Started by Heyward and Blanche Cirker in their apartment in post-war Queens, Dover Publications produced 10,000 book titles over the course of 80 years. They built a profitable company through a number of unique and innovative publishing practices, most notably filling their catalog with republished versions of books that had fallen out of copyright.I never knew any of this, though I’ve certainly owned and Dover Books.
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Indeed …
… This Is A Permanent Book. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Most interesting. Without doing an inventory, I can think of three pairs of Dover Books around the house, all by authors more (or much more) than fifty years in the grave by the time Dover was founded: Doughty, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. I will say that the binding does hold up, though the lamination can get a bit crazed.
ReplyDeleteIn A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner writes of The Modern Library's similar business model, and of the effects of extended copyright on it, and (he argues) on English taste.