About Us

Purpose:
The purpose of “Editing and Publishing,” English 349, is to teach writing, editing, and publishing skills in a “real” job setting. Book sales from previous years fund book production for the following year’s class.

History:
The "Editing and Publishing" course was created by Mary Croft in the mid-1970s and offered by her for a few years before Dan Dieterich began teaching it in 1978. In the course, students composed booklets on a wide variety of topics and then printed 30 copies of them so that they could distribute them to their classmates. In 1984, Dieterich changed the way the course worked, modeling the new course on one taught at Notre Dame. Instead of each student composing one booklet, all students worked together to edit, design, print, bind, market, and sell 500 to 1,000 copies of a single book.

In 1984 the class published Sean Murphy by Dan Houlihan. Since that time we have edited and published 14 other books, the most recent of which is The Buckridge Chronicles by Dick Hall. Our first two publications were issued under the name "First Class Publishers." In 1988 students adopted the name Cornerstone Press and decided to use that for all future class publications.

Structure:
Here at Cornerstone Press, we hold class elections to determine what job role one has to fill to publish a book for that semester, and from then on, the class functions like a publishing company. In addition to course work, all class members fulfill the tasks associated with their job titles.

Publication Process:
Although we have certain job duties that our position requires us to fulfill, our jobs often overlap for a team effort to publish the book. We are responsible for collaboration with the author, working with the publisher, marketing, and selling the book. In a for-profit publishing company, these activities can take years, but our class strives to accomplish it all in one semester. This semester we are publishing Wildflowers of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest: a Comprhensive Field Guide For Amateurs and Professionals by Merel R. Black and Emmet J. Judziewicz.