ou might imagine that running a university press would be like playing the stock market, angling for the big win: You patiently invest in scholars, waiting for the one book that will take the intellectual marketplace by storm, dictate a new wave of public policy, or anticipate the next Big Idea.

Books aplenty: press director Cohn, left, and editor-in-chief Wissoker photo: Chris Hildreth

Actually, looking after a press is more like portfolio management, according to Ken Wissoker, editor-in-chief of Duke University Press. "We don't even think very much about each book's individual performance; we think about the performance of the entire list," he says. "There's so much risk assessment involved in publishing."

Careful cost-benefit analysis yields a product mix that includes books with the power to influence a generation of thinkers and public intellectuals; others that break new ground within a narrow specialty much too important to ignore but much too complex for the common reader; and still others that will find their voice speaks loudest in classrooms. Oh, and, of course, there's the occasional work that falls flat on its face.

This balancing act has a strong entrepreneurial theme. Editors try to identify hot new talent before anyone else does, to recognize the still untenured hero of the next generation of grad students. The players in this market never strike it rich, yet, as on Wall Street, they can still lose big.

Some have, and the way is fraught with peril for the 120 or so remaining North American university presses. The same nonprofit publishers who for so long have kept the machinery running to disseminate new knowledge have been squeezed by spiraling costs, tightening demand, too much or too little specialization, buyer price sensitivity, big advances, the disappearance of the independent bookstore, bottlenecks in ever-narrower distribution channels, mergers and acquisitions--the economy, stupid.

Still, after threatening to crash and burn a scant decade ago, Duke University Press has engineered its way to a trajectory that may keep it aloft through the current hard times. Canny strategic decisions and pride in its deep roots have nourished it, feeding an eagerness to send out new shoots even as financial exigencies kept the old growth pruned back.

The press has never been one to shy from a good fight. Back when its parent institution was still called Trinity College, one of its first books--the 1924 An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes, edited by a Trinity professor--daringly introduced many readers to the likes of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson. Nearly seventy years later, press leaders again placed a bold bet, this time on cultural studies--the field of interdisciplinary scholarship that looks at art and literature, law and the sciences, history, and gender and race through a social and political lens. Think multiculturalism, emerging disciplines, gay and lesbian studies: high potential, high risk. They hedged their investment with area studies, foreshadowing the university's emphasis on internationalization by carving out specialties in the geographic niches of Asia and Latin America, which dovetailed with Duke faculty interests and existing press strengths. A stable journals program was to provide a steady income to fuel a Great Awakening in the books department.

Today, the portfolio is paying solid returns in terms of promotion for Duke University Press authors--who are not necessarily affiliated with Duke in any other way--and in prominence for the press. Its stock has risen steadily, not just because the press champions subject matter in the intellectual vanguard, but because of a concomitant mastery of old-fashioned business virtues: high editorial and production standards, low turnover of key employees, and good customer service--including service to that pesky and peculiarly time-consuming customer, the scholarly author.

" We spend a lot of time thinking about the economics of what we do," says Wissoker, "and trying to balance that with our reason for existence, which is to publish scholarship. We give people tenure."

Many academics now look to Duke as one of the top presses in the nation in the humanities and social sciences. Mentors quietly urge their protÈgÈs to sniff out opportunities for a first book from Duke. Established scholars such as New York University's chair of East Asian Studies, Harry Harootunian, lump Duke's press in with the likes of those at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, even Oxford and Cambridge. "Duke, while smaller than some university presses and perhaps less established, publishes books as good or better," says Harootunian, who taught for twenty-four years at the University of Chicago before heading for NYU.

" My sense is that a Duke book could certainly sustain a tenure at Princeton," reports Anthony Grafton, a history professor there. "Duke was for a long time a very solid, traditional press, and now tends to what cognoscenti call the cutting edge, and critics call the trendy."

" Scholarship has to make waves," says Srinivas Aravamudan, an associate professor of English at Duke and a member of its editorial board. "It can't be neutral or it becomes like putty."