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Herbert Warren Richardson (born April 14, 1932) is an American Professor of Theology, an ordained Presbyterian minister, and the founder of The Edwin Mellen Press, which describes itself as a "non-subsidy academic publisher of books in the humanities and social sciences".

Early life

Herbert Warren Richardson was born on April 14, 1932. He is the great-grandson of Isaac Adams, the Massachusetts State Senator and inventor of the Adams Power Press.

Richardson attended Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, and pledged in an interracial fraternity (where his friends included James Lawson, the activist and architect of the civil rights movement).

Career

Scholar

In 1963, Richardson earned his doctorate at Harvard Divinity School, where he was also an Assistant Professor until 1968. Later, he became the first Harvard Divinity School alumnus to be appointed Professor in the Divinity faculty, and served "with unusual elan" as a teacher and scholar. He was also ordained a Presbyterian minister.

As a religious studies scholar, Richardson made a name for himself early on, publishing a translation of the works of St Anselm of Canterbury, and an early exploration of American theology. During the height of the ecumenical movement during the late 1960s, he left Harvard University in 1968 for the University of St Michael's College (a Roman Catholic institution which is part of the University of Toronto).

Publishing

In 1970, he was invited to become a Gastprofessor (Visiting Professor) at the University of Tübingen, (West) Germany, where he learned wissenschaftlich or "scholar-for-scholar" ("S4S") publishing.

In 1972, Richardson started his own scholarly press, which he called Edwin Mellen Press (in honour of his grandfather). The Press's original goal was to publish theses completed by graduate students of the University of St Michael's College, Toronto. Soon thereafter, the Press expanded to publish dissertations by scholars from other universities. The press published books on topics as varied as the health problems of migrants living on the border of Thailand and Burma to the role of parrots in fiction.

By 1979, the press had grown large enough that the business moved out of the basement of his home, and relocated to larger premises in Lewiston, New York (a village just across the Canada–US border near Niagara Falls). The press continued to expand, and was publishing as many as 150 titles each year. By 2013, the Press's published books were held by numerous academic libraries around the world, including the University of London (holding 4,926), and Harvard University (with 4,731).

Criticism

During the 1990s, Richardson had brought a suit against the magazine Lingua Franca for critical coverage of the Mellen Press. In 2013, Richardson sued the librarian and blogger Dale Askey for libel after Askey criticized the quality of Mellen's books in a blog post. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, more than 30 scholarly organizations subsequently condemned the press, which had maintained that its good reputation was at stake. Later, the matter was settled, without payment, in February 2015.

Archives

In 1998, Richardson befriended Margot Lipton (a former secretary to Robert Kempner, the German-born American lawyer who had served as US Assistant Chief Counsel during the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg) and, shortly thereafter, Lipton granted power of attorney (over her estate) to Richardson and moved to an assisted-living facility in Lewiston, New York. In 1994, Lipton had been granted power over Kempner's estate (in his will), and in November 1998, Richardson persuaded Lipton to move Kempner's estate to a house in Lewiston ("The Robert Kempner Collegium"). In 1999, Richardson met detectives looking for parts of Kempner's archives, and said "he was trying to help them...and make sure the Kempner collection was preserved." He "agreed to relinquish" to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., a set of Nazi documents that had come into his hands. The loose-leaf diary (dating from 1936 to 1944) of Alfred Rosenberg (one of Hitler's most long-standing leading supporters, who was convicted and hanged for war crimes in 1946) had been held by Robert Kempner until his death, and therefore later formed part of Margot Lipton's estate, and was given to Richardson for "safe-keeping". The diary was recovered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2013, and is now in the possession of the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Selected Publications

• Richardson, H. W. (1967), Toward an American Theology, New York: Harper and Row.
• Richardson, H. W. (1969), Transcendence, Boston: Beacon Press.
• Richardson, H. W. (1971), Nun, Witch, Playmate: The Americanization of Sex, New York: Harper and Row.
• Richardson, H. W. (1980), New Religions and Mental Health: Understanding the Issues, New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
• Richardson, H. W. (1968), Theology for a New World, New York: S.C.M. Press.
• Richardson, H. W. with Elizabeth S. Clark (1996), Women and Religion: The Original Sourcebook of Women in Christian Thought, San Francisco: Harper Collins.

References

1. "The 200 Year Business/Academic Origins Of The Edwin Mellen Press". The Edwin Mellen Press. Retrieved December 16, 2015.
2. "The Edwin Mellen Press - official website". Archived from the original on December 11, 2015. Retrieved December 16, 2015.
3. ^ "Explaining S4S Publishing". Professor Herbert Warren Richardson. July 17, 2012. Retrieved February 9, 2016.
4. ^ New, Jake (April 15, 2013). "Herbert Richardson v. the World". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved February 9, 2016.
5. George Hunston Williams, Divinings: Religion At Harvard, Vol. 2, 2014, pp. 566ff.; Patrick Primeaux, Richard R. Niebuhr on Christ and Religion: The Four Stage Development of His Theology, 1981, Preface, pp. v–vi.
6. ^ Fabris, Casey (February 15, 2015). "Librarian Says Academic Press Has Settled Lingering Lawsuit Against Him". The Ticker. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved June 30, 2016.
7. Scheier, Rachel (August 27, 1999). "Nuremberg Lawyer's Lost Papers Recovered Holocaust Experts Are Studying Records Left By The Lansdowne Man. They Had Vanished". Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia Media Network, PBC. Retrieved December 16, 2015.
8. Simon, Richard (February 6, 2014). "The search for the lost Nazi diary". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved February 9, 2016.
9. Cohen, Patricia (June 13, 2013). "Diary of a Hitler Aide Resurfaces After a Hunt That Lasted Years". The New York Times. Retrieved June 15, 2013.
10. "Encontrado el diario de un confidente de Hitler" [Found: the diary of one of Hitler's confidants]. La Vanguardia (in Spanish). Barcelona, Spain. June 10, 2013. Archived from the original on June 24, 2013.
11. Fenyvesi, Charles (June 14, 2012). "Mysteries of the Lost (and Found) Nazi Diaries". National Geographic. Retrieved September 29, 2013.

• 1932 births
• Living people
• Baldwin Wallace University alumni
• Paris-Sorbonne University alumni
• Harvard Divinity School alumni
• Harvard Divinity School faculty
• American academics
• Academic biography stubs
• Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers
• Presbyterian Church in America ministers
• United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers
• Presbyterian Church in the United States ministers
• American Presbyterian ministers
• American theologians
• American Christian theologians
• American book publishers (people)
• American publishers (people)
• Harvard University alumni
• Harvard University people