A love affair with books 

Andrew Hurley

Retiring Yale University Press director John Donatich says working with authors has prepared him for his next pursuit: becoming a psychoanalyst. View full image

Hospitalized with a broken elbow, four-year-old John Donatich received a gift from a neighbor—a board book featuring Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit. “I remember thinking ‘What is this wonderful thing?’” he says, “and fell in love with my first book.”

Since then, as a reader, editor, publisher—and, for the past 22 years, director of Yale University Press, a position he is leaving in June—Donatich has loved thousands of books.

The four-year-old enamored with Peter Rabbit became an elementary school child who often saved his lunch money to buy books, eventually collecting enough to build his own eclectic library. “I’ve always felt a book was written for each reader’s particular attention,” Donatich says, “a physical object waiting to be lit by a singular imagination.” In his earlier years, when many publishers had their own printing presses, Donatich could even distinguish books by touch and scent. “I used to ask my sister to blindfold me and hand me a book. I could usually tell by the smell and the texture of the paper who the publisher was.”

Donatich worked for Grove Press, HarperCollins, and Basic Books before coming to Yale University Press in 2003. Between its New Haven and London offices, YUP publishes more than 400 books a year. In one way or another, Donatich says, “I touch every book I publish,” including editing his own list of authors. His YUP tenure is replete with rewards and accomplishments: strengthening the press’s finances; launching several new series and expanding existing series; publishing in English international works of cultural significance; publishing winners of the Nobel Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize; expanding offerings in everything from art, architecture, and fashion to Soviet history; and undertaking initiatives to propel scholarly inquiry into the digital age.

Donatich has published two books of his own—a memoir called Ambivalence, A Love Story and a novel, The Variations. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and The Village Voice.  

His publishing career, Donatich says, has prepared him for his next chapter—training to become a psychoanalyst. There is a parallel, he says, between entering analysis and having an author come to an editor with a manuscript she thinks represents her best self. 
 
But he will always remain a book guy. “A lot of my emotional and intellectual life resides in reading,” he says. “There will always be a place for long-form narrative. This beautiful invention has survived flood and fire, the Spanish Inquisition, the US Postal Service. Each book has the power to change the world, one mind at a time.”