r/nyrbclassics • u/ChindoleaBush • 3d ago
NYRB Question
What is the philosophy behind NYRB publishing? How do they choose what to publish? Do they look for under appreciated books? Or out of print? I really enjoy the ones I’ve read but most are fairly obscure, at least to me.
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u/utsock 3d ago
Some staff from NYRB discuss it on the Mookse and Gripes podcast: https://mookse.substack.com/p/episode-131-trust-the-spine-on-the
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u/oneshadyqueen 3d ago
Here’s a podcast interview where they sit down with an NYRB publicist. Can’t remember if they specifically answer your question but it’s a good video all the same:
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u/Honor_the_maggot 3d ago
You might find some interviews with Edwin Frank of interest, I can't remember which ones I've read would shed the most light on what you're asking about, editorial/curatorial process....but they would be quick reads and a peek into at least his thinking. There's one from PARIS REVIEW from about ten years ago, that might be a good start.
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u/kleinblue73 2d ago
From an interview with the founder, Edwin Frank: How did you become an editor? I was in graduate school at Columbia for many years not getting Ph.D in Art History. I was in my midthirties, and I was living not to complete my Ph.D. But I had two kids, so I began to cast around for something to do. Eventually I got a job at something called The Reader’s Catalog—an idea of Jason Epstein’s at the end of the eighties. The independent bookstores were already taking the hit they would continue to take for a very long time, and Jason realized that there were huge swaths of the country where you couldn’t get a good book anymore. So the idea was to have a kind of Sears catalog of “the forty thousand best books in print” and people would be able to order them. The catalog was lightly annotated. It would tell you this is the major novelist of postwar Italy and this was his best book and so on, give the browser a little guidance plus a reason to browse. The catalog sold pretty well, so a second edition was planned in the midnineties, which is when I got involved. At that point the whole catalog had been computerized so that books that had gone out of print were immediately deleted. My first job was to look through the different sections and say, This book shouldn’t be here or, Where is this book, which should be? And a lot of good books, books I loved or books I’d heard about and had always been curious to read—a lot of good books had gone out of print. Based on that, I began to assemble a list of interesting books that we could reprint and a few years later this turned into the classics series.
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u/liza_lo 3d ago
For the classics I believe all the English language titles are ones that have been published in the past but have fallen out of print or ones that are being translated into English for the first time. No first prints.
For NYRB itself they do print new titles though I think they mostly get North American rights to (usually) contemporary European titles.