Madam, - Mary Leland's valuable article on the difficulties faced by academic publishing (Arts, May 31st) paints too bleak a picture of the recent history of Cork University Press. While we have reduced our output from a very high level of 30 titles a year, we have never been reduced to "an enterprise alive in name only".
Instead, we have continued to publish a significant amount of new work, particularly across the field of Irish Studies, and to the same high standards of academic peer review, design and production that Sara Wilbourne established. While we lost editorial staff, we retained a first-class production, sales and marketing team, who have played a major role in turning the press around financially.
Nor do we think that the level of support we have had from UCC should be described in terms of "parsimony". The university carried the press through very difficult times and continues to support us at a time when university funding has come under huge pressure. Indeed, UCC should be seen as a model for other universities in its support for academic publishing.
Finally, I would not like your readers to think that we were publishing books only on Cork this year, as some readers may have inferred. In addition to the titles mentioned by Mary Leland, we have just published Peter McQuillan's Native and Natural: aspects of the concepts of "right" and "freedom" in Irish, in our Critical Conditions/Field Day series. This week we will launch Elaine Sissons's Pearse's Patriots: St Endas and the Cult of Boyhood.
Next week Seamus Deane will launch Clare O'Halloran's Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian debate and cultural politics in Ireland, c. 1750-1800. On the same night, as our contribution to Bloomsday, we are launching two new titles in our Ireland into Film series, Margot Norris on Ulysses and Gerardine Meaney on Nora.
In July, Billy Colfer's The Hook Peninsula will appear, the latest in our major series on the Irish landscape, while in September we publish Finola O'Kane's Landscape Design in 18th-Century Ireland. We are proud to be publishing a collection of essays on Edmund Burke by Seamus Deane in August, and in July and December we bring out two new issues of The Irish Review.
I hope this will reassure readers that Cork University Press remains an important and vibrant presence in Irish publishing. - Yours, etc.,
TOM DUNNE,
Managing Editor,
Cork University Press,
Crosses Green,
Cork.