In 1995, I wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education outlining the problems of publishing scholarly books in literary criticism and explaining why the Penn State University Press could no longer afford to remain active in this field. Of the 150 books about literature the Press had put out in the previous decade, 65% had sold fewer than 500 copies, 91% fewer than 800 copies, and only 3% more than 1,000. The pattern of sales in this discipline had eroded to the point where a press without much of a subsidy from its parent university could not sustain a publishing program in it anymore. It seemed clear even then that what we scholarly publishers have come to call the problem of “endangered species” would be spreading to other disciplines over time. Five years later, in an article I wrote for the newsletter of APSA's Organized Section on Comparative Politics (2000), I analyzed data that seemed to show that field to be heading in the same direction as literary studies, and I concluded with not a great deal of hope for the future. Recently, at the invitation of the Association for Political Theory, I turned my attention to the subfield of political theory and offered this paper as background for the session on book publishing at the conference in November 2006. While many of the same pressures remain in place to bedevil university presses, and it would be premature surely to claim that we are out of the woods yet, there have been some significant changes that give reason to think the future may not be quite as gloomy as it appeared back at the turn of the millennium.This article was initially prepared as a background paper for the Association for Political Theory conference plenary session, November 4, 2006.