SBL San Diego: A Book Lover’s Paradise

For a book lover like myself, a highlight of any academic convention is the book exhibition put on by publishers and booksellers from around the world. I never have enough time to explore the offerings.

Eisenbrauns occupies a special place in the heart of any scholar of the ANE and the Hebrew Bible. Besides the top-notch books and periodicals it produces in-house, Eisenbrauns carries an ever-wider range of titles from foreign publishing concerns. I could have spent hours browsing the selections put on display in San Diego by two of its sister publishing houses: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; and Evangelische Verlagsanstalt (Leipzig) / Theologischer Verlag (Zürich) / Verlag und Buchhandlung der Evangelischen Gesellschaft Stuttgart.

I enjoyed speaking with Alexander Melzer of the Evangelisches Verlagshaus. I fell in love with a set of “baseball” cards prepared by the great professor of homiletics, Wilfried Engemann. This set of 48 cards, each of which sports a beautiful, high-quality portrait or photograph of a great theologian from antiquity to the present, and a short biography, comes with instructions on how to play games with them. Out of 48 cards, the names and biographies of about 40 were familiar to me (don’t worry, Jim West, your heroes are included). For a handy review (auf Deutsch), go here.

Such a great idea. No wonder the cards have gone through two editions in no time. If Fortress, Eerdmans, IVP, Hendrickson, or Baker does not acquire the rights to them, they are just plain stupid. I presume Engemann or others will produce further sets. An equivalent packet of 48 for the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament would sell well, I think, if priced between $10 and $20, so long as they are as beautifully produced as those by Engemann. In a forthcoming post, I will state my opinion as to whose busts and biographies might go on a Tanakh/OT set.

But the set of 48 theologians were priced at 40 euros in San Diego! That was a mistake, I now see. I’ve ordered a set from Eisenbrauns for $19.00.

You can browse by publisher on the Eisenbrauns site, but that is not nearly as nice as paging through a selection of the books themselves, or spending time with publishers’ exquisitely produced catalogs. I have a suggestion for James Spinti in this regard: work out some way for Eisenbrauns customers to sign up online to receive publishers’ catalogues of choice from Eisenbrauns’ repertoire as they come out. SBL members receive catalogues from a wide range of US publishers, but few from foreign publishers.

Let’s be honest. If you want to read hard-core scholarship, the best selections still come out of Germany and old Europe generally. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Theologischer Verlag, Brepols, De Gruyter, Brill, Peeters, Du Cerf: the list of providers is long and glorious.

Comments

[Andy Kerr]

Distributing catalogs (especially those in PDF format) is trivial. Getting catalogs from the publishers... that's another matter. If publisher catalogs were available for download from the Eisenbrauns website, would that fulfill your wish here? Or do you want to get the hard-copy catalogs?

[JohnFH]

Hi Andy. Thanks for all you do.

I prefer hard-copy catalogs, because perusing them is the kind of the thing I like to do while attending to other matters, if you follow me.

Still, downloadable catalogs all in one place is a great idea. But many of the hard-copy catalogs I picked up at SBL San Diego do not appear to be readily available online. It's important to build up an archive of catalogs, because detailed descriptions with photos of author and cover appear one year and disappear the next when a particular book is back-listed.

If all or most of the catalogs of the publishing houses Eisenbrauns carries were made available online in PDF form, Eisenbrauns might even link to specific loci within them via ISBN.

That would be cool, but also, a lot of work.