University Extension Press was founded in 1989 by Stephen Taylor as a small independent publishing house. The name carries a quiet reference to the idea of extension — extending good thinking past the classroom, past the conference room, past the academy, and into the kind of nonfiction books that a person reads once and then returns to.
The press is based today in Fallbrook, California, on a six-acre rural property. It operates as it has from the beginning: by the hand of its founder, publishing books we believe deserve to exist, in the quantities that a small house can actually steward.
What we publish.
We publish three kinds of work. We publish the memoir, business, and essay writing of Stephen Taylor — most visibly in the form of the Circuitous Path: series, which opens with a memoir of love and entrepreneurship and extends into a growing library on marriage, grief, reinvention, retirement, etiquette, and the curious ways a life is assembled.
We publish the four-volume genealogical series of Donald Taylor, Genealogical Studies of Early American Families — rigorous scholarship drawing on the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants — published here because careful ancestral scholarship deserves a careful publisher.
And we maintain a small backlist of earlier titles and international business newsletters from the press's earlier years — kept in the catalog for readers who find their way to them, rather than retired.
What we don't publish.
We are an independent press. We are not an academic press — though our name has sometimes led readers to assume otherwise. We do not claim membership in the Association of American University Presses. We do not publish peer-reviewed scholarship. We do not operate as a vanity imprint that accepts manuscripts for a fee.
What we do is publish a small number of books, carefully, because a careful catalog of good work is a better thing than a large catalog of middling work. That has been our editorial standard since 1989 and it remains so.
The founder.
Stephen Taylor is the founder, publisher, and principal author of University Extension Press. He holds a Master of Arts in International Management from the University of Texas at Dallas School of Management. His career has moved between corporate international business, entrepreneurship, writing, and the patient work of figuring out when each pursuit has run its course and it is time for the next one.
He is the author of The Circuitous Path: Through Entrepreneurship (2026) and several forthcoming titles in the series. He lives in Fallbrook, California. His wife and co-author on earlier work, Kimberley Taylor, passed in May of 2025.
The facts.
- Founded
- 1989, by Stephen Taylor
- Based
- Fallbrook, California
- Type
- Independent press
- Publishes
- Memoir · Business · Genealogy · Essays
- Current authors
- Stephen Taylor · Donald Taylor
- Flagship series
- The Circuitous Path:
- Contact
- By correspondence