Michele Slung is the kind of book...

Michele Slung is the kind of book nut who haunts thrift stores, scouts garage sales and believes that heaven is a giant second-hand bookstore. She is also the author of “Momilies” and “More Momilies,” both best-sellers; a former editor at The Washington Post Book World; and a one-time bookseller. She loves heroines, and believes that writers are often as interesting as the people they write about. In addition, Slung was among the early and avid fans of Great Britain’s Virago series of reissued fiction by forgotten or little-known women writers.

The combination has produced NAL’s Plume American Women Writers series, celebrating literature written by American women, and brought into existence under the editorial guidance of Michele Slung. Four years in the making, the series focuses on writers who may have been unjustly overlooked, those who were popular in their own eras but who have since been forgotten and the lesser-known works of well-established authors. The books will feature introductions by such well-known writers as Ursula K. LeGuin, Judith Martin and Mary Lee Settle. The series made its debut in October.

“Angel Island,” one of the first books in the series, is a feminist fantasy first published in 1914. In this book by Inez Haynes Gillmore, five men, shipwrecked on an island, are confronted by flying women. To the men’s dismay, they refuse to be tamed. “Pink and White Tyranny” (1871) is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s biting examination of the institution of marriage. In “The Prodigal Women” (1942), Nancy Hale allows three high-spirited women to explore the dynamics of Boston society.

“The whole idea of this is rediscovery,” Slung said by telephone from her home in Washington. “More than anything else,” she added, “this is intended as a readers’ series,” something “for people who are curious readers, who don’t mind something a little offbeat.”

Slung holed up at the Library of Congress to locate “interesting women writers who had sort of fallen out of people’s memories.” In particular she sought out “books that had been commercial successes in their day, maybe writers who were popular in the 1890s, but whose works are still worth reading.”

The objective was to “re-evaluate the writers, not so much for absolute literary merit, but for what they tell us about the period, and for what they tell us about women, through the heroines.”

In researching the books and their authors, Slung also picked up a wealth of literary trivia. Gillmore, for example, was an early suffragist. Martha Gelhorn, it seems, argued fiercely with Max Perkins, her editor, over the title of “Wine of Astonishment,” a Biblical quote. Gelhorn had wanted to call the book “Point of No Return,” but Perkins nixed it as too depressing. NAL Plume will give the book Gelhorn’s original title when the book is reissued.

Hale turned out to have been not only the first woman reporter at The New York Times, but also an editor at Vogue who doubled as a model for the same magazine. Slung had hoped to place “Prodigal Woman” in Hale’s hands herself, but unfortunately Hale died just a few weeks before it came out.

The Plume American Women Writers series will release three books per season. Slung is hopeful that the effort will be received with “a feeling of indigenous pride.”

Also under the heading of literary rediscovery, the good news from the Library of America is that the response to its pioneer CLASSICS (for “Collected Literature of America for Student Study in California Schools”) program has been overwhelming. Within two weeks of its inception, in fact, 181 high schools around the state had submitted applications to obtain the 60-volume, hardcover collection of American literature and history created by the nonprofit Library of America in response to the state department of education’s “Crisis in California School Libraries” study of 1987. On the other hand, initial funding allows only 200 schools to acquire the CLASSICS series, the first such program to be offered nationally.

“The Library of America would be a godsend to our community,” Jerry Asher, chairman of the English department at Tulare Western High School, wrote in his grant application. “The program would provide access to writers and works we presently do without. Even with popular writers like Poe, our offerings are incomplete.”

Cheryl Hurley, publisher of the Library of America, said she was “hopeful that we will be able to accommodate all” the schools that want to participate in this move to bring classic American literature to high school students. In a similar undertaking involving public libraries in Texas several years ago, Hurley said foundation funding had provided that just 40 libraries could partake of that program. When 120 libraries applied, “we went back and got more money,” Hurley said.

The effort in California came about at a time when “there was already a great sense of crisis” about the dismal condition of school libraries and the growing paucity of school librarians. Budgets were so tight that school libraries often could not replace missing or damaged books. And though educators like Allan Bloom and Education Secretary William Bennett were insisting on the need to infuse children with classical literature, some volumes simply were not readily available. “Professional groups, librarians, high school principals and the state superintendent of education were very aware that something had to be done,” Hurley said. “I think there has definitely been a sense that if the children don’t have these books, they won’t be able to read them.” So a primary objective in developing the CLASSICS program, Hurley said, was ensuring access to these masterworks of American literature.

“It used to be that there was a ‘Huckleberry Finn’ here, maybe Emerson’s ‘Essays’ there,” she said. Now, “a student can look and say ‘Oh! There’s America’s great literature, all in one place.’ ”

Though each volume numbers 1,000 to 1,500 pages, the equivalent of three to five standard books, the format is “physically attractive,” and not at all intimidating in its enormity, Hurley insisted. “It has to do with someone’s sense of being able to see it all at one time,” she said.

The renewed interest in classic American literature “didn’t just start with Alan Bloom’s book,” Hurley said. Instead, she likened the growing focus to architectural preservation of crumbling buildings.

“One of America’s great accomplishments in 200 years is its literature,” she said. “This is definitely historic preservation,” albeit of a more subtle variety than that involving decaying edifices. “You can see a building falling down,” she said. “It takes a little more for people to see that it’s getting hard to get a copy of Melville’s shorter works.”

But “the real excitement is that the schools have found something they can sink their teeth into,” Hurley said. “And California is first.”

(At the risk of corporate self-aggrandizement, it should be noted that the $100,000 grant for the CLASSICS program came from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Los Angeles Times/Times Mirror Foundation.)

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT: As everyone in Tinsel Town knows by now, the Boston Globe’s Affiliated Publication paid $26 million to buy The Hollywood Reporter from publisher and editor-in-chief Tichi Wilkerson. However, the rights to that publication’s “golden years” were not included in the deal, allowing Tale Weaver, a new West Coast imprint, to launch its operation with “Hollywood Legends: The Golden Years of the Hollywood Reporter.” The book was written by Wilkerson and Marcia Borie.

OSCAR AND LUCINDA WIN: Australian Peter Carey’s novel “Oscar and Lucinda” (Harper & Row) has won the Booker Prize as best novel published during the past year in the British Commonwealth. In her review of the novel (Book Review, June 19), Carolyn See called Carey “the greatest novelist living on the planet.”

Proving that McDonald’s serves up more than hamburgers, the world’s largest fast-food restaurant chain recently presented the 1988 McDonald’s Literary Achievement Awards to three black writers: Doris Harris of Seattle; Frank B. Wilderson of Minneapolis; and John Henry Redwood of East Orange, N.J. The winners were selected from among 700 entrants. Each receives a $2,000 honorarium.