About BCL

12/15/03

About Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc.

Background
Bruccoli Clark Layman produces reference works in literary and social history. The company was founded in 1962 by Matthew J. Bruccoli, an author and professor of English, and C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., a marketing executive, to publish limited editions of literary works. In 1975, Frederick Ruffner, president of Gale Research, Inc., invited Prof. Bruccoli and Mr. Clark to develop a series of reference books in literary biography. The next year Bruccoli Clark, Inc., was incorporated and commenced production of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Richard Layman was the first employee.

Bruccoli Clark grew steadily over the next decade and a half. In 1983 Mr. Clark went into semi- retirement, and the company name was changed to Bruccoli Clark Layman (BCL). By that time, the company employed some twenty editors, proofreaders, researchers, and typesetters and was well established as a producer of camera-ready copy for reference works, with a reputation for editorial excellence; the staff doubled over the next decade. Clark retired in June 1994 and died in 2001.

From the beginning the company has maintained its commitment to high editorial standards. BCL develops projects through the stage of camera-ready copy and forms co-publishing partnerships with publishers who have the resources to manufacture, promote, and sell its books. BCL edits, typesets, proofreads, and designs all of its books in order to extend editorial control as far as possible into the publishing process. Typesetting and pagination are done on Windows-based computers using Adobe FrameMaker pagination software and compatible input programs. Forty in-house computer workstations operate in a Novell network.

Organization
Typically a BCL project is developed from inception in-house. BCL in-house editors locate specialist volume editors who are not on BCL's staff and work with them to refine the rationale for a volume and to enlist contributing writers. When typescripts are submitted to BCL, the in-house volume editor begins a process of editorial scrutiny that lasts an average of three months. The editor checks every checkable fact and line-edits copy. Revisions and queries are submitted to the contributor or the outside editor for response, and when the typescript is in satisfactory form, proofs are prepared either by in-house typesetting or by alteration of electronic data submitted by the contributor. Proofreading and copyediting are meticulous processes at BCL. When type is set in-house, a word-for-word read is the first of four complete readings by different in-house proofreaders and copy editors. Most BCL books are illustrated, and the in-house photo department has built an archive of illustrations in literary and social history comprising some 400,000 images, many of which are in the public domain.

The core of Bruccoli Clark Layman is the editorial department. Eleven editors, most of whom have Ph.D.s in the humanities and all of whom have graduate study beyond the master's degree, are responsible for assuring the editorial integrity of every book produced at BCL. Editors are responsible for accuracy, clarity, and adherence to the editorial rationale of each book they supervise. Two full-time library researchers assist the editors in their work.

Manly, Inc.
In 1987 Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman formed Manly, Inc., to research and develop new projects. BCL and Manly are closely associated, BCL typically produces projects Manly develops. With the formation of Manly, Inc., the editorial scope of BCL broadened to include social history. Since 1976 Bruccoli Clark Layman has produced some 400 reference books comprising some 50 million words. Publishers associated with Bruccoli Clark Layman and Manly, Inc., have included Gale Research, the primary publisher of BCL books from the beginning; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Facts on File; Omnigraphics; and Chadwyck-Healey. For Gale BCL has produced the Dictionary of Literary Biography, a history of literature in all languages from antiquity to present told through the biographies of writers. As of 2003 the series, which is still in progress, comprises some 300 volumes organized by genre and nationality that are independently useful and that as a group form the broad history promised by the series rationale. From 1978 to 1989 Bruccoli Clark (and then Bruccoli Clark Layman) provided an imprint list for publication by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Volumes under the HBJ/BC imprint included, among other books, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Price Was High and Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, and Selected Letters; Manly produced New Black Mask Quarterly (8 volumes) and A Matter of Crime (4 volumes) for Harvest, the HBJ trade-paperback imprint. In a joint venture with Facts on File, Bruccoli Clark Layman and Manly produced the ten-volume Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography, the four-volume Bibliography of American Fiction, a one-volume Dictionary of American Literary Characters, and a two-volume Dictionary of British Literary Characters, among other works. For Gale, in 1993 and 1994 BCL and Manly produced a three-volume biographical history of the Cold War; a series in cultural history, Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Culture; and a nine- volume social history of the United States in the twentieth century, American Decades. Manly served as planning consultant to Chadwyck-Healey for an electronic database of American poetry before 1920, including the complete poetic works of some 300 poets. In 2002 BCL and Manly, Inc., will produce twenty-six reference volumes.

Tradition of Quality
The second book Bruccoli Clark published, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Writers Since World War II, was named an Outstanding Reference Book of the Year by Choice. The DLB is now recognized as the most authoritative source of its kind and the most ambitious literary reference work in the history of American reference publishing. Recent volumes produced by BCL and Manly, Inc., that have been named to either the Choice or Library Journal lists of outstanding reference works of the year include The Cold War (1993) and The Value of a Dollar (1994), and American Decades: 1950-1959 (1995).

Growth
Bruccoli Clark began with two employees in 1976, a secretary and an editor. The firm produced one book. By 2003 the staff had grown to forty-six full-time employees and produced about eight million published words per year. BCL is actively developing reference projects for online publication.

Principals
President
Matthew J. Bruccoli did his undergraduate work at Yale University and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia. He is the Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. A bibliographer and biographer, he has written standard books on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Vice President
C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (1925-2001), did his undergraduate work at Kenyon College and earned his M. A. in English at Wayne State University. He was the leading collector of Nathaniel Hawthorne and wrote the standard Hawthorne bibliography.

Vice President
Richard Layman did his undergraduate work at Indiana University; he earned his M. A. in English at the University of Louisville and his Ph.D. in English at the University of South Carolina. He has written books on subjects in American literature, notably Dashiell Hammett.