Yale Alumni Magazine

The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University.

The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers.

Comment on this article

Timing is everything
November 17, 2009
by Donald Lamm '53

Donald Lamm '53, a former chair of W. W. Norton & Co., served on the Board of Governors of the Yale University Press for 17 years, 16 of those as chair.

Without being present at the board of governors meeting that apparently accepted a favorable report on the book from the publications committee, I do not know whether the matter of illustrations came up. It should have. That was the time for a decision to include or exclude the cartoons. In a somewhat comparable situation, threats and actual physical harm came to publishers of translations of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

The availability of the cartoons on the Internet mitigates the situation somewhat.

As a trade publisher, I would have had no compunctions about going full steam ahead, illustrations and all. (Some twenty years ago I received death threats from a radical religious group, non-Muslim; to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been carried out yet.) But a university is a vulnerable place, so I can understand the administration urging the Yale Press to withhold the illustrations for the security of members of the institution. And the availability of the cartoons on the safety of the Internet mitigates the situation somewhat. Still, the timing was unfortunate.

Will the reputation of the Yale University Press be injured by this episode? I don't believe so. The Press has an admirable standing among academic publishers and has endured controversy in the past. One of its strengths is that the leading officers of the university serve on the board of governors. That is rare among university presses. Henceforth those officers as well as the publications committee and the editors must exercise greater diligence when considering books that entail potential risks to the well-being of the university community.

“Yale University Press and the Danish Cartoons” (9/9/09)




	©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu