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May 1, 1997

Cathedral Publishing: Filling a small press nitch on campus

Have a best-seller from the turn of the century or an Abbie Hoffman tome from the '60s that you would love to use in a class, but can't because it's out of print? Or maybe it's a collection of your own articles or those of colleagues that you would like to use in your teaching, but can't do so without producing stacks of unwieldy photocopies.

If those teaching problems sound familiar, Cathedral Publishing in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning may have the answer.

An entrepreneurial venture by Central Business Services, Cathedral Publishing specializes in producing books and customized course packets in print runs of 1-500 or more copies, numbers far too small for a commercial publisher or university press to warm up the presses.

Cathedral Publishing also can produce those small numbers of books at a relatively low cost. It recently reprinted several dozen sociology texts for the Canon-McMillan School District at a cost of about $25 per copy. A traditional publisher, if one could be found, probably would have charged $40 to $60 per copy, according to Frank Lehner, manager and editor-in-chief of Cathedral Publishing. "You bring the material to us, we'll do the copyright clearance," Lehner said. "We'll copy the material. If you want a customized cover, we'll do it for you. We'll produce it. We'll bind it and we'll sell it to your students. You can just worry about teaching your class." Cathedral Publishing's roots go back about four years to the installation of a computerized, print-on-demand copying system at Copy Cat. The system essentially is a high-speed laser printer on which data can be manipulated, according to Lehner.

Soon after the system's installation, Sam Rizzardo, manager of copier administration in Central Business Services, and Julie Gismondi, manager of Copy Cat, joined forces to begin producing customized course packets for faculty.

"The idea was to allow professors to teach from a variety of source material and not be confined to the limitations of a textbook," Lehner explained.

Pleased with the quality of the packets, Central Business Services approached the University Press to learn if the new system might be used in book publishing. The result was the poetry book "Summer Drowning" by Reginald Shepherd, the first university press book in the nation printed by digital and on-demand technology.

"When it was done, no one could tell that it been 'Xeroxed,'" Lehner said. "It met all of the criteria for quality necessary for a book." Assured that the new technology could be used to produce books, Central Business Services created Cathedral Publishing and about a year and a half ago hired Lehner, who had been working in design and marketing at the University Press, to manage the new venture.

According to Lehner, Pitt is one of only five schools in the nation using print-on-demand technology to aid teaching and the only one using it to publish books. Others using the technology are Harvard, Cornell, Chicago and Stanford. "From what I know," Lehner said, "we are the first university in the nation to set up an on-campus publisher to attempt to exploit the emerging advantages of on-demand technology." Cathedral Publishing is working in three areas: reprints of out-of-print mass market books, reprints of out-of-print instructional books and customized texts made up of original material owned by faculty.

"We are using the technology to provide a service for the educators and allowing them to be more creative with what they want to teach with," Lehner said.

Because traditional publishers do not print books in the 1-500 copy range, Lehner said it is tough to compare the costs of producing books the old way with on-demand technology. He said it is especially difficult in tiny runs, such as the 15 books that Cathedral produced for one professor. They were sold to students for about $25 each.

"We're using this technology to fit short run and ultra-short run markets," said Lehner of his overall plan. "We're hoping to work with our cost and work with university presses nationwide to help them apply this technology to publish monographs that are in the 200-300 range." A side benefit to such publishing is that rare, original books can be copied and duplicates donated to Hillman Library, allowing the original to be preserved in storage.

"We're encouraging professors in instances like that to write a forward for their class that we can bind right into the book and make it even more personalized and functional," Lehner said.

In addition to serving faculty at Pitt and the Canon-McMillan School District, Cathedral Publishing has been used by faculty at Duquesne University, Carnegie Mellon University and Carlow College. Ploughshares magazine also has contracted with the University publisher to reprint back issues, while the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies has retained Cathedral to produce an original biography of Gen. Matthew Ridgway.

Lehner hopes to use Cathedral's print-on-demand abilities to create interest in the Ridgway book among traditional publishers.

"We're real excited about that book," he said. "We're hoping that we can sell it or perhaps package it and sell it to a more mainstream publisher, collect a fee from that and get the material distributed in a bigger and better way than we are able to do."

–Mike Sajna


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