(The first, ironically enough, was Russian-in a pirated edition.) It ended up selling several hundred thousand copies in various editions, and has been translated into 21 languages. The little book got a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and the first edition sold 83,000 copies (notes still in the file show the Press scrambling to reprint fast enough). The Press printed a respectable 5000 copies, “and then the astonishments began,” as Bruner said at a conference in 2011. But that’s what happened with Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education. A small-town poet’s report of his conversations with an elderly Oglala Sioux man? Black Elk Speaks.Īnd in 1960, no one expected the report of a Woods Hole conference of eminent scientists and psychologists, spurred by the political shock of Sputnik to imagine reforms in American schools, to fascinate and inspire book reviewers, university students, neighborhood book groups, and school teachers for decades. A technical monograph on 16th century astonomy, in a series forbiddingly entitled the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science? The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
University presses seldom find themselves with spectacular best-sellers, and when they do, it’s never the books that anyone would have predicted.
In the post below, HUP Executive Editor-at-Large Elizabeth Knoll looks back on the 1960 publication of Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education. Throughout our centennial year of 2013, we’ll be reflecting on the 100 significant titles we’ve chosen to represent our first 100 years.
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