Naomi Noble Richard

Just as this issue was going to press, we received word that Naomi Noble Richard, editor extraordinaire of Archives of Asian Art from 1997 to 2012, had passed away in Denver. She was eighty-eight years old. Naomi's expertise in the arts of Asia, her exceptional eye for detail, attention to the course of an argument, and constructive engagement with her charges combined to win her a reputation as the very best interlocutor and editor that an author could hope for. She improved everything she touched, from the hundreds of articles, books, and catalogs she shepherded through publication to the journal's format and design.In lieu of a formal obituary, we offer in Naomi's memory two tributes that Marsha Haufler and the late John M. Rosenfield, both former Editorial Board Chairs of Archives, wrote on the occasion of her retirement in 2012 (Archives of Asian Art 62 [2012]: 1–3). They present Naomi just as we will remember her: vibrant, witty, diplomatic, sage, and unwavering in the pursuit of perfection.The management of Archives is hardly arcane, but it may not be wholly transparent to readers or even to our authors. It relies on a division of responsibilities. The editorial board solicits, evaluates, and selects the articles, tries to keep the journal aligned with new research directions and new technologies, and worries about its fiscal future. The press designs, prints, distributes, and markets the final product. The editor occupies the crucial, scary space in between, a place where there can be, in the immortal words of Monty Python's Life of Brian, ‘‘a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things.’’ For the last sixteen years, Naomi Richard has been our editor, and she has always known where the little things ‘‘lieth,’’ not to mention how they should lie.From the time she came on board, Naomi set the style for Archives, and this style not only has given the journal a distinctive character, but has also been an attraction for authors in search of a publication venue. Authors familiar with her work hope she will edit theirs because they know she will treat it with respect and they will learn from the process. Being edited by Naomi is like taking a master class in writing, with everything considered, from the logic of your argument to a given turn of phrase. She can smooth the rough edges of linguistic admixtures, untangle wayward paragraphs, and suggest just the right word to make an idea shine. She is the Zhongkui of problematic prose, the dispeller of all written infelicities.For Naomi, the process is as important as the product. There has been hair tearing, to be sure, and pithy comments about authors who submit and run, sometimes disappearing for months beyond the reaches of modern technology, leaving behind unfinished footnotes and Sanskrit sans diacritical marks. But the storms are weathered, i's are dotted and t's crossed, and the authors become cherished friends, recipients of inside jokes and messages signed ‘‘n.’’We met once for lunch in New York, then again for a meeting at Asia Society. Otherwise, because I live in Kansas, our relationship has been built on long phone calls and many, many emails. I find it hard to believe that we have met in person only twice, because such a strong sense of presence comes through her writing, with its extraordinary combination of wit, vocabulary, and deities invoked in various languages. Email subject lines like ‘‘burning (well, simmering) indignation’’ and ‘‘another possible kerfuffle’’ compel you to open the messages immediately. Her valedictions are funny and kind. Sometimes she signs off ‘‘ccc,’’ meaning ‘‘confront chaos calmly,’’ but the acronym ‘‘ffe,’’ referring to the Japanese New Year's dream of ‘‘Fuji, a falcon, and an eggplant,’’ is more common. One day, however, the closing line of a message about a wayward author read ‘‘Fuji, Falcon, Eggplant, and Krakatoa.’’ When I asked about the additional word, I was informed, ‘‘Krakatoa is what explodes if one disrespects one's editor.’’ Along with the jokes have come words of wisdom from a remarkable range of sources, Han Yu to Hercule Poirot, occasional political commentary, updates on beloved grandson Ben, and stories about a series of highly individual cats, Cherubino, Rubatummy, and Headlamps. Thus I can always ‘‘see’’ Naomi. After she, husband Joe, and the cats moved to Colorado in the summer of 2008, she wrote: ‘‘The books are all shelved. The cartons are gone. So is much of the dust. So is my miasma of gloom and nostalgia, altho’ I still haven't gotten quite to the point of calling it ‘home.’ That will come.’’Naomi Richard shepherded Archives through difficult transitions, the journal's and her own. She weathered the trials and tribulations of changing publishers, as well as her own move over halfway across the country. She stayed with Archives long after it was convenient or financially reasonable to do so out of loyalty to Asian art, especially the art of Japan, and to her friends who write about it. The journal and the field are much in her debt. Krakatoa could not be more pacific.Ccc and ffe,MARSHA HAUFLER_______Naomi Noble Richard began editing Archives of Asian Art in 1997, but I knew her long before that. My first encounter was a telephone call one morning in the summer of 1984. Naomi was working on the manuscript of a catalogue that I had submitted to the Japan Society, and she called to ask why I dated a certain calligraphy seventeen years after the calligrapher had died. I was tempted to cite a comment by Yoshida Kenkō that this makes a work of art especially unusual. Instead I mumbled something about the typographical frailty of humankind, and Naomi replied that authors are not always required to contribute to the pool of human knowledge, but they shouldn't stand on the shore and pollute it. With such audacity and candor she won my eternal allegiance.Archives of Asian Art, born in the 1940s as Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, had long been a small, precarious enterprise, or what the Japanese call a ‘‘one-telephone outfit.’’ I became associated with it in the 1960s when it was run by Laurence Sickman, director of the Nelson-Atkins Gallery in Kansas City. Archives was issued only once a year. Jeanne Harris, a stalwart secretary, was the copy editor and production manager—in her spare time. Financial support came from Asia Society in New York, mainly with funds donated by the genial collector Myron Falk. The printer was a Kansas City establishment more accustomed to producing high school annuals. Regardless, based on Sickman's vast erudition and his wide circle of colleagues, Archives published research articles of fundamental importance for art historians, museum curators, and connoisseurs. Larry was especially proud of the annual reviews of acquisitions of Asian art by museums in the U.S. and Canada.Larry in 1974 asked me to oversee the magazine, and I found a capable freelance editor in Cambridge, Katherine O. Parker, to edit manuscripts and manage production. She was not, however, trained in Asian studies. Myron Falk became ill; financial support was increasingly uncertain; I was increasingly ensnared in academe, so in 1984 I persuaded Richard Barnhard at Yale to replace me, and Asia Society secured the editorial services of Naomi Richard. In 1998 Marsha Haufler (Weidner) at the University of Kansas took vigorous charge, and working closely with Naomi raised its professional standards. Now the journal is in the hands of Stanley Abe at Duke, with the backing of Asia Society and the University of Hawai‘i Press. Two issues per year are scheduled; the cover is now in color; production is being computerized. The digital world lies ahead, and Archives of Asian Art is no longer a one-telephone outfit.Among Archive's attractions is the relative speed with which it publishes articles. Young scholars (‘‘publish or perish’’) can show a juried article to a tenure committee without the three- or four-year delay customary with many academic journals. The very process of publishing—evaluation, editing, proofreading, printing, more proofreading—is an important stage in scholars' maturation. Having it managed by someone with Naomi Richard's skills is shock therapy for newly minted PhDs who thought that their training days were over.To be sure, Naomi adheres to the editor's Hippocratic oath: do no harm; respect the author's voice; check spelling, grammar, punctuation, and format; clarify the purpose of the manuscript; keep the intended audience in mind; enforce deadlines; remain cheerful at all times. But she does much more. She agrees in principle with the A. E. Housman school of editing, which holds that accuracy is a duty and not a virtue. Naomi checks and double-checks facts (for which she maintains a huge database). She handles East Asian languages with skill; she is widely read in European and American literature; she understands major issues in cultural history; she will test an author's assumptions; and she will get belligerent if the typesetters scramble diacritical marks.I am not the only author to whom Naomi mentioned polluting the pool of knowledge, for this is a stratagem to startle her writers into taking her seriously. Inexperienced authors consider this intrusive, even rude; experienced writers understand that they are being given priceless aid. With congenial authors, Naomi establishes a deep personal bond laced with great good humor and infinite kindness, a bonding based upon the conviction that writing about Asia is really important.Rare indeed are editors who leave their imprint upon an entire genre of discourse. Maxwell Perkins, for example, helped shepherd the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Ring Lardner from the authors' brains and onto the shelves of our libraries, thereby enhancing a golden age of American fiction. Naomi Richard has worked closely with senior scholars—Frederick Mote, for example, and Michael Loewe, Helmut Brinker, Sherman Lee, James Cahill, Donald McCallum, and Tim Clark. In the decades of her editorship, the scope and quality of Asian studies in Europe and America have improved dramatically. This, of course, has been prompted by many factors: expert language training, generous study and travel fellowships, receptive publishers, increased job opportunities, and ambitious art exhibitions. But when manuscripts left Naomi's desk, they regularly had become more focused, more coherent, more accurate, and more readable.Naomi's background was uniquely suited to her role. Her father, Shlomo Noble (1905–1985), was a scholarly polymath—philologist, student of Yiddish, translator, historian of Diaspora culture, and a famed storyteller. He had been born in Galicia, a region that straddled the borders of Poland and the Ukraine. In 1920, in the turmoil after World War I, alone and penniless, he came to the United States and settled in Pennsylvania. Shlomo soon moved to New York City and became an archetype of the wandering scholar. He earned a PhD in Germanic studies at Ohio State University, married a highly educated European woman, and for four decades in Manhattan he worked variously at the Institute for Jewish Studies, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia University.Naomi Noble was born in Pennsylvania, earned her BA at the University of Chicago, and entered the doctoral program there in Chinese. In 1955 she started working as an editor, married the dedicated oncologist Joseph Richard, raised two sons, and established her reputation as doyenne of editors of studies of Asian art. One of her most monumental tasks was the revision of the third edition of Sherman Lee's famous History of Far Eastern Art, which Naomi worked on without having met the author. Lee was profoundly grateful for her efforts, and one day, as she sat in the cafeteria of the Cleveland Museum of Art, he approached her and started to introduce himself. Naomi interrupted, saying, ‘‘Yes, I know. You are Sherman Lee.’’ He replied, ‘‘You won't even let me finish a sentence before you start editing me.’’ And they both collapsed in laughter. When the publisher Harry Abrams wanted to publish a fifth edition, Sherman agreed, but only if Naomi was hired to edit it.JOHN M. ROSENFIELD

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