[3][4] In 1974, the press published Roughing it Easy: A Unique Ideabook for Camping and Cooking, by Dian Thomas, which later made the New York Times Best Seller list.
These rejections include Dennis Lythgoe's Let 'Em Holler: A Political Biography of J. Bracken Lee, Béla Petsco's Nothing Very Important and Other Stories (1979 AML Best Fiction Award winner), and Science and Religion: Toward a More Useful Dialogue by several BYU faculty.
Financial troubles struck the press in the late 1970s, leading to a decision for it to only print internal university publications,[5] making it essentially defunct for many authors and scholars.
Before achieving wide notability, and after his own theater company failed, Orson Scott Card worked as a proofreader, then copy editor at BYU Press.
In this role he met Calvin Grondahl, whose Mormon-themed cartoons were rejected by BYU Press, yet he would later illustrate one of Card's early works, the 1981 Saintspeak.