Jan Riggenbach is the author of Midwest Gardener’s Handbook and a longtime garden columnist and feature writer for Midwest Living magazine. Her recent release, Your Midwest Garden is a guide to the flowers, shrubs, vegetables, fruits, and other plants that thrive and make beautiful Midwest gardens. Below she tells us her “Gardner Story.”

For years I’ve
heard from readers who have a shoebox full of my garden columns clipped from
the newspaper. Over and over, I heard the same complaint: “I can never find the
column I’m looking for when I need it.”

I promised
I would gather the columns into a book. This year, in Your Garden: An Owner’s
Manual, it finally happened. I laughingly tell readers that the index is the
most important part of the book because now they can find what they’re looking
for.

I’ve read
and reviewed a lot of garden books over the years, but the ones I keep are the
reference books that I turn to again and again. To help make my own book a
useful reference, I added plant lists so you could see at a glance, for
example, which perennials to plant for fall bloom or what annuals will thrive
in the shade. In the appendix, I added a month-by-month garden chore list, fine-tuned
for Midwest gardens.

My
audiences gasp when I tell them it took me almost 40 years to write this book,
but it’s true. In that time, I’ve written nearly 2,000 columns from which this
book was distilled.

Continue reading “From the “garden” of Jan Riggenbach”

You can judge a book by its cover; in fact, I hope you do because we
spend a lot of time honing the titles and cover designs for our books. With
more and more people purchasing books online, it’s even important than ever to
grab them with a good title or compelling cover.

In the online world of search
engine optimization (SEO), a title needs to come up if a consumer is looking
for a book on a certain subject. That’s why I’m such a stickler for non-fiction
book titles (except perhaps, memoir) to say what the book is about.

In a recent meeting about titles
for forthcoming books, I raised the point that a particular title didn’t tell
you what was the book was about.

“Well, if you read the book,”
someone said, “you’ll know why the author wants this title.” I countered, “With
that title, I’m definitely not going to read the book.” We settled on keeping
the title, but with a very descriptive subtitle that captures what might come
up when someone searches that subject online.

Different genres have different
conventions for titling. It’s okay to go for a snazzy title paired with a long,
long subtitle on a sports or business book. (That seems to be the acceptable
approach now, anyway.) Personally, I love it. A recent favorite of mine: Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and
Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan. How could you resist a book
like that? Apparently you can’t because it’s been a hot seller for us. Of
course, some books don’t need a subtitle; the title says everything. I love 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before
They Die. End of story.

Religious books are tough to title.
You have to convey why the book is unique but remain respectful, while
explaining what the book is about. I’m particularly proud of the title we came
up with for —well, I don’t have to tell you what the book is about because the title
and subtitle say it all: From Gods to
God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends.

Fiction and literary memoir are a
bit more challenging. We seldom change the title that the author submits; it
would be like changing the title of a painting. Our memoirists, in particular,
seem to be quite skilled at titles. For example:

 

Continue reading “The Director Dish: Judging a Book by Its Cover”

We would like to welcome UNP's new marketing manager, Martyn Beeny to his
first blog post. He comes to UNP from the South Dakota State Historical Society Press in Pierre, SD, where he was Marketing Director and Associate Editor since 2005.

The first week on the job is always a whirl, a shimmering
mirage, where you keep thinking you are grasping the nuances of your new job
and the wonderful people you are meeting all around you, only to realize that
you cannot actually reach out and grab it—the mirage is the idea that you have
any idea about what you are doing, of course.

You meet a lot of new people, you try to learn their names
as quickly as possible, you move things around in your new office; all things
you expect. What I didn’t expect was to find myself standing in front of the
stove after work this week trying to cook sautéed penguin. Ok, hold on. Before
someone writes to PETA and sends them my name, I was not actually cooking
penguin; that is illegal! And yet, I did find myself in front of the stove
attempting to replicate a dish from our recent title, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic
Cuisine by Jason C. Anthony.

Aside from the wonderful writing that describes so
eloquently the harsh cuisine of the Antarctic, Anthony included in his book a
selection of recipes from various points in Antarctica’s history. As I flicked
through the pages during that first, whirlwind week, one, that for sautéed
penguin, caught my eye. As mentioned above, it is illegal to kill/cook penguin,
but my mind instantly wondered if the recipe might be adapted slightly to use a
legal ingredient so that the modern reader might entertain himself (and
hopefully others) with fare from the south.

I don’t claim to be a chef, but I think I can follow
directions given in a recipe. That assumption led me to the aforementioned
position in front of the stove and to the photo diary below. Today, I shall feed
my fellow workers with sautéed “penguin.” We’ll let you know what they think!

Having traveled to Antarctica to spear my penguin (purchased
Cornish game hen from the frozen section in the local grocery store), I plucked
and cleaned it (defrosted it, opened the packaging, and removed as much meat as
I could!), and melted the butter. The original recipe in Hoosh called for a whopping four ounces of butter. I halved that.
I’m guessing that penguin meat requires a little more cooking than the rather
more fragile game hen I had substituted.

Continue reading “Need a dinner suggestion? Antarctic fare offers nice surprise”

Like many Americans, I first saw Nebraska from the interstate, zooming through at seventy-five. My early encounters with the University of Nebraska Press were more numerous and more substantial. As a grad student and then editor living in the Northeast and Deep South I saw the Nebraska name on dozens of spines at bookstores and in my professors’ offices, and I read reviews of UNP books in the scholarly and general-interest press. Associations (all of them positive!) were formed. Nebraska – the publisher but also in some meaningful sense the university and the place – became, for me, much more … Continue reading Krissed Off: Seeing Nebraska in New Orleans

Nicole Tonkovich is the author of newly released, The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Tonkovich recently began a blog where she will transcribe field diaries kept by Alice Fletcher during
her allotment work. Click here for the first entry. Below she discusses how she discovered her book's topic. 

I became aware of E. Jane Gay and Alice C. Fletcher while
watching Ken Burns’s PBS series The West.
I was immediately intrigued–both by the clarity and beauty of Gay’s
photographs and by the fact that these two women were well into their middle
age when they went West, where Fletcher supervised the allotment of lands to
the Nez Perce Indians from 1889 to 1892.

As I delved into the story I was initially attracted to Gay’s
work. In addition to her photographs, she documented the pair’s adventures in a
series of witty and sometimes-acerbic columns published in reform periodicals
of the era. What she was telling the readers of these newspapers differed in
detail and in intent from the reports her friend Fletcher was sending to the
Indian Bureau. Somewhat reluctantly, I began to read Fletcher’s records, as
well. She was in many ways Gay’s opposite: where Gay was acerbic and witty,
Fletcher was earnest and hectoring. Gay had a lively sense of irony; Fletcher
lacked that sense entirely. Yet together they were part of the conception and
administration of a major federal program that impacted not only the Nez Perces
but nearly every Indian tribe in the nation, decimating their lands and
endeavoring to erase tribal identities altogether.

Continue reading “From the desk of Nicole Tonkovich”