Settling Publishing Issues at the AAR

Trudging through McCormick Place
To complete your quest, you need an elf, a dwarf, a hobbit …

I am sleeping a lot these days, recovering from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting, held in Chicago’s monstrous McCormick Place convention center. Beware of any architect who designates parts of buildings as a “grand concourse.” That translates as “huge useless spaces that you have to walk back and forth through to get to the important stuff.”

This was the most “businesslike” of all AAR meetings that I have attended. I barely even saw the book exhibit—quite a change from years when I examined every publisher’s booth carefully (unless it was something like IVP or Zondervan) because I had no one to talk to. Now I have to write to all sorts of people with whom I should have liked to have a fuller conversation.

Important publishing news in Pagan studies and Western esotericism: the merger (which I had not discussed) here between Equinox Publishing and Acumen.

Now they are de-merged. It feels like a divorce, with the authors and series editors as the minor children who are assigned to the custody of one parent or the other.

As part of the agreement, certain religious-studies books that were already in production, including one that I spent all spring and summer on copyediting and typesetting, have been assigned to Acumen.

But a number of series editors — including Nikki Bado and me for the series originally called Equinox Studies in Historical and Contemporary Paganism — are moving their series back to Equinox as originally contracted. It’s as though the kid said, “No, I want to go live with Mom. And I will.”

As for The Pomegranate, the editorial pipeline is finally moving, and I anticipate another issue coming out soon. That has been on my mind a lot.

After being in editorial limbo for a few weeks, it was good to get these issues straightened out.