Professor's publication receives 'outstanding academic title' award

The Novels of Daniel Defoe has been awarded an ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ by Choice, the review journal of the American Library Association.

Bob Owens, Professor of English Literature at the Open University, has been joint General Editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe, an edition in 44 volumes that has been appearing at the rate of 4 or 5 volumes every year, since 2000. The first part of the final set, The Novels, appeared in late 2007, and included Prof Owens' editions of Robinson Crusoe and the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

The award of ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ is given to about ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice over the year. The 2008 list, published in the January 2009 issue (vol. 46, no. 5) includes 679 titles from 54 disciplines. There were 38 titles in the section on English and American Language and Literature, in which the Defoe edition was included.

The criteria for the award are:

• Overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
• Importance relative to other literature in the field
• Distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
• Originality or uniqueness of treatment
• Value to undergraduate students
• Importance in building undergraduate library collections.

The journal Choice is perhaps not very well known in the UK, but it has a circulation of over 35,000 copies to academic librarians as well as academics in the USA, and is very important in getting academic works into college and university libraries.

Professor Owens says, "For the edition to have been given this accolade in its final stages is very pleasing indeed, not only for me but for my dear friend and colleague and joint General Editor, Nick Furbank, Emeritus Professor of The Open University. Now in his 88th year of age, but as intellectually indefatigable as ever, Nick completed a magnificent edition of Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress in the final set which has just appeared. It has been quite a job seeing 4 or 5 volumes through the press every year for ten years, though it has been enjoyable too."

Edited from email 12/12/2008.