The Harvard Books on Astronomy By Rudi Paul Lindner The University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor American Astronomical Society, January
2002 The Harvard Books on Astronomy were
a milestone in science publishing, in bringing astronomy to the public,
in recruiting young men and women to the field, and in attracting them to
Harvard. There were two series of Harvard Books, the first beginning in
1941 and ending in 1951, published by the Blakiston firm in Philadelphia.
The second series began at the Harvard University Press immediately after,
with revised editions of most of the earlier volumes, to which a few new
titles were added. The Boks Milky Way remains in print, in
its fifth edition. In this talk I shall discuss the genesis and plan of
the series, the production of the volumes, their success, and their impact
upon the field. The range of astronomical literature
available to an inquiring public in the late 1930s was wide in some ways,
restricted in others. There were the two-page monthly articles by Henry
Norris Russell in Scientific American, describing recent developments;
there was a magazine, Popular Astronomy, for serious amateurs and
professionals; and there were two small, fledgling illustrated magazines,
The Sky and The Telescope. If you were searching for a book,
your choices ranged from such general invitations to the field as E.A. Faths
Through the Telescope, well illustrated but more descriptive
than analytical, to one of the works by Jeans or Eddington, inspiring
but not attractive to the eye, to a college textbook, such as Robert H.
Bakers Astronomy, the best selling work in the field since
its first edition in 1930, long on data, short on inspiration. There was
little in between, as the reading lists in back of the various editions
of Amateur Telescope Making indicate. If you wanted to find something
topical, you were pretty much out of luck. The idea for a series of popular,
well-illustrated book-length treatments of individual astronomical themes
probably belongs to the ever-active mind of Harlow Shapley, assisted by
Bart Bok and Donald Menzel. Shapley had been writing for general audiences
ever since 1926, and he had composed three books of varying lengths as well
as edited a radio lecture series. Bok had been interested in public education
in astronomy for some time, and Menzel had written a short, illustrated
illustration to the field as a whole in 1931. Shapley and Bok, the co-editors
of the Harvard Observatory series, had developed some clear
ideas of what they wanted, based upon recent experiments in adult education
at Columbia University and elsewhere. These books would develop topics
in detail but without technical obstacles: they would be short on the romance
of the skies and long on how astronomers work. Their audience would comprise
serious high school students, teachers, college students, and the educated
public. Each book would cover far more than a magazine article, but it
would stop short of a professional monograph. And each book would be fully
illustrated with figures, lots of photographs, and portraits of the astronomers
responsible for advancements in the field. The authors would all be staff
and graduates of the Harvard Observatory, which meant that the authors were,
with the exceptions of Harlow Shapley and Leon Campbell, young: three of
them are alive today, and I thank Lawrence Aller, James Baker, and Fred
Whipple for their assistance. And the books would emphasize the work done
at Harvard. Bart Bok found an appropriate publisher
in the Blakiston firm of Philadelphia. Blakiston had been publishing medical
and health sciences books for two generations and was very much interested
in broadening its base. It had a reputation for quality and high production
values. The Harvard Books reflect this. Printed on glossy stock even during
wartime, with photographs on alternate pages, and a Harvard crimson cover
that cried out on library shelves, the series had no competition. The books
were also priced reasonably, at $2.50 per volume in 1941, $4.50 by 1949.
This was more than most high school students could easily pay in 1941, but
for public libraries they were cheap. And Blakiston flogged them to the
library trade, pushing them into bookstores only after the war with the
assistance of the Garden City Publishing Company network. The original plan for the series worked
out pretty well, although there were defections. The Gaposchkins were among
the original authors, but they took their good time about developing a topic
and in the end found themselves without sufficient scope for their talents.
The early advertisements promised a book on binary stars, stellar interiors,
and stellar evolution by Martin Schwarzschild and Theodore Sterne, but the
wartime work of both authors brought that to an end. Their outline survives,
however, and we can see what they had in mind, including a good deal on
orbits, energy sources, and the H-R diagram, but not much on stellar evolution,
reflecting the situation of the time. At the end, Shapley added a title,
The Relativistic Universe, by Philipp Frank, and one chapter did
go through the editorial process, but in the end the work became a series
of articles for Sky & Telescope. Donald Menzels book on
Our Sun appeared at the very end of the first series, in 1949, and
as pointed out by Roy K. Marshall, because of material on nuclear energy
Menzels book joined an earlier volume by Copernicus as the only two
books on the sun to be delayed by official censorship. As exhibits in the history of the
book, the volumes are fascinating. The original conception had been that
there might be ten photographs distributed over 150 pages of text. As it
worked out, all the books contained photographs on alternate pages, charts,
graphs, and drawings, which made the series the best-illustrated books on
astronomy available. Reviewers commented favorably on the photos of researchers,
which ranged from the formal portrait to the revealing snapshot. The sole
women portrayed were Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Cannon. The pages were
glossy, a plus in wartime, and the bindings attractive and uniform in design,
as were the dust jackets. The crimson bindings with gold lettering, the
large numbers of illustrations, the appeal to a young audience from authors
who were for the most part also young, there was only one other product
on the market sharing these characteristics, the two volumes of Amateur
Telescope Making, and I suspect that both series shared the same audience. The first series volumes were very
popular. Translations appeared, an authorized version in Spanish, and an
unauthorized version in Russian. All of them were reprinted, some with
additions, and by 1950 there were calls for revised second editions. The
authors royalties increased after Donald Menzel, who had become a
consulting editor for Prentice-Hall, attempted to take his volume there.
Despite the popularity and warm reception the Harvard Books enjoyed, Blakiston
did not make any money on them. The press runs, 2,000 copies each, were
not big enough to benefit from the economies of scale, and the firms
managers were afraid that a bigger run would lead to too many unsold copies;
as a result, demand always caught the Philadelphia firm flat-footed. By
1950 sales had reached 70,000 hard-cover volumes, the press runs had increased
to 6,000 copies, but the books were becoming behind the times. Perhaps the most successful volume
in the first series was Bart and Priscilla Boks The Milky Way.
The tone and texture are set for the young and the young at heart, and there
is a consistent effort to alternate between the equipment and approaches
used by the astronomers and the results of the researches. It is very much
a work in the tradition of Kapteyn and Oort, with lengthy discussions of
the luminosity function and the use of star counts in outlining the true
shape of our galaxy. But the Boks were quick to change their focus in response
to research elsewhere, and theirs was the first series book to be revised,
in the light of the success of the Schmidt telescope and Walter Baades
publications in 1944. When the work of Morgan, Sharpless, and Osterbrock
and then the results of radio astronomers produced a more accurate picture
of our spiral arms, the Boks were quick to respond. The book also has the
lightest touch of the volumes in the series, with phrases that caught reviewers
fancy. If the Boks volume was the most
accessible and exuberant, the most demanding was by Goldberg and Aller.
Lawrence Aller recalls that the collaboration went well, with the technical
materials relegated to appendices, but the contemporary correspondence indicates
that the composition of this volume was a tug of war, with Leo Goldberg,
fresh from his experience with The Telescope, eager to reach a general
audience, and Aller seeking more technical rigor. The finished product
betrays some of these discussions, and in the end, when Leo Goldbergs
administrative commitments led him to leave later revisions to Aller, the
second and third editions became more and more technical. Nevertheless,
Goldberg and Aller occasioned critical acclaim from professionals. Walter
Adams thought it the best volume in the series, and Walter Baade suggested
that it should be on the list of the Book-of-the-Month Club. When Goldberg
and then Aller became part of the Michigan staff, their book served as a
useful recruiting tool for students. Shapleys own volume, Galaxies,
is in some respects the most problematic. Much of the material is local,
emphasizing the exploration of our galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds, reflecting
Shapleys taste and his original title, Star Clouds and Galaxies.
Much of the research also seems local, based upon the instruments at Oak
Ridge and Bloemfontein, with the Mount Wilson staff mopping up after them.
In his review, Walter Baade felt it necessary to point out that the forefront
of modern research was not located on Garden Street in Cambridge. The book
also betrays some haste: there are pictures of astronomers to whom no reference
is made in the text, and the last section, on the expanding universe, wanders.
The book is, on the other hand, very much in the Shapley style, a style
that appealed to the general public and newspaper reviewers. It must be borne in mind that Shapley
was unable to dedicate himself to the book. By the late 1930s he had become
a statesman of science with many demands upon his time and energy. Specifically,
during the gestation period of the series and of his book, he was deeply
involved in providing for refugee academicians: Luigi Jacchia, for one,
owed his and his mothers life to Shapley. While browsing through
the Shapley papers in search of his negotiations with Blakiston I came across
the file of my own master, whom Shapley counseled in person, wrote recommendations
for, on whose behalf he badgered Harvard trustees, and whose thesis advisor
Shapley lobbied relentlessly. Shapleys efforts on behalf of this
young Byzantinist give us some sense of where he directed his energies in
1941 and 1942. We should, in retrospect, make generous allowance for him. At the end of the 1940s, Blakiston
became an imprint of Doubleday and the larger firm began to examine the
list with care. All the volumes needed revising, and that meant resetting
type and obtaining new illustrations: that is, the entire production process
would have to start over again. A revised edition of one of the books,
Fletcher Watsons Between the Planets, would cost $1,400 without
considering the cost of new illustrations, and this was more than Doubleday
wished to invest, considering that astronomy was only two per cent of their
business. In the fall of 1951 a Doubleday executive called Shapley in and
told him that the firm was ending its astronomy line. There were two firms interested in
taking over the books, the Harvard University Press and Sky Publishing Corporation.
The Federers, who published Sky & Telescope, had good ideas but
much less experience in the book trade I believe that at this point
their only venture had been Allyn J. Thompsons Making Your Own
Telescope --, and so Harvard took over in 1952, slowly publishing revised
editions of most of the first series books and adding, very quickly, Cecilia
Payne-Gaposchkins Stars in the Making. This proved the series
best seller. Harvard sold over twelve thousand copies in hardback, but
the paperback version sold more than 78,000 copies in corner drug stores,
news stands, and stationers, where I found it next to a work of lesser authority
but greater charm. The Harvard Books, under Harvard management,
became separate volumes, with different design, production values, typography,
and binding. Further, in the 1950s and 1960s there was increasing competition
for them in the marketplace, as a look through the Books and the Sky
column in Sky & Telescope reveals. The series continued, but
it no longer had the same impact. In the course of doing research on the series
I heard many stories of the effect the crimson volumes had on young people.
For some, it was a matter of saving money to buy the next volume in order
to keep up with the story, a bit like following the adventures of a radio
hero, except that here were young astronomers, writing of the specific work
they loved, and explaining in plain language how they did it. For others,
it was a discovery in the local Carnegie library, where the series stood
out as the most pictorial introductions available. For yet others, it made
them eager to follow in the footsteps and to go into astronomy and, if possible,
go to Harvard, the spearhead of research. An informal survey of my age
cohort in the science program at Michigan produced numerous copies of the
first series. The series was, for Blakiston, a loss leader that brought
it much good will. I understand that the party at which the Blakiston staff
handed the contracts back to Harvard was impressive by any standard. For
the field of astronomy, the series proved a source of future amateurs, professionals,
and solid public support.