Vindictive Liberals: The 1963 Edition of Human Action
From 2013.
This is the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most scurrilous incidents in academic publishing. The victim was Ludwig von Mises. The perpetrator was Yale University Press.
Yale University Press published the 1949 edition of Human Action. Sales were much higher than the editor had expected. It was a 900-page treatise on economics, written by an immigrant from Germany who was teaching at an undistinguished university. He was out of favor with the now-dominant Keynesian establishment. The book sold for $10, which in 1949 was the equivalent in today’s money of $98. Who would have imagined that it would go through six printings?
In 1962, it went out of print. I remember attending a week-long evening seminar by Mises that summer. It was sponsored by Andrew Joseph Galambos. Attendees could not buy Human Action.
Mises wanted to revise the book. The replacement editor allowed this. But he would not allow Mises to see the page proofs in early 1963. Mises had asked.
When the book appeared, it was a typesetting atrocity. The editor did not pay for a new typesetting job. Instead, he hired a typesetter to typeset revised sections. Then the man then pasted over the old edition. The changes were made in bold face. They did not match the original edition. The result was an aesthetic disaster.
My edition has this title page. On the page is an addition. It is attached to the page by Scotch tape.
(For the rest of the story, click the link.)
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The original is here.
In 1966, Henry Regnery Company published a revised third edition. But the company had to pay a royalty to Yale University Press.
In the multi-author Introduction to the Mises Institute's reprint of the 1949 first edition, we read of the second edition:
What followed was another trial in Mises's life. The second edition went into production far later than anticipated, which left the publisher without copies of Human Action for fifteen months. Mises was never given galley proofs to examine before publication. When the second edition finally appeared in May 1963, it was riddled with typographical errors. There were missing paragraphs and lines, duplicated lines, and even a duplicated page. There were no running heads on the pages and the printing was variously light and dark. Despite protests, the publisher refused to accept full responsibility, which led Mises to secure the services of an attorney. In the de facto settlement (Mises never acceded to it entirely), Yale distributed errata sheets and agreed to prepare a corrected third edition when the second edition sold out. The matter was finally settled when Henry Regnery worked to secure the rights for his publishing company in early 1966. He reset the book and published the third edition later that year (at which time Mises was eighty-five years old) (p. xix).