Updates to "Which publisher has the best line of classics reprints?"

Hackett Classics, Verso Books, and Library of America have their strong points — Delphi Books, LivriVox and StandardEbooks should’ve been in my original post - Many readers recommended Archipelago Books and McNally Editions - Gossip about Penguin Classics - I am less concerned about paper quality

For the last six months I’ve posted a short tale every Thursday. However, I’m a bit under the gun with a deadline for my Princeton Books project, so I’m not posting a tale today. Instead I’ve gone through the comments to my post from two weeks ago on the best publishers for classics reprints, and I’ve compiled a list of updates, corrections, and recommendations.

In general, I will continue to publish tales, but I do have plans for some other types of posts (interviews, in particular) that I think will pre-empt some of the Thursdays over the next six months.

In this post, I’m also going to experiment with bolding key take-aways and with other presentation tricks I’ve been learning from

Petya K. Grady

and

Celine Nguyen

. I feel like a very old dog at this point, but I do think I can learn some new tricks.

I was wrong about these ones…

Hackett Classics

The judgment of mine that received the most disagreement was my entry for Hackett Classics, which to me seemed low-effort and geared primarily towards professors who wanted to assign cheap copies of philosophical texts to their undergrad. I had trouble believing they were really up to the quality of the more-expensive Cambridge competitor. Especially given that these books are usually extremely difficult, you usually are going to want the best possible version. However,

Jacob G.

pointed out the real price-point comparison here is to Oxford and Penguin Classics, and I agree that for philosophical texts, Hackett is much better than these competitors.

Ethan McCoy Rogers

is some kind of specialist in Chinese literature, and he said they’ve done great work recently translating Chinese classics as well:

For philosophical translations, I generally advocate going with the translator rather than the imprint. The Hackett version of Critique of Pure Reason, for example, is both reliable and arguably more readable than the Cambridge version for a non specialist. Hackett has published significant writings by the small group of English language Chinese philosophy scholars in recent years, for example: the two volume anthology edited by Van Norden and his very very valuable language primer Classical Chinese for Everyone; Ziporyn’s excellent translations of the Zhuangzi; Ivanhoe’s translation of the Dao De Jing (including a very valuable appendix on the ambiguity of the Chinese).

Also, a non-specialist who wants to understand philosophy could do worse than reading through Hackett’s catalogue. The books they select are reliably worth reading for anyone interested in philosophy. Cambridge publishes a lot of texts that would be useful for specialists but that should probably be much lower priority for general readers. I think Hackett is great.

The publisher of Hackett, Jeff Dean, also weighed in with a very gracious comment:

Hi Ethan. I'm the Publisher at Hackett and really appreciate your remarks! Naomi, I'm sorry if you haven't had a good experience with Hackett editions in the past. We do indeed aim primarily for student use, but what you describe as "low effort" is actually the product of significant work, wherein we do our best to ensure we are able to publish books that are both affordable and of high quality. Our typically simple designs, the translations we commission, what kind of apparatus we include -- more or less, scholarly or pedagogical – are all determined by the needs of our intended audience, which is mainly undergraduates in philosophy and classics, though also in history, literature, languages and other subjects in the humanities. If you ask around, I think you’ll find we generally have a strong reputation amongst our core community. That said, what we offer certainly isn’t right for every context, and I understand that it may not be best option given what you’re looking for. Thanks for this piece, and for your work more generally!

My opinion has certainly been swayed, and I will pay more attention to Hackett Classics in the future.

Verso Books

David Sessions

spoke up on behalf of left-wing publisher Verso Books. I do think I ultimately should’ve rated them a bit higher than I did. They have frequent sales and price their books quite cheaply—the ebook editions are slick and well-formatted. But, more importantly, they serve to make accessible a lot of important left-wing authors who aren’t necessarily well-served by other publishers. I quoted from Adorno in one of my recent posts, for instance. That quote came from Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is published in English by Verso Books. If you’re reading a certain kind of Marxist thinker, Verso Books is probably your best bet. I myself am quite suspicious of these thinkers, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important to keep them in print.

Library of America

Jared Henderson

spoke up in defense of LOA, saying, “They’re my favorite by a mile—especially when they decide to be comprehensive, like with their Le Guin offerings.”

This was convincing to me. I do think I was probably a bit unfair to Library of America too. I really should be evaluating these presses more on the basis of their aims, rather than on the basis of whether I myself find their work to be useful. The aim of the Library of America is to completely republish an author’s major works. This is a worthwhile aim. Nobody else does this. Nobody else is going to publish Henry James’s collected prefaces, for instance. If you want everything Edith Wharton ever wrote (as I do!) then you need Library of America. In a world where I was rich as the Great Gatsby and had my own library, I’d probably want a complete collection of LOA volumes.

It’s a bit hard to actually read the books, but these are the books you purchase when you’re very invested in an author and want to lay hands on everything they’ve written. For more minor authors, they don’t necessarily republish everything, but they still publish a lot of stuff that other publishers wouldn’t touch (for instance they have a volume of James Fenimore Cooper’s naval tales). The compromises they make in presentation (thin paper, small print, little prefatory material) are in service of packing as many primary texts into each volume as they possibly can. This completeness is a little less important now that we have Project Gutenberg and StandardEbooks, but it’s still worthwhile.

I should’ve added these ones…

Delphi Classics

A reader asked if I had experience with Delphi Classics. For those who don’t know, this is an ebook-only imprint that takes together an author’s entire oeuvre from some public domain source, and mashes it together into one ebook. It’s kind of astonishing: you can get, say, thirty books in one $2.99 file.

I have read a fair number of these books. Back when I first started as a classics reader, these books were often too large for my e-reader device and would crash it, but now that’s less of a problem since Kindles have more RAM. I think they’re a good option if you’re looking for a reliably-formatted ebook at a cheap price, particular if you’re digging deep into an author’s oeuvre.

Librivox

Randall Hayes

’s recommended Librivox. I cannot believe I forgot this outfit! They are fantastic. These are free public-domain ebooks, read by volunteers. I listened to several Walter Scott novels in Librivox versions. Yes, they’re not professional narrators, but…you can’t really beat the price, and it’s amazing how they’re able to offer decent audio versions of books that are too niche even for Naxos or AmazonClassics. Highly recommend.

StandardEbooks

Gelred

and

Colin Rosenthal

recommended StandardEbooks. I can’t believe I’d never heard of them before.

You see, Project Gutenberg, which is the main source of free public domain texts, began before the e-book really existed. They started doing their transcriptions back in 1971! As a result, not all Project Gutenberg ebooks look good on your Kindle or other e-reader device. StandardEbooks apparently goes the extra mile, takes these Project Gutenberg transcriptions, cleans them up, puts them in a standard format and ensures that the resulting epub files look decent and read well.

Extremely valuable project. The Project Gutenberg version of Roughing It that I read recently had some formatting issues due to the presence of illustrations from the original text. I just looked, and it seems like the Standard Ebooks version of the book strips out these illustrations—as a result I’m sure it reads much better. When I wanted to look into Melville’s Typee earlier today, I instinctively headed to the Standard ebooks website instead of to Project Gutenberg. Hopefully I’ll use more of their work in the future.

I’m interested to learn more about these ones…

Pushkin Vertigo and Valancourt Classics

BDM

recommended these two imprints. First of all, I had no idea that Pushkin Press had an imprint devoted to republishing classic crime novels. They have a few English-language books under their crime imprint, but the majority seem to be translated from other languages (especially Japanese). That is both wild and fantastic. Am so excited about this discovery. The catalog for Pushkin Vertigo is here.

With regards to Valancourt, I’ve run across their books from time to time, but haven’t actually ever read one. I will trust that

BDM

when she says they are good.

Galley Beggars

ML Cohen recommended Galley Beggars Press. I looked at their catalogue, and I am intrigued. I don’t know that their genuine classics offerings (republished books by Elizabeth Gaskell and Ford Madox Ford) really distinguish them, but their contemporary literature offerings look pretty good! They’re definitely on my radar now.

Rupa and Fingerprint Classics

Jayasri

noted that India has two local sources of classics reprints: Rupa and Fingerprint. She said the quality of Rupa editions was generally good. I will note, from looking through their catalogues, that these imprints don’t seem to republish that many Indian books! Perhaps they reserve that for their non-Classics imprints.

Stark House Press

William Burns recommended this press, which seems to keep in print a lot of books that served as the basis for mid-century film noirs.

McNally Editions

This might be an extremely basic opinion, but McNally Jackson is my favorite bookstore. They’re in New York, within walking distance of my in-law’s condo, and I love the way they organize their books (by country of origin). They carry a lot of classic literature, and I am always finding something new there. They also have a book publishing arm: McNally Editions. I’ve read one of their books, Kay Dick’s They. I felt like the book was okay, but I gave it a decidedly-mixed review. Looking through their catalogue, I see a number of books that I either own or am interested in, including The Oppermans, Rent Boy, The Step-daughter, Office Politics. Thanks to

𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️‍🌈

for the reminder!

Archipelago Books

This is a small press that’s best-known as the original American publisher for Knausgaard. They were mentioned by a number of commenters, but I don’t have a strong sense of what they do. The brand doesn’t necessarily mean anything to me yet. However

Jim Coughenour

said they were several cuts above New Directions in terms of quality, which is an extremely high recommendation. They were also recommended by

𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️‍🌈

and

Ariana

.

Fitzcarraldo

Both

Buku Sarkar

and

Ariana

recommended this publisher. I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know much about them. Here’s the catalogue for their classics imprint.

Beacon Press

Ariana

also recommended Beacon Press’ Celebrating Black Woman Writers series.

A few other points that arose…

Penguin Classics

The most intriguing comment I got was from JR:

I do think that Penguin Classics has been taking a different direction, slowly, in the past decade or so, in line with the general shrinking of a public audience for classic literature. Penguin Books is certainly a more mainstream commercial publisher than the others, so I suppose this makes sense, and Penguin Classics have always been likelier to modernize and abridge than some of the other lines (plus its translations tend to favor a freer, more immediate and less literal take on the text). But it’s continued to aggressively cull its back catalogue even as its new publications have dried up to a trickle. It now seems mostly to publish topical anthologies on issues of broad contemporary interest, or else mid- to late-twentieth-century English books. Hence why some of the glosses/textual scholarship are sparse and creaky; they’ve neglected to touch it since the nineties!

I am open to this argument, even though it’s mostly vibes-based. I do think there’s a reason why Oxford Classics are so much better than Penguin, and it’s because Oxford is just a more mission-driven organization overall.

Still, I personally love declinist narratives—this is something I know about myself—so I would like to withhold judgement on Penguin Classics. I am consistently astonished by what they publish, and while their American and British offerings might be getting worse, their Indian offerings have been getting much better.

The head of Penguin Classics, Henry Eliot, runs a great Substack that everyone should probably subscribe to, and I hope to get from his newsletter a better sense of where they’re going these days.

Paper Quality

The issue of paper and print quality also came up several times. Several commenters complained about the print and paper quality of Dover Thrift Editions, Oxford Classics, Wordsworth Classics, and the Loeb Classical Library. I read hardly any print books, so this is a major blind spot on my part. I also left off entirely the classics imprints, like Dover and B&N Classics, whose main purpose is to provide cheap paperback copies of the classics at the absolute lowest price possible. I’m not particularly price-sensitive, so it seems churlish of me to run down these imprints.