Out of Print, Out of Mind

Publishing talk last year was dominated by the growing conviction that book advances had gotten absurdly out of hand--but that didn’t stop publishers from signing up Ken Follett, Jeffrey Archer and Danielle Steel for a reported total of $100 million for their next 10 novels.

Crazy? Probably, especially when you consider that many good but previously published books remain out of print. A number of companies--Dover Books, Second Chance Press, Carroll & Graf, the lamented North Point Press immediately come to mind--have made reprinting neglected books a specialty, but given the publishing truism that the heart of the book business lies in the sales of older titles, it’s surprising how little time most publishers devote to rediscovering underappreciated books.

There are many reasons for this state of affairs, prominent among them the fact that reviving older titles is more difficult than it initially appears. First off, says Jay Schaefer, an editor at Chronicle Books in San Francisco who publishes two or so reprints a year, “Everyone’s beating the bushes trying to find the good titles. It’s hard to find something that’s not being looked at.”

He started his reprint list in 1989 with a collection of stories he loved as a child--the Professor Challenger tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which Schaefer was surprised to discover were out of print and largely out of copyright. Chronicle is busy mining this overlooked vein; aside from the two-volume Challenger series, in May it republished a collection of Conan Doyle stories, “Round the Fire,” that has been out of print for 60 years.

Hugh van Dusen, executive editor of HarperCollins’ trade-paperback line, Perennial Library, says it wasn’t always difficult to ferret out neglected books. When he started out in publishing in the late 1950s, says Van Dusen, “I spent almost every Saturday morning in the Columbia University library looking at books” recommended by experts. The result was Harper’s republication of important works by a number of eminent cultural figures--Van Dusen names philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and historian Jakob Burckhardt--that were generally unavailable in bookstores, even though the copyrights to many titles had lapsed, thus making them public-domain works available at relatively little cost.

Today it’s “much harder” to find books worth reprinting, Van Dusen says, and even then such rediscoveries must demonstrate “a new reason for existence,” which is to say, often, a well-defined, promising market. One book that fits the bill, says Van Dusen, is “A Book of Men,” an anthology of writings about men first published in 1975 by an obscure press and which Harper will reprint next year. He hopes it will catch on with those readers who made Robert Bly’s “Iron John” a recent best seller. Another is Maurice Zolotow’s “Marilyn Monroe,” the first serious book about the actress, initially published in 1957 and reprinted by Harper last year. The book often is mentioned as an important work by later Monroe watchers, says Van Dusen, so he was “very surprised” to discover it was out of print.

Publishers who specialize in reprints generally seem more concerned than mainstream publishers about a book’s intrinsic quality; they tend to be smaller, idiosyncratic and more willing to follow their passions.

That’s certainly true of the Indianapolis-based, nonprofit group the Liberty Fund, which publishes handsome editions of classic works of philosophy and economics, from Adam Smith’s lesser-known “Theory of Moral Sentiments” to James Fenimore Cooper’s philosophical work “The American Democrat.” Liberty has just republished Algernon Sidney’s “Discourses Concerning Government,” which Thomas Jefferson believed as significant as John Locke’s treatises on government; Liberty, says director of publications Charles Hamilton, found it remarkable that no modern edition of the work was available.

The press has also republished the first two histories of the American Revolution--one by Federalist revolutionary David Ramsay, the other by anti-Federalist Mercy Otis Warren, said to be “the most formidable woman intellectual in 18th-Century America.” There hadn’t been a new, non-facsimile edition of either book, says Hamilton, since they were first published--in 1789 and 1805, respectively.

Citadel Underground also is dedicated to the publishing of classics, but of a different kind--classics from the beat and hippie eras, including Emmett Grogan’s “Ringolevio” and Terry Southern’s “Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes.” “I was at a Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco in 1988,” says ex-series editor Dan Levy (who has recently moved on to another publishing house), “when I looked around and realized a lot of the people there were so young they hadn’t heard of Emmett Grogan. And they weren’t proto-yuppie Reagan youth.”

Levy, a Los Angeles native and UCLA graduate, knew a good idea when he saw it, and before long was in New York searching for a publisher willing to reissue a line of countercultural books for a new audience. “I don’t know why other publishers haven’t done this,” says Levy. “There certainly are people of that generation in publishing.”

Citadel Underground, he adds, isn’t about nostalgia but the transmission of ideas. Its two mottoes are “Take Back Your Mind” and “Challenging Consensus Reality Since 1990”--ideas no less valid simply because, at any given moment, they don’t predominate.

It took Levy a while to find a receptive publisher because unearthing lost gems is a crapshoot, even in the world of publishing; not only is it as risky as publishing a new book, only rarely does it produce a blockbuster. (The exception that proves the rule is Beryl Markham’s “West With the Night,” which made North Point a well-known imprint.)

Editors are more likely to advance professionally, too, by going to parties, working the telephone and doing lunch than by hanging out in used-book stores, as most of the editors interviewed for this article do. But that’s not the only way reprint editors find quality books. “After you run out of your childhood favorites, and your friends’ favorites,” says Schaefer, the reprint editor can scan old best-seller lists, encourage literary agents to send older material, pay finder’s fees for good suggestions, and talk to favorite literary bartenders. (Liberty Press is unusual in that many of its books come to the editors’ attention at academic conferences.) Schaefer admits, though, “If I had a great secret way of finding neglected books, I wouldn’t tell you.”

Finding a title that’s worth reprinting often is only half the battle, however, for the waters often are muddied by legal complications. Schaefer, an attorney himself, says “If you left it to the lawyers to determine who owns copyrights and whose privacy is being invaded, the Bible would be about a paragraph long. . . . Anything still protected by copyright and you’re in for an adventure. It’s like a jungle--you’re dealing with a basement full of dusty filing cabinets.”

Often, says Schaefer, the original contract--which specifies which publishing rights an author has granted to a publisher, and for how long--has vanished, which means the reprinter usually must conduct a search with the Library of Congress to discover the owner.

Kent Carroll, of New York’s Carroll & Graf, agrees with Schaefer’s assessment. “It’s an adventure, because you’re going into the past, and the publishing rights can be all over the place.” (Dorothy Parker, for example, left her estate to the NAACP--but not all of it. Some of her works remain with Viking, forcing prospective reprinters to apply to both the NAACP and Viking to make sure they’ve covered all the bases.)

“Authors are insane,” continues Carroll, “or senile, or dead, and estates can be difficult, because they’re often handled by lawyers who don’t have a clue” about book publishing. Carroll, whose reprint list includes lesser-known works by writers such as James Gould Cozzens, Nancy Mitford and Charles Willeford, recalls his attempt to buy six relatively obscure Erskine Caldwell titles for $10,000, only to be told he would have to increase the offer tenfold. Needless to say, the books remain out of print--a “not infrequent” occurrence, Carroll says, when a book was once an enormous success and expectations for it remain impossibly high.

A similar fate met another book, out of print for a few decades, that Carroll had liked so much he attempted to track down the author by taking out a newspaper ad in the area where the author was last known to have lived. The approach worked, and the author was delighted--until his agent got involved. “The agent had sold an option 15 years earlier to Francois Truffaut or someone,” says Carroll, and hoped to sell the publishing rights, when the movie came out, for much more money than Carroll was willing to pay. The film, naturally, never was made.

A somewhat happier tale concerns the science-fiction novel “Donovan’s Brain,” which Carroll & Graf brought out because both Carroll and his partner, Herman Graf, had loved the movie. The book did not, in fact, sell many copies, but at a booksellers’ convention, Curt Siodmak, the author, unexpectedly introduced himself and invited his new publishers to his ranch. Carroll, who had seen a number of Siodmak-based movies as a child, had assumed the author was long since dead.

Another obstacle for reprinters is the book world’s reluctance to deal with works that aren’t brand, spanking new. Martin Shepherd, founder and editor of the Second Chance and Permanent presses in Sag Harbor, N.Y., says he doesn’t republish anything less than 20 years old because if it’s any more recent, “reviewers won’t review it. The rush to get new stuff is amazing when you consider there’s so much good stuff that doesn’t get noticed.”

Second Chance specializes in publishing hardcover editions of previously unnoticed literary fiction--among its authors are Mark Harris, Heywood Hale Broun and Berry Fleming--usually in printings of 1,000 to 3,000 copies. It’s a small audience, Shepherd says, but since he believes it encompasses the most serious readers of fiction in the country, publishing for them makes him “feel like a custodian of the culture.” Shepherd once looked actively for good books to reprint, but he now relies on agents, friends and loyal readers; he learned his lesson after the company was written up in the New York Times, whereupon he was inundated, in a few week’s time, by nearly 600 books--six of which ended up on his first list.

The major reason mainstream publishers don’t emphasize the reprinting of overlooked books, however, is the low numbers that Shepherd cites. Such a limited market, they believe, can’t be reached profitably, even if a book can be acquired at little or no cost. To a large extent that’s true, but you wouldn’t know it from the success of Dover Books, the granddaddy of the neglected-work reprinters with perhaps a thousand such titles available and a reported $25 million in annual sales.

A key aspect of Dover’s prosperity--and one that can inspire an intense reader loyalty otherwise unknown to publishing houses--is that it listens closely to its customers. (So does Citadel Underground, which solicits reader comments and suggestions through a postage-paid card bound into every book.) John Grafton, Dover’s reprint editor, says “We have a very good relationship with our readers” and guesses that perhaps 20 of the 100 or so reprints it does every year ultimately come from reader suggestions.

“Our problem isn’t finding ideas about good things to publish,” he says, “but wading through them. There’s lots of good stuff out there; we never sit around saying, “Gee, what are we going to publish?” What’s more, Grafton says Dover “pays attention” when different readers write to recommend the same out-of-print title--something that rarely happens at mainstream publishers, if only because readers sense such houses aren’t likely to listen. Dover may well be the only publishing company whose bookshelves overflow with old books rather than new, many of them mailed in by its extended family of readers and consultants; it’s a good thing Grafton’s office is in New York City, for in a California-style earthquake he’d drown in a sea of vellum and dust.

Dover’s uniqueness also is apparent in its recent decision to inaugurate a “Thrift Edition” line of classic short works of fiction. The series includes Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild”--priced at a dollar apiece. It’s something no ordinary publisher would dare attempt, seeing extremely low profit margins and resistance from bookstores able to earn only 40 cents per sale, but Grafton believes “the sky’s the limit”; the series may encompass 200 books or more in a few years, he says, so long as Dover can sell 10,000-15,000 copies of each title annually.

That such an idea--obvious in hindsight, considering the potentially enormous bulk sales to high schools and colleges--came from an unconventional house is symptomatic of the fact that many in the book business today are penny-wise but pound-foolish. As Levy puts it: “I don’t think the best way to serve readers is to spend millions of dollars on a couple of books when there are a lot of great out-of-print books around. I definitely feel there are a lot of older books that have a lot of vitality left in them.”