is a press that is renowned for being very focused not just on publishing influential books but on making beautiful books. Directly behind you, there are many such. This is “Ambigrammia,” by Douglas Hofstadter, the author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach.” It’s a book about language, about cognition. It’s a very unusual book, and it is spectacularly produced.

What I also thought coming in, and continue to think, is that Yale has a very broad-ranging publishing portfolio. And when you work at a university press, one of the things you always have to be conscious of is, in Yale’s case, the middle word in your name: We are a component of Yale University, and so we want to make sure that everything that we’re doing reflects well on the university, and ideally reflects the university’s strengths and focus.

Once I’m a bit more familiar with the list, I will start thinking, where are we from a strategic standpoint? What are the areas that we really want to be pushing hard on and into? And how do those reflect market realities, how competitive are they, how do they reflect academic demographics in terms of Ph.D.s being offered, in terms of courses taught, and how do they reflect the strengths of Yale University?

One constant has been that I’ve always thought Yale punched above its weight in terms of the media attention its books receive, and that belief continues to be borne out.

Mindful of what you have just said about the work to come, have you identified anything that you see as a clear opportunity for the Press?

Pfund: I’m interested in how we can reach as many people as possible through technology. Today’s multitude of formats enables that in a way no single format can. That then immediately begs the question of when you yourself as a publisher sell directly to a reader or “end user,” as we now say, and when you need to rely on an intermediary that is better positioned to reach a particular audience via a particular format. For instance — “The Encyclopedia of New York City” [gestures to giant volume on table] is a definitive resource about New York. It is something that has value beyond its print edition, its nine-pound physical heft, right? There are limitations to this book sitting here as it does. So, for me, the question is, how can we liberate it, how can we get this content to inform as many databases and products, as many people who are looking for information about New York City as possible. Are there ways in which we can work with partners, whether tech companies, database publishers, non-English language publishers, to ensure that our books are getting to as many people as possible?

You are undertaking a major digitization project this year. As I understand it, you’re basically digitizing print titles in your catalog going all the way back to the Press’s founding in 1908. What can you tell us?

Pfund: This project preceded my arrival, and we’ve prioritized it in recent months. An ancillary benefit of such digitization projects is that you can then often revive deep backlist books via print-on-demand technology. 

I imagine one topic that must be on your mind, as it’s on the minds of almost everyone in every field, is AI and how that might influence book publishing.

Pfund: There’s been a variety of practices so far with regard to how publishers are thinking about engaging with AI companies. We’ve made the decision that if we do so, we will do it in conjunction with our authors, that we will approach our authors and indicate to them what we intend. Make clear to them that we will not allow their books to be used for training large language models if they object to it. That said, this is a perfect illustration of what I was saying about working with partners to ensure wide dissemination: From a mission-based standpoint, I think it’s our responsibility to try to ensure the work of our authors is helping to influence something that is already redefining the information and education landscape.

You referred earlier to a recent bestseller, a reissue of “A Little History of the United States,” part of the Press’s popular Little Histories series. What is the role of series in a publisher’s list? And do you imagine starting new series?

Pfund: I’m a big fan of series — but I’m a big fan of series that have a beginning and middle and an end. It’s really important when you launch a series to think about what the intellectual contours of the series are up front, what purpose it is serving, and then to build in stage gates, ideally once a year, where you assess how it’s going, on academic grounds, intellectual grounds, commercial grounds. And then to be willing to change course or even back away from it if it has outlived its usefulness.

The Little Histories series is wonderful because its success becomes a magnet for authors who want to contribute a volume.

Do you have a particular system or organizing principle for your books at home?

Pfund: Our living room is not unlike this office in that most of the wall space basically consists of books. And it’s divided into fiction and nonfiction, and then in the basement is basically a giant repository of what might be called genre. And that has nothing to do with relegating genre to the basement, but simply because the bookshelf size made this a logical approach. One of the principles that we try to live by, because we live in a small row house in Brooklyn, is the one-book-in, one-book-out rule. We don’t live rigidly by it, but we do occasional purgings. And even though that’s painful, one of the things that you end up with is an incredibly tight book collection. One of the joys of walking through our living room is just having my eyes float across the spines and it’s like a visual autobiography. Whether it’s books that I edited, whether it’s books that I published, whether it’s books that have influenced me, you know, every spine has resonance. Living in a house without books would be like living in a house without furniture. 

What about your interests outside the world of books?

Pfund: I like to go places I’ve not been before. I love the water, and fishing. I run and walk a lot. I grew up partially in Germany, and we spent a lot of time roaming around Europe during the summers, and that instilled in me a love of travel, of new places. [My wife] Amanda and I went to Belize for the first time several years ago and have been back every year, to different parts of it, just because we like it so much. I also like putting myself into unfamiliar social situations and seeing what comes of it.

Is there a book from early in your life that you feel has had an especially lasting impression on you?

Pfund: I read “The Bluest Eye” and “Sula” by Tony Morrison when I was in college, and that ended up being the driving force behind my thesis on her in 1987. Before that I became enraptured by the work of a Polish journalist named Ryszard Kapuściński. He had personally witnessed 26 revolutions or civil wars. That struck me as a pretty compelling way to spend your time (and I’d probably seen “The Year of Living Dangerously” one too many times), and fueled my early desire to become a foreign correspondent. When I got out of college, I applied for an internship with [late New York Times correspondent and editor] R.W. Apple Jr., and my candidacy was moving forward when the Times canceled the internship.

Sorry about that. But maybe the world of book publishing is the better for it?

Pfund: Well, I likely wouldn’t be sitting here now talking to you if that had worked out, so no complaints. 

One of the things about book publishing is that it’s always seen as inherently precarious, as this industry on the brink of catastrophe, of disintermediation, of technology-fueled irrelevance. And yet we persist.