Lever Press Publishes Its 50th Book

In April 2026, Lever Press published its 50th book.

James Lochtefeld’s God’s Own Land: Sacred Landscape, Pilgrim Economy, and Religious Change in the Ganga Himalaya, the newest entry in the ASIANetwork Books series, is Lever’s 50th book and a major milestone in the history of our press. As an open access, peer-reviewed academic monograph by a leading figure in the field, Lochtefeld’s God’s Own Land represents Lever’s commitment to bringing groundbreaking scholarship to everyone—and to making sure authors and readers never have to pay for that availability. As an entry in the ASIANetwork Books series, which is a collaboration between Lever Press and ASIANetwork (a consortium of 140 colleges working to further education about Asia), Lochtefeld’s book also demonstrates our commitment to the value of liberal arts education, teaching, and scholarship.

At the center of Lever Press’s mission to further open access scholarly publishing is our dedication to responding collectively to the structural and economic challenges facing higher education and academic publishing in the twenty-first century. Lever Press arose in 2013 out of an initiative by the Oberlin Group to study how libraries at liberal arts colleges could offer a new and compelling publishing alternative to authors of scholarly works. The answer was Lever Press: a university press founded in 2015, funded by a consortium of libraries, governed by elected representatives from those libraries, and offering diamond open access publication to authors across the world. In partnership with Michigan Publishing and its groundbreaking digital platform Fulcrum, Lever Press would also offer born-digital publications that could incorporate unique multimedia elements and experiment with new forms of scholarly publication.

Lever Press published its first book in December 2018. Eight years later, in April 2026, we’ve released our 50th book. Our Press has grown quickly in the intervening years, thanks to the support of our institutional member partners, our oversight committee of librarians, our editorial board, the series editors of our eight book series, and the hundreds of authors who have written books and contributed to edited collections.

We’ve developed strong scholarly reputations in cinema and media studies, history (especially history of science and Asian history), literary studies, education studies, musicology, Asian studies, and women’s and gender studies. We are home to the first series of its kind, Videographic Books, where scholarship takes place in the form of video essays paired with text. We publish new classroom editions of forgotten literary classics through Re-Editions and a collaborative project between students and college professors through Open Access Musicology. We’ve won and been nominated for awards for experimental digital books and niche academic monographs alike. Our 50 books have more than half a million views and almost a quarter of a million downloads from more than 200 territories and countries across the world.

After eight years of growth since our first book debuted, Lever Press is now a firmly established presence in the scholarly publishing landscape, a major name in open access publishing, and a recognizable, reputable publisher in an increasingly competitive market for scholars’ attention. By the end of 2026, Lever Press will have published 58 books. We’ll publish our 100th book sometime in 2030.

The publication of Lever Press’s 50th book is a landmark—but it’s also just the beginning. Thank you to all those who have helped make Lever Press the success we are today.

Here’s to another 50 books and to even greater impact in the coming years!