What publishing activities existed at the London School of Economics and Political Science before the official publishing house, LSE Press, was founded in 2018? LSE Press’s Communications Coordinator, Elinor Potts has been surveying material from the LSE archives on the origins of publishing meetings and activities, discovering untold stories of wartime publishing constraints, and a desire for free and open knowledge prior to the advent of Open Access publishing and the contemporary movement for un-paywalled research.
Early in 2024, LSE Press began making plans for a symposium on the future of social sciences publishing to be hosted here at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The focus of this symposium was the question: “what’s in store for social sciences publishing?”. In the process of preparing for this – thinking of panel formulations and focussed questions – it became clear that in order to understand the future of publishing across the social sciences, we should understand something of the legacy of publishing here at the School.
Founded in 2018 as LSE’s official publishing house, LSE Press is an Open Access publisher of high-quality academic books, monographs, edited volumes, and journals. It is based in LSE Library, which is also the British Library of Political and Economic Science. As such, I was lucky to be guided by two excellent archivists, Lisa McQuillan and Anna Towlson, who signposted valuable information as part of this research project.
Fragmentated operations
Reading through the archival material from the Publications Sub-Committee of the Professional Council from 1933 to 1967, there several recurrent concerns around publishing activities at LSE. There is a desire to share the pearls of LSE’s academic research through published works; a desire to boost LSE’s reputation through ensuring there is a clear connection with the published work and their home institution (what modern readers might understand as “branding”); a desire to protect LSE from the financial risks of the academic publishing world; and a desire to maximise the global reach of published works in key territories, in particular in the US and Europe.
LSE’s publishing outputs in the first half of this period before World War II were largely fragmented through various publishing agreements and series managed by external providers. Despite the fragmentation of these activities, published research attributed to LSE outperformed fellow University of London (UoL) constituent colleges, as we see in minutes from a 1937 committee where an appendix of periodicals and monographs is listed against other London institutions. As seen below, LSE is by far the most active in this area at the time.
Publishing was surely coming from the School, although, at the time there was no publishing by the School in a formal sense. The lack of concerted effort to implement a by is directly addressed by the first Chair of Legal History at LSE, Theodore Plucknett in minutes from a Publications Sub-Committee of the Professional Council meeting on 15 July 1941, stating that:
The great problem is publication. Publications sponsored by the School are really publications of the School, save only in the narrow trade sense of the word. I hope we shall consider making them publications by the School…
The outbreak of World War II would disrupt any hopes of making Plucknett’s idealised publications by the School. Minutes from a 1942 Publications Sub-Committee meeting outline that a committee of the Academic Council had started a report three years before the war had begun:
Investigating the matter of a University Press; much work was done and a report was nearly ready when this investigation was interrupted by the outbreak of war.
The effects of the war can be traced through other ephemera found in the archives – correspondents would confer via their “wartime addresses”, and LSE’s Library collections moved outside of London to avoid bomb damage, though the Library eventually reopened in 1945.
The continued fragmentation of LSE’s publishing activities was critically viewed in a letter to Allen Mawer, Provost of University College London, written on 1 May 1942. A M Carr-Saunders, Director of LSE 1937-1952, writes: “Hitherto we have had an arrangement which we do not find satisfactory; there is a School Series of books on social and economics topics which, however, is not in the hands of one publisher. The author makes an arrangement with some publisher or other to take on the book and the book bears the nominal imprint of the School and a number in the so-called School Series. There is, however, no uniformity in regard to size or shape and for this and other reasons we are anxious to put our publications on a new footing.”
T H Marshall, the eminent sociologist and then Secretary of the Publications Committee, echoed the desire for an institutional publishing operation to manage his existing project in a letter, writing in a letter dated 15 June 1943, “I have made approaches to one or two published in the meantime, but find that they would only publish it under conditions that I should be very reluctant to accept. I should much prefer to have it published by the School and only sounded other publishers because I thought the School would be unable to consider it.”
Also during this time, economist F A Hayek wrote particularly strong in defence of an institutional publishing body, going as far as imagining an LSE Press logo on the spine of the book in substitution for the suggested School crest in the existing publications series. In a letter to the LSE Director on 12 July 1943, Hayek writes,
If we contemplate a development of the School publications on the scale which was contemplated by the Committee ie, comprising perhaps a considerable number of distinct series and some journals, there might be considerable advantage in the name of a sort of LSE Press appearing on each of them.
New beginnings
After the War, LSE established the New General Series of studies and monographs in the social sciences in a publishing agreement reached in 1947 with by the publishing house Messrs Longmans Green & Co – the first title of which was Reason and Unreason in Society by Morris Ginsberg and Martin White. Later, long-standing publishing agreements were reached between 1952 and 1967, with an LSE book series arranged between the Publications Committee and G Bell & Sons for 22 titles, as well as Athlone Press, (two lecture series) and two departmental series of books and Oliver and Boyd. Alongside this, as in the pre-War years, ad-hoc publications arranged by departments with other small publishers continued.
A secondary review into publishing at LSE was initiated in 1965 following the dissatisfaction with the fragmented nature of LSE publishing endeavours and the lack of editorial control, with consideration given to setting up an in-house publisher through a partnership with The Economists’ Bookshop (present on campus from 1947 until 2021, the building now houses LSE Generate).
In 1967, a new contract with Weidenfeld & Nicolson to publish LSE books was drawn up, promoting works from LSE authors with commercial appeal. This arrangement used the profits from these books to subsidise the more niche offerings, with minimal financial input hopefully needed from LSE. They appointed an editor to work on LSE publications, Julian Shuckburgh, and the plan was for a small committee to be set up with members of the LSE Publications Committee and W&N staff to meet monthly. Many of these books can still be found in the collections LSE Library, and bear LSE’s crest in the frontmatter.
Contemporary reflections
Reading through these archival records of publishing at LSE in 2024, the operational differences cannot be ignored. On a technical level, publishing communications at LSE Press today are archived and organised digitally. In a similar tradition to the Publications Sub-Committee of the Professional Council, we continue to meet with our Editorial Board comprised of valued LSE academics whose insightful comments and experiences co-steer the direction of our publications list.
Typewriters gone, we operate in a world where AI can be used to process meeting minutes and generate action points – physical paper printouts are minimised for the sake of sustainability – a far cry from the chaotically varied papers of different sizes, weights and textures, scarred (on occasion) by phantom cigarettes, which gather in the archival boxes. These old forms of managing a publishing business are uncanny; both alien and familiar. But what prevails is a desire to share LSE’s research to a wide global readership.
Whilst the academic publishing committees may have split hairs over the practicalities of setting up a formal in-house venture, the raison d’etre for the School’s publishing series, as discussed by geographer L Dudley Stamp in 1943, shows commonalities in the work LSE Press does today through publishing work by LSE professors and early career researchers. In a letter to the Publishing Committee dated 4 March 1943, Stamp explains,
A great volume of research is carried out by members of the staff of the School and by post-graduate students. In the past this work has been published in the ordinary way by commercial publishers and there is nothing to indicate its connexion with the School, so that the prestige which would result naturally to the work of the School has thereby been lost.
Stamp continues,
Some of my colleagues seem to suggest that commercial publishing firms of repute are unduly rapacious and are concerned only with making profits. Whilst publishing firms are not philanthropic institutions, I suggest that this judgment is far from the truth…. It would, I think, be extremely unfortunate if the School, as a non-profit making institution adopted a more mercenary attitude than that shown by commercial publishers.
This is the work which we proud to continue at LSE Press through challenging commercial profit-motivated publishing through free and open access to our essential publications in the social sciences.
LSE Press is a non-profit open access publisher of monographs, edited collections, textbooks and journals at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Press publishes high quality, essential social science research that has the potential to influence academic debate, public policy and the broader conversation. Their books and journals are free to read and download via open access publishing here.
