Thursday, February 27, 2020

Indeed …

… This Is A Permanent Book. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

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.

1 comment:

  1. 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.

    In 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.

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