A Professor on the Press: "A beehive of drones and queens, proud of their brand of honey."

The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps. Howard E. Evans. 1966. $15.

Serbocroation Heroic Songs. Vol. I, Novi Pazar: English Translations. Wilman Parry. 1954. $12.50.

China: The People's Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A. John King Fairbank. 1967. Belknap. $2.95.

Tin Cans and Tin Plates: A Study in Two Related Markets. J. W. McKie. 1959. $7.50.

The Founding of Harvard College. Samuel Eliot Morison. 1935. $5.00.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Thomas H. Johnson and T. V. Wards, eds. 3 vol. set. 1958. $25.00.

How Russia is Ruled. Merle Fainsod. Revised ed., 1963. $8.95.

In a bare brick building a mile from the Square up Garden Street, the staff of the Harvard University Press every year sifts hundreds of esoteric manuscripts and publishes some 150. The Press's titles are diverse, and the six-fold increase in sales over the last two decades is proof of the University's encouragement of its once unwanted child.

Completely removed from undergraduate life, and useful to only those Faculty members who take the initiative in submitting their works, the Press seems to be the least integral of Harvard's many organs. Yet the Press's policy, according to Thomas J. Wilson, its director for 20 years, is "to publish as many good scholarly books as possible short of bankruptcy." That is its justification, for accessible scholarship is the sine qua non of a university.

The Press was nearly annihilated during the war years, but financial windfalls and the struggles of supporters made Harvard decide to maintain and strengthen it. The Press now edits, designs and lays out, arranges for the printing of, promotes, and helps distribute all over the world more than 100 series of books, all of them good scholarly books."

Alumni gifts have allowed establishment of many of these series. One of the oldest, and the largest, is the Loeb Classical Library, a 400-volume presentation of Greek and Latin works with the original text on the lefthand page and the translation on the right. Supported by a $300,000 endowment, it is the bequest of James C. Loeb '88, a bachelor banker who after his retirement in 1901 lived in a Bavarian castle surrounded by books.

The death of another banker in 1949 marked the Press's major step toward solvency and the capacity to undertake large projects. Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., '20, banker, architect, and amateur scholar (American Colonial Printing: Materials for a History), bequeathed about a million dollars to the Press, to be used to publish "inaccessible or hitherto unpublished source material of interest in connection with the history, literature, art (including minor and useful art), commerce, customs and manners, or way of life of the Colonial and Federal periods of the United States."

With this legacy, part of it consisting of as yet unvalued Texas oil lands, the Press set up "the Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press." Under its aegis are published the John Harvard Library, including such American fiction of historical interest as Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Adams Papers, which President Kennedy called "a major feat in American historical scholarship."

When the full extent of Belknap's endowment became known, the Press began using the Belknap imprint for more than Americana. Now a quarter of the books the Press publishes are awarded the imprint in recognition of their superiority. Recent Belknap books include Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 and John K. Fairbank's China: The People's Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A.