I was an editorial assistant in the books division of the University of Chicago Press for two and a half years, and for most of that time I was terrified of Susan Abrams. Actually, I was terrified in general. Publishing frequently feels like running for your life from a pack of minutiae: if you can’t fend them off, they’ll gnaw you to death. An unofficial motto hung on the wall of more than one editor’s office: “The process of publishing consists of an infinite number of details, no one of which is important unless it is overlooked or improperly executed.” Most of us had it memorized.
“You don’t have a science list,” she replied.
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She took out ads in journals asking people to send suggestions for paperback reprints, and that helped; humorist Will Cuppy’s satirical takes on scientific inquiry, How to Become Extinct and How to Attract the Wombat, both reprinted by the press in 1983, helped get the ball rolling. For weeks and weeks in the summer she schlepped books to every science association meeting she could find, from the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology to the American Ornithological Union. She talked to everyone, asking about their work, asking what they planned to do with it. That helped too. But the smartest thing she did, says Robert Richards, author of three books for the press, director of the U. of C.’s Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, and an old friend of Abrams’s, was talk to the people no one else did: graduate students.
Her strategies paid off in spades. Over the next two decades, Abrams shepherded one influential, well-written, well-reviewed book after another into print: Martin J.S. Rudwick’s The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (1985), Adrian Desmond’s The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (1989), Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution (1996).
“I have drafts of the intro to my book where she went through line by line,” says Jim Secord, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. (His second book, Victorian Sensation, which addresses the social and cultural shock that accompanied the publication of the precursor-to-Darwin work Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, was published by Chicago in 2000.) “Nobody does that,” says Secord. “I mean, I hardly do that for my graduate students. I’m a professor now in the British system, which wouldn’t have happened without Susan and what she did for my book.”
“I’ve never been so scared at work,” says Elizabeth Knoll, now the senior editor for behavioral sciences at Harvard University Press. “I was her third assistant that year, and I started in August. If it weren’t for working for Susan, I’d think that ‘breaking out into a cold sweat’ or ‘seeing red’ were mere metaphors.”
Her tendency to take her work personally may have contributed to her reputation as a difficult boss and coworker. She’s never seemed to make much distinction between her authors’ successes and her own, and for most of her career she has had, by her own account, almost no private life. “I never met a guy as interesting as my work,” she says. She lives in Hyde Park with three beloved cats, hundreds of books, and an Asian ceramics collection.
