from The Chronicle’s fora again:
Top:
Cambridge
Oxford
Duke
Chicago
Stanford
U of California
Second tier:
Minnesota
U of Toronto
UNC
Hopkins
(Columbia/Harvard-Belknap/Yale) (qtd from hyperbole)
At least in my field or one’s closely related to it, Cornell and Penn are in the top tier as well. (qtd from scratch32)
Seem to put out good American books:
Massachusetts
University Press of New England
Iowa (qtd from mignon)
Or for a different perspective:
Using letter grades, I would offer:
A+: Stanford, Harvard, Princeton
A: Chicago, Duke, Cambridge, Oxford
A-: Penn, Hopkins, UNC, Illinois, California, Minnesota, Toronto, Columbia, Cornell, [Wisconsin]With the understanding that these are all excellent and people regularly get tenure at R-1 schools with books from these places. (Raoul)
Other info:
The thread went on for four or five pages, so there are other interesting points. There are also horror stories and positive ones on different presses.
I am not ready for an academic book that these folks would publish, so I don’t really know how good they are. However, I am assuming the list would flame anyone who put forward a name that wasn’t reasonable.