My friend the bon vivant bookseller Michael Seidenberg of Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of his apartment in New York City, died in 2019. I’d known him since 1978, when as a teenager I apprenticed myself to his first shop. Michael loved pressing “lost” books and authors on me, and on anyone. A visit to one of his shops often concluded with taking home a novel one had not only not been seeking, but of which one had never heard. He would typically reduce the price of such a purchase, as a softening of the risk entailed in taking his word. Michael was also an instinctive devil’s advocate. When I once spoke of my enthusiasm for trade paperback imprints dedicated specifically to reviving lost books, he surprised me. “Those are tombstones,” he told me. “Being published by one of those presses that only publishes revivals, it’s the last heartbeat of a dying reputation. Presenting an author under the flag of rediscovery is the same thing as saying, ‘No one cared in the first place.’ After that, a book is officially dead forever.”
With hindsight we can see what Michael missed. Not long before that conversation, Virago Books in the UK had launched the Virago Modern Classics. These displayed two strengths: the distinctive green spines that made one want to see whole shelves of them together, and a confidence, buoyed by their feminist imperatives, to keep rushing them out faster than one could read them, like a sea turtle laying a thousand eggs, knowing some will thrive but not knowing which ones. This created a map for success in future such enterprises, not that it could be guaranteed. Vintage Contemporaries followed in 1984, adopting the Virago strategies.
We live in a continuing great era of rediscovered books. Starting in 1999, NYRB Classics doubled down on Virago’s and Vintage’s methods with its finer bindings and acid-free pages, creating a handfeel that made their series even more pleasing to read and collect, and by the quality of the curation and editing of the forewords, prefaces, introductions, translator’s notes, and afterwords surrounding each text. More recently, Mc Nally Editions has met that standard, while other, somewhat less rapid-fire presses like Transit, Counterpoint, Pushkin, and Two Dollar Radio are also making terrific contributions. The libidinal energy of such rediscoveries parallels other “analog” revival booms, like that for vinyl records.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing