When asked to write a short piece for the PMLA series entitled “The Book Market,” I muttered to myself, with a nervous laugh, “What book market?” More and more often I and others in academic publishing have been asking ourselves whether there exists a viable book market for literary studies. Almost every university press has a long history of publishing works in literary studies, and yet recently the frustrations of the market have begun to sour the relation between the field and its publishers. I regularly hear of one university press or another declaring that it is “getting out of the field.” Could a discipline with so many strengths, so much talent, and so much sophistication—in fact, the engine of the humanities—find itself for the most part unpublishable?