Editor Roger Conover Celebrates 30 Years at MIT Press
By Michael Scharf -- Publishers Weekly, 12/14/2007 4:06:00 PM
This week, MIT Press executive editor Roger Conover celebrates a rare publishing feat: 30 uninterrupted years at the same house. Hired in 1977 as the press’s first full-time art and architecture editor, Conover is responsible for publishing such seminal works as Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City and the journal October (which has spawned its own imprint publishing critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Thierry de Duve). Books he's edited account for nearly 15% of the press’ new titles since its founding in 1926—some 800 books.
Asked how he came to the press, Conover says he “walked in through the architecture door,” and relates what he thinks of as a typical publishing story: a stint at what was then the Radcliffe-Harvard publishing course, a fruitless Ford-era job search, a European sojourn and writing fellowship, and another crack at the job market on returning. Conover eventually got a job as a writer and editor at the Architecture Collaborative, the firm in Cambridge, Mass. founded by Bauhaus pioneer Walter Gropius, where Conover worked on that firm's "legacy of Bauhaus material."
Down the road was the MIT Press, which published books on the Bauhaus with which Conover was involved, primarily via the press’ late art director, the “extraordinary” Muriel Cooper. Frank Urbanowski, who retired as the press’s director four years ago, was only two years into his 27 year tenure then. He hoped Conover would turn what then a boutique architecture list into a combination illustrated-and-intellectual-books powerhouse.
The titles he acquired were exclusively art and architecture at first, but “over time, the discipline changed, and the edges of architecture had more to do with touching the edges of things like cultural studies.” Conover responded accordingly, and titles like 1988’s AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp, were pathbreaking. Conover’s own interest expanded along with the field, which itself “became more open to other kinds of writing”: his lists have come to include dance, sound, and “lots of things beyond. But they grew from this kernel in architecture and design.”
Remaining at the press has also allowed Conover to construct a coherent editorial oeuvre. From his perspective, what has emerged, and what continues to transform are not only the traditional relationships between author and editor and the various authors on any one season’s list, but the relationships “between whole sorts of sets of books, and series of books—structures of thought that build on each other between disciplines.” As examples, Conover points to the eight books of photographs by German industrial photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, to his publishing of a father and a daughter (Princeton professor Irving Lavin and UCLA’s Sylvia Lavin) and to a book he’s got coming up, one that assesses an earlier book that Conover published: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas. Conover thinks that the books themselves change, in terms of the meaning they carry, as the list changes.
Another change that Conover has been a witness to over 30 years is the drop off of university library and other institutional buying practices that has affected university presses across the board, pushing university presses further into the trade marketplace. Asked if that has affected his lists, Conover is circumspect: “I think MIT’s list is deep and vertical, and what it’s done is well developed and clear. It knows what it does very well, but it’s not trying to do everything. And I think that as long as we’re very clear as editors about what we are and what we’re not, that this competition is an advantage to us."
