New York Review Gives Out-of-Print Titles a Reprieve From Obscurity
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
NEW YORK -- How many of us, at the end of our working days, will be able to say with certainty that something we did made the world a better place?
Edwin Frank is one of the lucky few. He brought Alastair Roderic Craigellachie Dalhousie Gowan Donnybristle MacMac back to life.
Frank is the editor who oversees the New York Review Children's Collection, a modest publishing venture that reissues eight or 10 out-of-print books a year. Right now he's sitting in a no-frills conference room at the midtown Manhattan office of its literary parent, the New York Review of Books, showing off some of the titles he's had a hand in reviving.
Here are Lucretia Hale's "The Peterkin Papers" and E. Nesbit's "The House of Arden." Here are "Jenny and the Cat Club," "The Island of Horses," "D'Aulaires' Book of Trolls." And here's the one about young Alastair -- or "Wee Gillis," as the kilt-wearing lad is known to friends and family who find his real name too exhausting to deal with.
Not coincidentally, it's a book Frank loved as a child. "I had my father's copy," he says, "because my father's mother was Scottish and had come over on the boat."
First published in 1938, "Wee Gillis" is a collaboration between Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, the author-illustrator team who created Ferdinand the pacifist bull. Its protagonist is a boy born of a mixed marriage, Scottish style. The plot turns on the culture clash between his mother's Lowland relations and his father's family in the Highlands. A bagpipe is involved.
We're not talking Harry Potter sales here, of course, but then again, there's no need to lay out Harry Potter money in advances. Reprint rights come cheaply enough, Frank says, for the New York Review to make money on reissues that sell as few as 5,000 copies.
And whatever the numbers, the books' reappearance makes booksellers and buyers happy -- reversing, in a tiny but symbolic way, the odious publishing trend toward keeping books in print for shorter and shorter periods of time.
A customer comes in asking for an out-of-print book "at least once a day, if not more often," says Dinah Paul, proprietor of the Alexandria children's bookstore A Likely Story. Paul's store does well with the New York Review collection, but she thinks the market could stand far more of the same. After all, "we all have favorites from our childhood."
"Bless their little hearts," says Brookline, Mass., children's bookseller Terri Schmitz, when told that the Review intends to keep its reissues in print indefinitely. "That's unusual in this day and age."
Schmitz recently featured "Wee Gillis" in her column on reissues for the Horn Book Magazine. She says the New York Review's choices can be "eclectic" (translation: She thinks Norman Lindsay's "The Magic Pudding" is "the strangest book you'll ever read"). But she praises a string of other "terrific" titles in the series, including Rumer Godden's "Episode of Sparrows" and Eleanor Farjeon's "The Little Bookroom."
Publishers sometimes bring back their own out-of-print titles, of course, and others will buy rights to the occasional orphaned book. "My approach is, these books are just too good to be out of print," says Stephen Roxburgh of Front Street, an imprint of Boyds Mill Press, who recently reissued "The Mark of the Horse Lord" by historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff.
But the New York Review is publishing reissues more systematically. "I very much admire what they're doing," Roxburgh says.
The history of the Children's Collection, Frank explains, can be traced back to the late 1980s, when one of the New York Review's founders, Jason Epstein, had an idea for a mail-order venture called the Reader's Catalog -- "a sort of giant annotated Sears Catalog of the 40,000 best books in print."
Between the first and second editions of the Reader's Catalog, says New York Review publisher Rea Hederman, an astonishing 15,000 of those 40,000 books went out of print. A light bulb flashed on. "We began to think about how many books we admired we would like to see back in print," Hederman says.
This led to the New York Review Classics line of reissued adult literature -- which Edwin Frank also edits -- and eventually to the parallel series for children. Both series were launched without outside funding; the modest investments necessary came from the magazine's profits.
"It's essentially always been self-supporting," Hederman says of the Review's book-publishing arm.
Being attached to an established literary property helped in other ways, too. For one thing, there was a built-in audience of likely buyers who could be reached through ads in the magazine. For another, the name "New York Review" was already a powerful brand.
The Children's Collection has been further branded through the publishing choices the Review has made. Unlike the adult books, which are published in paperback, the children's reissues are hardcovers with distinctive red cloth spines. The parents and grandparents who'll be buying most of them, Frank says, tend to value quality and permanence.
And, like him, they also value things they've known and loved.
One of the best-selling children's titles has been "D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths," which, like "Wee Gillis," was a personal favorite of Frank's. As a boy, he remembers loving the myths themselves, which seemed far more exotic than their Greek counterparts, along with the straightforward way the d'Aulaires -- a husband-and-wife team -- narrated them. He also loved what novelist Michael Chabon, in his preface to the new edition, calls the "spectacular and quirky illustrations."
Another Frank discovery was the Jenny the cat series. When his daughter was young, he picked up "Jenny's Birthday Book," by Esther Averill, in Manhattan's Bank Street Bookstore. "My daughter liked it, my wife liked it, we all read it again and again without tiring of it," he says. In the front of the book, he saw a list of the other titles in the series, but he couldn't find them anywhere.
It pays to be the czar of a publishing empire, even a small one -- because you get to do something when life frustrates you like that.
Other recommendations came from friends and colleagues. One was T.H. White's "Mistress Masham's Repose."
" 'Mistress Masham' is a wonderful book," Frank says, but while he knew White's "The Once and Future King," he'd never heard of this one. The plot (which is really the least of it, given White's erudite and hilarious prose) involves a 10-year-old orphan named Maria who lives on a vast, run-down estate with a greedy, spiteful governess who's out to defraud her of her inheritance.
When Maria discovers a colony of Lilliputians on the property . . .
Well, it's far too complicated to explain. But thanks to the passionate fans who made the world a better place by suggesting it to the New York Review, you can pick up a copy and see for yourself.
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