Please pardon my delay in responding to your post, I’ve been traveling the past three weeks. and vexed by technical difficulties with our blog and website.

First off, I think Milestone Docs not being on the RUSA list is a great oversight. I have put hands and eyes on at least four books on that list (including our own), and now as a fellow RUSA winner perhaps I now have the “street creds” to say that your book was vastly superior to many on the list. In fact, I know of none on the list that are its equal.

Your content was fabulous, the copyediting superb, the design nearly flawless.

All I can think happened is what happened with a book we wrote two years ago titled Essential Primary Sources: Medicine, Health and Bioethics. We poured our heart and best scholarly efforts into that book — and had hopes it might make the RUSA list. We were greatly disappointed when the awards were announced.

A few weeks afterwards, the person who nominated the book wrote us and shared some comments from the RUSA deliberations. While everyone raved about the book, they disqualified it because the book’s essential content was “primary sources.”

If this is the case, then I respectfully think that RUSA should more clearly articulate such standards. More to the point, if this is the reason “primary source books” are overlooked, then RUSA should reconsider any such standard because the essential content of such books is often not the primary source itself (most of the primary sources are available via NARA or other sources), but rather the corpus of the selections and expert commentary that explains and puts each source into context.

Congratulations on the other awards for Milestone Docs — and keep up the excellent work!

Brenda and I hope to share a bottle of wine with you soon in an effort to drown our common editorial tribulations and woes.

Cheers,
Lee