I’ve been a sales rep for Harvard University Press, The MIT Press and Yale University Press since 1998. It seems impossible but I did the math: during that time I represented over 15,000 individual titles. I’ve always loved these books in a general way, but every season there have been a scattering of personal favorites that I promoted with a little extra enthusiasm. “Books I would actually buy and read” was the way I thought about them.
I couldn’t resist an invitation from my favorite store to share my top favorites, but the execution was more challenging than I expected. As I reviewed 36 seasons worth of annotated catalogs, there were hundreds of books published by these Presses that I loved, not just a couple dozen. I...