Look back in hardbacks

January: The American Historical Association convention in Atlanta starts the year off right. "Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?" and Other Questions is displayed and my editor, Michael Flamini, treats me to a fabulous seafood dinner. As always with a new book, I foolishly fantasise a review in The New York Times Book Review.

At a party, I meet the Oxford University Press children's editor, Nancy Toff. Mentioning that my two teenage daughters are avid readers, I state how I would really like to write for their age group because college may be too late to connect with young folk and it would better prepare me - an ever-aspiring "public intellectual" - to write to the general public's reading level. She asks if I am serious. When I say "very", she proposes a kids' book on American radicals and promises to be in touch.

February: In deference to frigid temperatures and snowstorms, I do not venture very far but rip book adverts out of journals as reminders for our upcoming Chicago weekend. Meanwhile, I accomplish all my promised reviews, and read Superman comics at bedtime.

March: Elliott Gorn's and my book series, American Radicals, allows me to live vicariously when one of our first titles, a biography of William Appleman Williams, garners a solid New York Times review. However, the series' future is unclear for there is talk that Routledge's corporate owners, International Thomson, are looking to sell the press. In fact, as the foremost publisher of cultural studies, Routledge's future is becoming the hot topic of academic gossip.

At the Organization of American Historians' meetings in Chicago, I run into Nancy Toff again. After apologising for not communicating, she explains that she has been finishing her own book on flute playing and thinking about creating a new series of young people's biographies. She asks if I would like to write one on Tom Paine (my childhood hero). Given that two new adult biographies have appeared recently (John Keane's is outstanding), I figure I will never do one for grown-ups; so, I grab the chance to do the children's version. More than ever, my daughters will serve as my "in-house editors".

April: My friend, our Routledge editor, Cecelia Cancellaro, leaves for a better position at Random House, leaving the series orphaned at the press. (Eventually, the press is sold to a British investment group. Confusion reigns.) Academic publishing is clearly changing, not just at commercial houses, but, indeed, all the more at American university presses. The latter are receiving less support from their institutional parents, making it imperative that scholarly books pay their own way not simply via library purchases but, additionally, either by bookstore sales or by adoptions for course and classroom use. Presses' decisions increasingly defer to market priorities, and monographs are getting harder and harder to publish. What will it mean for that grand old tenure question "publish or perish".

May: Reading The Wall Street Journal, my wife, Lorna, asks if I know "Amazon - the earth's biggest bookstore" (www.amazon.com). As a lover of bookstores, I wonder what the impact of on-line shopping will be. I check it out and, while I remain nervous about buying anything via the Internet, I start using the site as a reference tool.

June: Year-round, I buy too many books. Nevertheless, summer means we can head to Madison for a weekend in bookstores and Asian restaurants. We stay overnight at the Canterbury Books and Cafe "B&B"; each room is fitted out a la Canterbury Tales (we get the Merchant's suite). Normally, it's too expensive ($200 plus), but - having bought the requisite dollars' worth of books in the store during the past few years - we are entitled to a free night's stay. The Canterbury's staff is literate and engaging; the shop is open until nearly midnight; and every evening there is a reading or musical performance in the cafe. Our younger daughter is already planning to attend university in Madison and get a job there.

July: To Britain - which, of course, means visiting Dillon's and Waterstone's in London and Blackwell's in Oxford. I am eager to show the girls why I call Blackwell's "the Tardis" (just a little old house on the outside, its interior space is infinite). Adding to its Dr Who-ish character, the store is undergoing renovations. Preparing to write Tom Paine, I get carried away and buy more books than I will ever need to accomplish it. Back in London, I stop at Index on Censorship which is celebrating its 25th anniversary of calling attention to the suppression of free speech. The editor, Ursula Owen, recommends Alberto Manguel's new book, A History of Reading, and invites me to contribute an "American Notes" column in 1997.

August: I get ready for the fall semester. Making space for my new purchases, I cull books from my office shelves. Over the years, I have donated boxloads to the library. This time I fill two recycle bins when I discover that many of my old paperbacks are falling apart at the seams.

September: Prior to the Jewish high holidays, my family and I attend a funeral for the synagogue's damaged prayer books. As "People of the Book", we Jews are obliged to ritually bury works bearing words from the Torah.

At the cemetery, the grave is already dug and, after the appropriate words are recited, we lower the boxes into the ground and shovel the earth back into the hole. The experience is moving. I cannot help but contrast it to the treatment I recently accorded my own old texts.

October: The New York Public Library and The New York Times Book Review celebrate their centennials. The latter reprints classic reviews. I am humbled, and prepared to accept my absence from its pages - until I see the following week's regular assortment of reviews. Signing the OUP contract for Tom Paine, I now fantasise a review in the NYTBR's children's section.

November: Election Day. A pile of new works, including Michael Tomasky's Left For Dead and E. J. Dionne's They Only Look Dead, call for a progressive political revival. These and my other at-home books must be removed from our loft bedroom because the painters are coming. I strain myself lugging them down to the basement, and I make a mental note to ease my soreness by rereading Walter Benjamin's Unpacking My Library when I get to do the same. Lorna remarks how nice the room would look if we - that is, I - did not bring them all back upstairs when the paint is dried (not to mention she is allergic to dust).

December: I run into a former colleague, an award-winning science fiction editor, who has taken early retirement to pursue full-time trade publishing. He tells entertaining stories; however, he reports a growing "gender gap". Apparently, boys and young men are abandoning books in favour of computers, electronic games and the Internet. Happy that I'm the father of two girls, I wonder how to make Tom Paine especially interesting to them.

Harvey J. Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.