A World of Subscribers

Many of the files in the Records of the Stanford Language Universals Project (SLUP) are short letters from individual researchers who were looking to obtain subscriptions to the Working Papers on Language Universals. When the series first launched in 1969, subscriptions were available at no cost. Requests often led to private and collegial exchanges, with back issues, offprints, and seminar reports criss-crossing through the mail.

For example, the series editor, Edith Moravcsik, exchanged several letters with Yolanda Beh, the Head Librarian of the Regional English Language Centre in Singapore during the fall of 1970. Through bibliographic barter (see Bibliographic Correspondence), Moravcsik obtained four titles from the Centre’s Seminar Reports for the Universals Project library, which she actively cultivated and elsewhere described as a hub of Project activity. Department libraries at peer institutions grew, reciprocally, apace.

Stanford University, Language Universals Project, records 1967-1976, SC0449, Box 1. Binder 3, titled “Language Universals Project 1971 Correspondence.”

By the winter of 1971, copies of back issues were starting to run out, and the WPLU went into a second printing. With volume No. 9, in 1972, the Working Papers began to charge a fee of $2.00 per issue to cover the cost of printing and shipping, suggesting the extent to which readership had grown. This fee, however, was waived whenever subscribers agreed to send their own materials in return.

As I flipped through multiple binders of this correspondence in Stanford last April, I was struck by the deeply personal channels by which research reports and other information resources were exchanged in these, the earliest days of OCLC. I was also struck by how global the network of WPLU subscribers was during this deeply divided period in world history. Not only did the typological work presented in its pages rely on areally diverse samples, they were read and exchanged by people from around the world, feeding back into the data collection activities of the Project through trade in gray literature.

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/b8d89a676c2e66be4649ac982991def2/subscribers-to-wplu/index.html

I have begun entering individual letters into a narrative map, which will continue to grow in the months ahead. Anyone interested can view the map here!