The Evolution of Evolutionary Economics: The Saga of a Wayward Book
Newtonian Classicism and Darwinian Institutionalism, the precursor of Evolutionary Economics, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1953. It was published in what was called "the scholarly series" and was bound in gray heavy cover paper with the print in blue. It was sufficiently drab so as not to detract from its "scholarly" classification. The press run was set by the then academic vice president at 500. He, a historian of Spanish colonial Yucatan, insisted that any publication that sold more than 500 in its lifetime was not scholarly. No promotion and no advertising were undertaken. Any notoriety received came only from the journal reviews. Although the then editor of The American Economic Review, Bernard Haley, did not see fit to have it reviewed in the premier American economic journal, it received full reviews in The Economic Journal of The Royal Economic Society, in the Economic Record of the royal Australian and New Zealand Economic Society, and The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science at Penn, as well as in The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly. Whether as a result of these reviews or because of word of mouth, within about three years the stock on hand had been reduced to something like twenty copies. The question arose about its reprinting. These were unheard of sales in "the scholarly series." The answer was clear. The academic vice president's mandate setting the press run precluded any reprinting. And there was none. Only individual orders were filled, and then only after weighing the "worthiness" of the request. One from the Air Force Academy about 1962 was filled with alacrity. A request from a University in Rumania was reluctantly filled only after I indicated, "If we can get behind the iron curtain, let's go. Bob Patton at Ohio State had used the original print in his graduate seminar. Patton was a person of direct action, and when NC&DI was not available, he issued a mimeographed edition, copyright laws be damned. Sometime in the late 1960s the UNM Press received a request to permit a mimeographed reprint of substantial parts of NC&DI from a faculty member at Dennison University, perhaps one of Patton's former students but one who was more fastidious about copyright law. At that time the UNM press was creating a paperback series out of some of its back stock. I was asked how many copies NC&DI would sell in two to three years. I responded that it might sell two thousand and maybe three. To my surprise they said,