In a few days we will post our monthly “Books Received” message with the notation that some titles are still available for review and we will thereby solicit volunteers. Comments received latterly encourage us to think that some explanation of our assignment policies might be in order, to avoid some unnecessary hard feelings.
BMCR has enjoyed since its inception in 1990 the services of a voluntary board of editors who advise us (“us”: the editorial we in this case are Richard Hamilton of Bryn Mawr College, who does everything involving paper, and James O’Donnell of the University of Pennsylvania, who is responsible for the electrons) on placement of books for review and on the reviews themselves when they arrive. Our habit is to circulate lists of books-for-placement first to those editors and to make every effort to place books that way. The month-end list then announces availability of unplaced titles to a wider audience.
We stumbled into the practice of soliciting volunteers by accident and found it richly rewarding. Some of our best and steadiest contributors have come to us this way and in so doing have enriched our community in ways that would not happen if we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters, kept asking each other for names. (We’ve also made a few mistakes this way; but we’ve made a few mistakes with traditional placements as well.)
But what is worth saying is that when we publish the list of books received and solicit volunteers, the response is regularly overwhelming. We do this only at a time when we know both Hamilton and O’Donnell can pay attention to their screens fairly assiduously for a couple of days as the flood of responses comes in. We typically wait what seems a decent interval, for the first flood to abate, and then begin making assignments. Often a single title will have 6-10 volunteers. Invidia is inevitable. Further, requests from volunteers will trickle in over days or weeks as irregular e-mail-checkers (there are still a few of them left in this world) find the message and find time to read it.
Our advice to would-be reviewers is twofold: (1) if you wish to review for us, feel free to let us know privately; a c.v. is helpful support for such a request, and we do keep track of a large list of people with diverse expertise; (2) when you see the monthly list and want to volunteer for a specific title, feel free to do so quickly, but know also that it’s not simply first-come-first-served. We make assignments then based on qualifications and the most interesting match of reviewer to book: but we do so fairly quickly (as we try to do all things with BMCR) and so s/he who hesitates is lost.
Our editorial friends: The “print version” of BMCR regularly prints a list of the current members of the editorial board, but we have not distributed one to the much larger e-subscription list in some time, so we add one here happily, with immense gratitude to those who now work with us and those who have done so in the past for their part in making this immensely satisfying collaboration succeed.
Rick Hamilton: rhamilto@brynmawr.edu
Jim O’Donnell: jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Julia Haig Gaisser, Bryn Mawr
Richard Hamilton, Bryn Mawr
Russell T. Scott, Bryn Mawr
James C. Wright, Bryn Mawr
Martin Cropp, Calgary
Jenifer Neils, Case Western
James E.G. Zetzel, Columbia
Jeffrey Rusten, Cornell
Kent J. Rigsby, Duke
P.J. Rhodes, Durham
David Sansone, Illinois
Christina S. Kraus, Oxford
David Potter, Michigan
John Yardley, Ottawa
James O’Donnell, Penn
Joseph Farrell, Penn
Ralph Rosen, Penn
Froma Zeitlin, Princeton
Mark Edwards, Stanford
Richard Green, Sydney
H.-G. Nesselrath, U Bern
Brent Vine, UCLA
Sander M. Goldberg, UCLA
Simon Hornblower, UC London
Mary Blundell, U. of Washington
Alain Gowing, U. of Washington
Michael Halleran, U. of Washington
Robert Lamberton, Washington University
Miranda Marvin, Wellesley
Victor Bers, Yale