Salvaged from Obscurity

When a reader suggested I write about New York Review Books Classics and their republication of more than 100 forgotten, neglected, under-rated, out-of-print books, I was surprised to see I have already acquired 22 titles in the series, which I believe started in 1999. The project is the book publishing arm of The New York Review of Books, and the reprints are uniformly attractive and relatively inexpensive, and usually in paperback. I’m writing about them now because I see NYRB Classics has launched a blog, A Different Stripe, which I trust will soon shed its breathless tone and offer more in the way of substance. I’d like to hear how books are nominated for inclusion in the series. Who suggests titles? How many people read the books before they are approved or rejected? Which books have been rejected? Which title has sold the most copies?

The first title I purchased was Peasants and Other Stories, a Chekhov collection, originally published in 1956, with translations by Constance Garnett and an introduction by Edmund Wilson. I found it in a bookstore in Albany, N.Y., probably in 1999, before I was even aware of the NYRB series. I’ll buy almost any Chekhov but what caught my eye was the book’s design, which has since been changed. It had a stark, functional look to it, printed mostly in gray and red and in my hand it had a pleasant heft. Wilson’s selection is uninspired, because his intention was to highlight the “socially conscious” Chekhov, and I already have Garnett’s “complete” Chekhov, as republished by the Ecco Press. NYRB has subsequently republished Wilson’s To the Finland Station and Memoirs of Hecate County, reminding us of how dreary and confoundingly influential a writer Wilson was for decades.

Another impulsive purchase I made was The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton, one of my favorite books, with a new and useless introduction by William H. Gass. I already had the three-volume Everyman edition, but I couldn’t resist, even though so hefty a book bound as a one-volume paperback is almost impossible to read without snapping the spine. And even though it’s absurdly overpriced at $22.95, its saving grace is the picture on the cover – a skull and hourglass from “Vanitas,” a painting by Philippe de Champaigne.

My favorites among the NYRB Classics I own, books I cherish, rely upon and will probably reread, are The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, by Nirad C. Chaudhuri; A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor; Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman; Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; The Stories of J.F. Powers; American Humor, by Constance Rourke; Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, by Gershom Scholem; Letty Fox, by Christina Stead; Jakob von Gunten and Selected Stories, by Robert Walser; My Century, by Aleksander Wat; The Thirty Years War, by C.V. Wedgwood; Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig.

I can quibble about the inclusion of some titles – books by J.R. Ackerley and Jean Genet, for instance. Overall, NYRB performs a public service, salvaging books that might otherwise evaporate from literate consciousness.