Harvard University Press (HUP) will reissue five titles from its Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series, including Jorge Luis Borges’s This Craft of Verse and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, in hardcover on September 16.
Honoring the 100th anniversary of the Norton Lectures series and the accompanying Norton Professorship in Poetry at the university, the centenary editions feature a new cover design and original forewords by a “distinguished contemporary voice” to recontextualize the lectures, which all pertain to “the vital role of the arts and humanities in public life,” per an announcement.
HUP editorial director Sharmila Sen spoke to the careful curation that went into the reissue series. “From the outset, we knew we had to reflect the series’ historic commitment to literature, visual art, and music,” she said. “We also wanted books that could be read in one or two sittings, the equivalent of spending an hour or two attending the lectures in person.” In terms of content, Sen said the editorial process sought out “titles that would feel like a discovery to contemporary readers,” whether that meant sharing surprising words from a familiar name or introducing readers to someone new.
Though the Norton Lecture series continues at the university, the centenary reissue will be limited to the five titles forthcoming next month.
In addition to the Borges and Eco titles—which are introduced by novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and essayist Louis Menand, respectively—HUP will reprint John Ashbery’s Other Traditions, with a foreword by critic Stephanie Burt; the painter Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content, with a foreword by critic Adam Gopnik; and Igor Stravinsky’s The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, with a foreword by composer Vijay Iyer.
Sen pointed to Shahn’s lecture as an example of a more unfamiliar name about whom she hopes the reissue might “spark new interest.” In a conversation with PW, Gopnik said that, even at the time of his lecture 1956, Shahn’s work was more at home on an “old socialist’s walls” than in the currents of collegiate discourse. “I hope what really comes through, and that is very much of our time, is that he [Shahn] thought painting should be an art about people, made by people, and for people,” Gopnik said.
The hardcover format was a natural choice, Sen said, given the goal of the series to shepherd the Norton lectures into a new generation. “I imagined these books as keepsakes,” she said. Put together by HUP creative director Gabriele Wilson and designer Evan Gaffney, the cover art likewise visually reenvisions the past, collaging the lecturers’ headshots with materials from the Harvard archives.
As important as memory preservation is to the project, Sen said that encountering the speakers in print also provides opportunities for connection that a live lecture may not. “Those who attend lectures are often a self-selecting audience, drawn to voices they already admire or agree with. The books, however, should move beyond that quiet consensus,” Sen said. “For me, relatable is an overrated American virtue.”
