Why We Need Reprints

For the longest, I have nurtured the notion that classic fiction is qualitatively better than contemporary fiction — generally and specifically. Generally speaking, fiction of previous eras is better written than our own. Specifically, the popular novels of last century are far better than those of this century. Nevertheless, I still find myself apologizing for gravitating to older fare.

So it was with great delight that I read an article about the resurgence of reprints in yesterday’s LA Times’ calendar section. Apparently, “publishers specializing in reprints have become increasingly important” to our current market. One such “purveyor of reprints” is NYRB Classics, who’s scratched a niche by culling good books from the “out of print” netherworld. When it comes to literature, the past is not dust.

Whether the increasing number of reprints is because of reader dissatisfaction with contemporary literature or the flowering of an archivist, curatorial instinct, they are certainly part of the decentralization of literary culture. Miller says that, with space shrinking for print reviews and the Web as an overwhelming presence, people are trusting their instincts to figure out what to read. The threat this poses to the literary establishment is that whenever one of these new-old titles connects with a reader, whenever a reader wonders how Rose Macaulay’s “The Towers of Trebizond” or Hamilton’s “Hangover Square” could ever have been forgotten, it raises distrust in the establishment that proclaims certain books important. Especially if the reader has slogged through the pages of some highly praised snoozer.

Reprints may be how new novels that surely deserve larger audiences — Kate Jennings’ “Moral Hazard,” for instance — may finally find the readership they should have had the first time around. The reprint houses are not going to put the big houses out of business. But it could be that the bigger publishing houses are on their way to losing something more valuable than readers’ money. Their trust.

I’m tickled how smaller presses, winning readers over with reprints, “raises distrust in the establishment that proclaims certain books important.” Nothing like reading a forgotten gem to “raise distrust” in the current New York Times author de jour. Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, suggests that one reason for the resurgence of reprints is that the reading public “feels stuff not worthy of them is being shoved down their throats.” What does it say about the contemporary market — and its readers — that good books are run over by the incessant grind of newer books? We flit from one “best seller” to the next, all the while over-looking “lesser” books and authors with just as good a tale to tell. Perhaps that’s why we need reprints. Not only do reprints recognize a book with potential staying power, but it reminds us of our submission to “the establishment” — a compliance that, inadvertently, consigns those books to a dust bin.