I recently fell upon this reprint of a Lingua Franca article from 1995, "The Routledge Revolution: Has Academic Publishing Gone Tabloid?" written about Bill Germano during the golden age of cultural studies book publishing.

One thing is for certain: By spotting intellectual trends ahead of the curve and responding with a flash flood of suitable titles, Germano has changed the face of academic publishing in the humanities. While a university press might do a book or two on media studies or cultural studies, Germano was the first to publish entire lines of them aggressively, churning out wide-ranging "readers" and essay collections. And his gamble has paid off, Once there were only isolated scholars scribbling away in English or history departments. Now the universiry is awash with programs in film studies, gay studies, women's studies-many with reading lists heavily dependent on Routledge authors like Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Constance Penley. By supplying these nascent disciplines with the software needed to get up and running, Germano may have become the Bill Gates of cultural studies.

Fifteen years later, the entire thing reads like folklore. Not only has the "faddishness" of cultural studies become completely traditionalized in the academic humanities, but also the purportedly incisive interventions into culture never really happened. Instead they turned inward, toward the academy, who spent the decade since 1995 gnawing like termites on Deleuze or Foucault or whatever in order to produce the hardened saliva that would form its nest.

I hadn't thought about it until reading the article, but another trend that Routledge clearly popularized in the last two decades is the edited collection. There are many good examples of this format, but by and large the edited book is a real mixed bag.

Meanwhile, Bill Germano is Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union. His most recent books? They're about academic publishing, with a focus on turning dissertations into books.