A tribute to the publishers of classic physics books: McGraw-Hill

Scientific book publishing is not what it once was.  It is easy now for authors to make PDF versions of their lecture notes and books available on the web at no cost to the user, as alluded to in my post earlier this month.  Other books are available from publishers in electronic form, perhaps accessed by students through university and institutional libraries.  It is possible that the printed scientific book is rapidly becoming a historical artifact.  

This progress seems good and right.  It expands access to these materials by reducing cost, while reaching anyone with access to the Internet.  Perhaps welcome by many is the saving of space on a scientist's bookshelf.  Nonetheless, as a creature of an earlier age, I am a scientific bibliophile.  In their time, scientific books were outrageously successful means of putting knowledge into readers' hands.  I hope to begin a series of occasional blog posts to celebrate the publishers of these artifacts, focusing first on some of the classic textbooks and monographs of physics.

An easy choice for a starting point is McGraw-Hill, whose International Series in Pure and Applied Physics seemed to cover all fields of classical and modern physics.  In their heyday, volumes of this series were recognizable for their green covers with gold trim, embossed on the front with the series title.  The volume's title and author appeared in a black rectangle at the top of their spines.  The series begain in 1929, and some volumes continued to be used well into the 1990s and beyond.  However, I'm not sure whether any new volumes were added after the death of its Consulting Editor, Leonard Schiff, in 1971, nor whether he was replaced.  The first Consulting Editor was F. K. Richtmeyer, who served in the 1930s, followed by Lee A. DuBridge from 1939-1946, and G. P. Harnwell from 1947-1954, followed by Schiff.

One of the series' most prolific authors was John C. Slater of MIT, who contributed around 10 volumes on a range of topics (including classical physics texts co-authored with Nathaniel Frank).  Philip Morse, also of MIT, contributed four volumes (including both volumes of Methods of Theoretical Physics with Herman Feshbach, as well as two books on acoustics, one of which is reprinted by Princeton University Press).  The Morse and Feshbach math methods books were later reprinted by Feshbach's family for a number of years.

The famous text by Feynman & Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, first appeared in the series (and remains available as a Dover reprint), as did Max Jammer's The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, Frederick Seitz's The Modern Theory of Solids, and Microwave Spectroscopy by Nobel laureates Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow.  To select a couple other areas of physics, consider classical mechanics, where the series published Becker's Introduction to Theoretical Mechanics, Barger & Olsson's Classical Mechanics:  A Modern Perspective, and Lindsay's Mechanical Radiation.  In electricity and magnetism, the series featured books authored by Harnwell, Smythe, and Stratton; the latter kept in print by Wiley on behalf of the IEEE.  In the kinetic theory of gases, the monographs by Kennard and Present appeared in the series.  Other notable titles include Michael Tinkham's Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics (still in print with Dover), Francis Bitter's Introduction to Ferromagnetism, Leon Brillouin's Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures (at one time reprinted by Dover, but out of print now), and Schiff's own Quantum Mechanics, which ran through 3 editions.  I'm sure that older readers could name their own favorites too, or at least recognize some famous names in the list of authors and titles.

McGraw-Hill had another series, of undergraduate textbooks, called Fundamentals of Physics, edited by E. U. Condon.  I own two of the upper-division volumes of this series, Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics, by Frederick Reif, and Edgar Kraut's Fundamentals of Mathematical Physics, both still available as reprints from Waveland Press and Dover, respectively.

McGraw-Hill of course was also the publisher of the Berkeley Physics Course, a five-volume series meant to form a 2-year undergraduate physics sequence.  The most successful volume was Edward M. Purcell's Electricity and Magnetism, the only one to appear in a second edition, which remains in print now with Cambridge University Press.  Another classic in this series was Frank Crawford's Waves, which I mentioned in my earlier post.

In 1967 McGraw-Hill acquired Schaum's Outline Series, founded by Daniel Schaum, and continues to publish these books today.  These books (meant to supplement the main text of the course) range over multiple academic disciplines, not just physics.  As far as I know, of the four series discussed here, Schaum's is the only one that McGraw-Hill actively maintains. 

Outside these series of physics books, McGraw-Hill published others of course, like Mark Zemansky's Heat and Thermodynamics, which ran through 7 editions, and Jenkins & White's Fundamentals of Optics, which ran through 4 editions.  They also had another series called the International Series in Pure and Applied Mathematics, of which Dettman's Mathematical Methods in Physics and Engineering is worthy of note (again, still available as a Dover reprint).

Many of McGraw-Hill's physics books have attained classic status, and reprint editions are available for many of them by other publishers, as is evident from the above discussion.  These books have endured beyond their original publisher's interest in them.  While McGraw-Hill remains very active in the introductory physics textbook market, and still publishes some upper division texts, they don't seem to be major players in the latter, nor in the monograph sector of the market.  Thus, this tribute is mainly to past glories, with hope that some of the finest examples remain accessible to physicists of the future.

A family portrait of selected McGraw-Hill volumes in the International Series in Pure and Applied Physics.

Historical note.  McGraw-Hill has its roots in the publishing firms of James H. McGraw, who acquired the American Journal of Railway Appliances in 1888, and John A. Hill, who at the time was an editor of the Locomotive Engineer.  Hill formed his own publisher in 1902, and the two men merged their book operations in 1909.  Upon Hill's death in 1916, the remainder of their publishing companies unified to form the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company in 1917.