What would Ralph say?

• Author: Ryden, John G.
• Position: Ralph Sharp Brown, Intellectual Property, and the Public Interest - Brief Article

Ralph Brown had "a long love affair" with Yale University Press. Those aren't my words, they're Betty Brown's. They explain why it was his wish that we meet here today to remember him. The "affair" began when Ralph was in his early twenties and lasted for the rest of his long and full life.

To earn the money for his tuition at Yale Law School, Ralph worked on the Yale edition of Horace Walpole's Letters, a vast undertaking that took half a century and forty-eight volumes to complete, all made possible by the splendid beneficence of Wilmarth "Lefty" Lewis. At the Walpole factory Ralph edited volumes nine and ten. Ralph's name appears under Lefty's on the title page; his work appears in the footnotes. The joke that swept the Graduate School that year was that Ralph's notes were more witty, erudite, and charming than the famously witty, erudite, and channing Horace Walpole himself.

Ralph was only a few years younger than the Press, which marks its ninetieth anniversary this fall. In all those years, no member of the faculty had a longer or closer relationship with the Press or contributed to it in so many ways. Judge Pollak has spoken of his prize-winning book.(1) Ralph's formal association with the Press began in 1963 when he joined the Publications Committee.

I should explain what that means. Publications Committee sounds prosaic. It isn't. If the Press were a Navy ship--a metaphor I think former Navy person Brown would have allowed--the place where we make the books could be thought of as the engine room, the sales department the gun deck, and the Publications Committee the bridge of the ship, where the editors of the Press meet with the committee to set the course ... and where Ralph always made sure we knew what we were fighting for. The PC, as it is always called, is one of Yale's most coveted committee assignments and has the reputation of being the university's best floating faculty seminar. Its members hold in their hands the imprint of the university, and they authorize its use only when books meet the university's highest standards and approach the ideals for which it stands. In other words, only when the books are good enough to carry the name "Yale" on title page and spine.

After serving on the PC for five years, Ralph became chairman in 1968, and for the next thirteen years he steered the committee in his peerless way, after which--following a heart attack that slowed him down only briefly--he yielded the chair to Jary Pelikan...