Although Lathrop is a prolific writer--with six textbooks, three scholarly books, an edition of Don Quijote and numerous articles under his belt--he isn't quite prolific enough to be the author of all 100 volumes. Rather, he is the founder and editor of Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, a publishing company that works exclusively with faculty who research Spanish language and literature. Lathrop's associate editor in the publishing company is Alexander Selimov, assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures at UD and a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century Spanish and Cuban literatures.

Because these topics are important to a small group of scholars, Lathrop says, academics often have trouble finding a company that will do their work justice, publishing their books in attractive bindings and at reasonable cost. So, in 1978, Lathrop, who had a background in printing, stepped in and began publishing faculty manuscripts on Spanish literature.

"It costs no more to make a book pretty than it does to make it ugly, so why not make it good- looking?" he says.

He designed all soft covers until recently, when he hired Michael Bolan, AS '90, to manage the company. Now, Bolan does most of the graphics except for the covers designed by one of the original Mad Comics artists, Jack Davis. Davis has drawn two covers for Juan de la Cuesta, most recently for the fourth edition of Lathrop's Evolution of Spanish.

"It's a source of enormous satisfaction to know that I'm providing a needed service," Lathrop says. "Any number of my authors are full professors now because I've published their work."

Long before Tom Lathrop became Prof. Lathrop, he was a printer's apprentice--or, more accurately, he was a 15-year-old doing odd jobs in a small print shop in Hollywood, Calif. But, he says, what he learned in that print shop helped him make a living during his college years and gave him knowledge that would affect his future.

As an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a degree in French and Spanish, and later as a doctoral student in romance languages and literatures, he worked for a much larger print shop, all the while learning new skills and improving the old. Altogether, he spent a dozen summers in the printing business.

His experience led to a love of and respect for books in his field and a fear that they were being published on paper that wouldn't last, with bindings that fell apart and at prices that were too high.

Because Lathrop knew what went into producing books on higher-grade paper with attractive bindings, he knew such work could be done at a reasonable price. So, he says, he decided to do something about it.

"The idea was to start a series of scholarly books in the area of Hispanic languages and literature, printed on good paper with strong bindings, books that would be handsome but sell for a modest price," he says.

In choosing a name for the venture, Lathrop, whose areas of research include the author Miguel de Cervantes, decided to name the series after the printer who produced the first editions of Cervantes' Don Quijote, Juan de la Cuesta. Since de la Cuesta published Don Quijote in the early 1600s, Lathrop hoped the name would imply that the series is about older Spanish literature.

Lathrop asked eight internationally known scholars if they would serve on the editorial board of the fledgling series. Everyone agreed, he says, and then it was time to find the first title--a book called Cervantes and the Renaissance, which Juan de la Cuesta published in 1980. It has become a classic in the field, Lathrop says, and there now are 125 books published or under contract in that series. Plans now are in the works to add new series in French, German and Italian classics.

When Lathrop founded Juan de la Cuesta, he started with 100 International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). They were supposed to last as long as the publishing company.

ISBNs are issued by the U.S. International Standard Book Numbers Agency, responsible for assigning unique prefixes to books published in the United States as a way of keeping track of each title, regardless of edition or binding. The agency, which determines how many prefixes a publisher is likely to use in a lifetime and assigns that number, decided a total of 100 was all Lathrop would need.

When the company reached its 100th publication last year, Lathrop requested more prefixes. This time, ISBN assigned him 1,000.

--Barbara Garrison