Unlike many of the characters in Bigfoot, I didn’t venture into the editorial woods on a hunt for the elusive, that in the form of a manuscript on the beast. But from the first glimpse of it, I was convinced. Josh Buhs and I had worked together on The Fire Ant Wars, a book about how different ideas of the insect led to different public policies for dealing with it. But as he writes in the preface of Bigfoot, Buhs felt in writing on the ants that he had responsibility to them and their biology as an agent in the story. For his next endeavor, he wanted to focus entirely on human ideas about nature, and not be responsible to the taxonomy of nature itself. Shortly after The Fire Ant Wars was released, I asked him about the next project—one hazard of being an acquisitions editor is, I fear, that we don’t afford good authors a break—and the moment he let me know he was on the trail of Bigfoot, I jumped at the chance to join the expedition. I loved from the very start the irony of a university press publishing a book on Bigfoot, but a book that is still very serious in its treatment of the creature and the mythology, science, and culture with which it has coevolved.

Buhs’ book went from a work in which Bigfoot risked serving as a totem for everything Americana, to one with a much more focused yet no less engaging romp along the yeti trail. The resulting book provides compelling footage on the structure and history of America in the twentieth century. It’s also a work that probes the boundaries between science and pseudoscience. Most of the Bigfoot literature dwells on whether the creature exists or not, an issue Buhs merely nods to in a prefatory note about how the writing this book increased his skepticism. By pointing a new lens toward the culture of Bigfoot, Buhs encourages us to think less about the differences between real and ridiculous, and more about what yetis, yowies, and Bigfeet signal about our views of nature.

Shortly before the book published, Bigfoot turned up, momentarily, in a freezer in Georgia. And much as our creative promotions team was tempted to find another in the Porcupine Range of the Upper Peninsula, we all know the actual beast isn’t the point of this book. Rather, beneath the footprints and behind the shaky film footage are serious ideas about the natural world, the cultural role of science, class divisions, and ultimately the nature of reality. One of the most interesting components, from the perspective of a science editor, is Buhs’ exploration of how Bigfoot served as a means for a certain demographic of white American males to challenge the halls of science. Bigfoot was just plausible enough, for example compared to a flat earth, to warrant the attention and further scrutiny of the scientific establishment, at least some at the margin. And in some ways the study of the tracks, etc. added a legitimacy to cryptozoology.

Finding peer reviewers to take the work seriously was also an interesting hunt. Chicago asking for advice on Bigfoot? Thankfully we found historians of science and historians of the paranormal to engage actively in the text and it’s been interesting to watch now the book’s reception, particularly among the circle of Bigfoot seekers and savants. Buhs and the book have been largely welcomed, and the jacket even boasts quotes from Loren Coleman and David Daegling. But there’s occasional vitriol, as even within this community there are cultural divisions. I, like Buhs, remain a yeti skeptic, but an editor keen to find the next book that does such justice to a truly fantastic phenomenon.

Christie Henry is the Executive Editor of Sciences at the University of Chicago Press.
Joshua Blu Buhs is an independent scholar and the author of The Fire Ant Wars, also published by the University of Chicago Press and available through the Seminary Co-op.

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