Perspective: A hipper university press

b.) Casanova Was a Book Lover: And Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities About the Writing, Selling and Reading of Books by John Maxwell Hamilton

c.) Getting Naked With Harry Crews by Erik Bledsoe

The answer? All of the above.

Long known for publishing heavily footnoted tomes written in academese on "very important topics," the once stodgy university presses obviously are getting hipper. Esoteric fare such as On the Purity of Logic by Walter Burley, the first complete English translation of a handbook of logic written in Latin by a 14th century English philosopher (coming out from Yale University Press this fall) still prevail. But more and more titles with greater mass-appeal, including coffee table books, collections of journalists' columns and even cookbooks, are cropping up on university press lists. And they are being read by more than just a roomful of professors. Even the more scholarly books offered by these campus-bound presses often are being packaged for maximum commercial impact. This week Columbia University, for example, is publishing a feminist dissection of the Starr Report, the document that almost brought down a president. Its titilating title? The Starr Report Disrobed (see review below).

The all-time bestselling title at the University Press of Florida still is a classic classroom textbook: Critical Theory Since 1965 by Hazard Adams. But lately the Gainesville-based press has been finding success with far less stuffy titles. Since its publication in 1995, The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook by Adela Hernandez Gonzmart has sold 20,000 copies for the press, a huge success for most campus presses. Getting Naked With Harry Crews, an anthology of interviews with the popular Florida author, and Kick Ass, a collection of Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen's newspaper articles, both published at the end of last year, are not far behind.

In May Louisiana State University Press, the publisher of the Casanova book on our list, published Still Waters, a collection of photographs by C.C. Lockwood. Although Lockwood is based in Baton Rouge, his stunning color photographs of flora and fauna across the globe have a national audience. Still Waters, a retrospective of Lockwood's work, collects "the best 100" in a lavishly produced oversize volume.

Journalists, who are not exactly big on footnotes, are suddenly proving popular at university presses. The University Press of Florida is preparing a collection of columns by feisty St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell for next fall's list. The University of Alabama Press has just published Somebody Told Me, the often moving newspaper stories of Rick Bragg, a former St. Petersburg Times reporter who is now Miami bureau chief for the New York Times.

Howell Raines, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, is a featured writer in The Crimson Tide: An Illustrated History of Football at the University of Alabama by Winston Groom of Forrest Gump fame, due out next month from the University of Alabama Press. Other contributors are announcer Keith Jackson and authors Gay Talese and the late Willie Morris. Meanwhile in October the Texas A&M University Press will be publishing Finding Celia's Place, a memoir by Willie Morris' first wife, a feminist activist who previously has published with Little Brown and Scribner. And the Alabama press is reissuing Raines' debut novel, Whiskey Man, about a boy in Depression-era Alabama.

More and more fiction writers, particularly mid-list authors abandoned by the bigger publishers, are finding a welcome mat at university presses. Ohio University Press has even started its own mystery series. Striking out with commercial publishers, P.L. Gaus, a chemistry professor at the College of Wooster, found a natural home at the Ohio University Press for his series set amid the Old Order Amish sects in Holmes County, Ohio, says press director David Sanders. The series makes the world of the Ohio Amish accessible to people in a way a scholarly treatment can't, says Sanders. The first book, Blood of the Prodigal, was launched last year with a state-wide author tour, a marketing effort that paid off in sales. The second, Broken English, published this year, went into a second printing even before its official publication date.

Publishing nearly 9,000 books a year or roughly 17 percent of all U.S. books, the 120 or so university presses have long been subsidized by their parent organizations. But by venturing into general interest as well as regional titles, they are becoming profitable businesses that no longer have to rely on the largesse of the universities that spawned them. That is making them not only more daring -- and more fun.

"With a successful program, we are funding our own growth," says Meredith Morris-Babb, editor-in-chief of the University Press of Florida, although she adds modestly, "We don't consider ourselves a national trade house -- yet."

Such lofty aspirations are not so far-fetched though. University presses have been known to hit the national jackpot. Twenty years ago Louisiana State University Press took a chance on a novel brought to its offices by the mother of an author who had committed suicide 11 years earlier at the age of 32. The manuscript had been rejected by a slew of other publishers, including Simon & Schuster.

It was a lucky move for LSU press. John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces went on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and sell 1.5-million copies worldwide. The novel, featuring the pompous and overweight Ignatius who lives with his mother in New Orleans, still sells 50,000 copies each year for LSU press. This year the press is celebrating the hardcover edition's 20th anniversary with a new edition, featuring an introduction by National Public Radio commentator and author Andrei Codrescu supplies a new introduction to go along with Walker Percy's original foreword.

And there's not a footnote in sight.

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