Mercenaries and Paid Men: Scholarship FTW, Publisher FAIL
I’m currently reading Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages, a brand new collection of articles edited by John France. It’s awesome: I can’t put it down.

There’s one nifty bite-sized article after another. Kelly DeVries writes about the problem of defining medieval mercenaries and distinguishing them from other paid soldiers. David Crouch looks at why the emerging knightly ethos of the late twelfth century made William Marshal try to distance himself from the mercenary captains who were his allies. Muslim and Armenian engineers working for the Crusaders receive attention in an article by Nicolas Prouteau. David Bacharach compares urban militias in England and Germany, while Adrian Bell attempts to determine whether the career of Chaucer’s knight was more consistent with a mercenary or an ordinary crusader. Other articles discuss regions as disparate as Ireland, Lithuania, Hungary, Sicily and Spain.

The only thing about the book that really irritates me is the fact that it was published by Brill. This means that it would cost $145 US (about $175 CDN) to buy my own legal copy. In this respect, the entire work shows a sad failure of imagination on the part of its publishers and editor.

I have to admit, the book is a prime example of all that baffles me about academic publishing. I’ve learned from reading Making Light that publishers usually have rational, if counterintuitive, reasons for the way they operate, but I simply do not understand the business model employed by a house like Brill. How can they possibly be maximizing their profit by pricing books out of the range of everyone but major research libraries? Even professors with respectable salaries cringe at their prices.

I would understand the cost if the book was a dry work on an esoteric topic and only of interest to a small, specialized field. I’m all in favour of dull books about obscure subjects making it into print, even if their print runs are minuscule. My dissertation would be impossible if it weren’t for about a hundred such books. I also understand that they have to be expensive in order for the publisher to recoup the production costs. Small print runs, library-grade binding and the peer review process all cost money.

But Mercenaries and Paid Men is not a dull book. It’s about medieval fricking mercenaries, for Pete’s sake. There’s a market for that stuff, and it goes far beyond the “scholars, postgraduates and undergraduates” suggested on the Brill website. Have the publishers not heard of gamers, reenactors, western martial artists, armchair generals and precocious thirteen year olds? I know a lot of people outside of academia who are eager to graduate from their Osprey books to something meatier. Is it really more profitable to slap a monochromatic cover on the book and price it in such a way that no bricks-and-mortar bookstore will touch it?

And what was John France thinking? In an age when academics are increasingly called upon to justify their existence, sending a book to a publisher who will charge $175 for it is like putting the manuscript in a locked filing cabinet in a basement lavatory with a sign on the door that says Beware of the leopard, as far as the taxpaying public is concerned. Instead of subscribing to the elitist attitude of William Marshall, could Dr. France not have been a little more ...mercenary?