Curious Dry Books (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 August 2002)

by Peter Monaghan

CURIOUS DRY BOOKS: Reprinting a nun's 1947 guide to the trivium—the first three of the seven traditional liberal arts—would not seem to be the savviest way to break into modern-day scholarly publishing.

But it typifies the approach of the tiny, Philadelphia-based Paul Dry Books, which since 2000 has been going where ever fewer university presses dare go.

Among the press's recent publications of fiction and nonfiction works—new, out-of-print, or in the public domain but unavailable in trade paperback—is The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric: Understanding the Nature and Function of Language (May), whose title is as unwieldy as its scope is ambitious.

It was written by Sister Miriam Joseph Rauh (1898–1982), a member of the Sisters of the Holy Cross who taught English for 30 years at Saint Mary's College, in Indiana. While much of its subject matter has fallen from pedagogic favor, "until the 19th century, that's what people were taught," says Paul Dry, the press's founder. "The book is about the way you think, and the way you put thought on paper."

Other publications, prepared by a staff of three, have included a 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses and My Business Is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery, edited by Stephen Berg, the founder of The American Poetry Review. Due out next is Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (September), by Eva Brann. A tutor since 1957 in the Great Books program at St. John's College, in Annapolis, Md., one of Ms. Brann's recommendations became one of the press's first reprints: the satirical 1930 novel, His Monkey Wife, by John Collier, about a British schoolmaster's weird love entanglements in the Upper Congo.

"The big publishing corporations have decided they can't make enough money on particular types of writing," says Mr. Dry, "and that has left open niche markets for small publishers like us." His niche, he says, is books for people interested in close reading of the kind that he did as a Harvard University undergraduate, and that he rediscovered in the 1980s when he joined a book group. Another book-group member, John Corenswet, a Harvard-educated lawyer, is now his business partner in Paul Dry Books.

Mr. Dry may seem to have thrown caution to the wind in entering publishing, but he comes to the trade after 17 years in a much riskier business, stock-options trading. It is his profits from that, and Mr. Corenswet's from his legal work, that are financing the press. "I figured that if I published books that I love, other people would love them, too," Mr. Dry says.