Gaia McCune, a fourth-year English major at Alfred University, recently put the finishing touches on a project she had been working on through the spring 2025 semester: a new edition of Sarah Edgarton Mayo’s 1844 book, The Flower Vase. Gaia’s introduction explores the history of floriography, the language of flowers that was popular in the Victorian period.
Walter Kreutzer, also a fourth-year student, finished his book: Fairy Tales for Everyday, a collection of his original fairy tales and illustrations. First-year student Alfie Koenig created a new edition of the anthology Victorian and Edwardian Tales of Terror with his own scholarly introduction, author biographies, and edits to existing material. Fourth-year student Kimberly Paulo completed The Sun Shines: A Collection of Nature Literature, an anthology of British and American writers whose work explored nature. Samantha Batt published The Art of Sapphistry: Lesbian Literature from Antiquity to the Medieval Ages, a year-long project that includes many of her own Latin translations. Third-year student Alyra Rain wrapped up a thousand-page textbook project she has been working on through the 2024–25 academic year: Foundations of English Literature: An Anthology of Pre-Restoration British Literature.
The students’ finished projects are the capstone of their work in English Professor Allen Grove’s Publishing Practicum course, a one-semester introduction to book publishing offered in the Division of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Grove’s students choose their own subject matter, research the material thoroughly, write introductions, and wrestle with the nuts and bolts of layout and graphic design. Their finished works are published through Grove’s company, Whitlock Publishing. Grove uses sales revenues to pay for publishing expenses. Any remaining balance is donated to the English Division’s visiting writers fund.
Grove has taught the course every other year for more than a decade. Several of his students have converted their class experience into jobs in the publishing industry, and Whitlock Publishing has brought out 37 books with titles and subject matter ranging from The Woman Suffrage Cookbook (Sean Hilliard ’15) to The Feminist Coloring Book (Erin Jurkowski ’21).
“When I designed the course, I wanted it to give our students practical skills, applying their research and writing abilities to produce something concrete,” Grove says. “Generally, they’re not writing a book; they republish works that are out of copyright and unavailable in inexpensive paperback editions. Many students create original anthologies focused on an area of interest. All members of the class write well-researched introductions, timelines of important events, and suggested reading lists. They learn layout, typography, basic graphic design, and other elements of book publishing. Writing the introduction requires so many of the skills we teach in the English Division. And when they’re done, they have a book that’s for sale, and they have a great credential for publishing or writing jobs, or graduate school.”
Much of the Practicum’s classroom work is front-loaded, with the students spending the first weeks of the semester studying sample introductions in other anthologies and brainstorming their own introductions. Students conduct research into the authors they choose to publish, and the class visits Herrick Library to study book jackets, as each student will design their own book cover in addition to writing the introduction.
The work evolves into desktop publishing, with Grove supervising the students in Herrick Library’s computer lab, where they learn to use InDesign to develop age-old layout skills such as kerning and leading. Grove’s hope is that most of the students finish their projects by the date of AU’s annual Undergraduate Research forum. At this year’s forum, six of his students presented posters at the forum, and five had their books in hand.
Additionally, Grove noted, AU Art Librarian John Hosford audited the class this semester, as part of a project he has been working on tied to the 125th anniversary of the New York College of Ceramics.
The bulk of their work finished, Grove’s students are winding down the semester with less structured classroom periods. During a recent class, held in the seminar room on the second floor of Seidlin Hall, the discussion included thoughts on the role of Artificial Intelligence in creative practice; also, some opinions on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, whose work included ghost stories, horror and fantasy. Ghost stories are usually popular, and Grove’s company has published two volumes of The Alfred Book of Ghastly Tales, collections of ghost stories written by AU students and faculty.
“Probably no other school in the country offers an undergraduate class like this one,” Grove says of the Publishing Practicum. “But it’s a natural for the English Division. We celebrate our Maker Culture at Alfred University, and in this course we’re really making something.”
