Which publisher has the best classics line?

It's Oxford University Press

Since this is a Great Books blog, I assume you’re all extremely interested in my opinions about which publishers of reprinted classics are actually good.

I’ve divided these presses into three categories, and each is evaluated according to different criteria. If a press isn’t mentioned, it’s probably because I just haven’t read many of their books. With two exceptions, I’ve read multiple books from each of the presses below (the two exceptions are The Dorothy Project and Boiler House Press).

Just as a note, my opinions are mostly about their Kindle versions. If the press has a good website that’s worth your time, I’ll link to it, otherwise I’m eschewing links.

EDIT: In the half hour since posting this I've already gotten so many new suggestions that I'm gonna add a new section to include other people's recommendations. Please comment if you've got any, and I'll try to credit you as well.

Mass-Market Classics

The first type of press publishes books we've all heard of: Huckleberry Finn, Middlemarch, The Canterbury Tales. With these presses, what matters is how well these books are presented, how cheaply they're priced, and how much value they add over a free public-domain edition.

One thing I don't evaluate, either in this category or in any other, is the average quality of their translations. To be honest, I haven't found that any press is really a stand-out in terms of translation quality. They all seem to do a more-or-less fine job. If anyone has noticed one press has particularly bad or particularly good translations, please let me know!

Presses in this category include:

Oxford World's Classics - The best. Their Kindle versions are often half the price of the equivalent Penguin Classic, and their footnotes are detailed and thoughtful.¹ The amount of introductory material and footnoting you get at this price point is truly astounding. To me, they are just self-evidently the best. If I was to, say, re-read Middlemarch, I’d go with their version without comparing it to other publishers, because how much comparison shopping do you really want to do with this stuff? Unless you think another line has a translation that's genuinely better, get the Oxford version.

Penguin Classics - The widest variety. They publish so much crazy stuff at a very reasonable price point. Who else is going to publish Middle English versions of Chaucer for just $20? They also publish much more American and non-Western work than Oxford does.² I think their presentation of longer works tends to be a bit lacking; they often abridge or split up works in weird ways that harm the text. But with anything that can fit easily into one volume, they’re often the best, particularly if there’s no corresponding Oxford edition. I quite frequently just browse their catalog and buy whatever looks interesting. That’s how I ended up reading Song of Kieu last year and Nine-Cloud Dream this year.³ Penguin classics put out two cloth-bound coffee-table books detailing their catalog: here’s one; here’s the other. I own both and keep them by my bedside, sometimes leaf through them to find new books.

Modern Library Classics and Everyman's Library - Grouping them together because they’re quite similar and are both divisions of Random House. Very lacking in front-matter (introduction and maps) and foot-noting, but because they don't invest heavily in those things, they can afford to publish longer books. They have the best Kindle version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for instance. And I have an Everyman's Library reprint of the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Who else is going to print this kind of book and do it cheaply and well? For a certain kind of book, you'll almost certainly end up with one of these two. Their Kindle versions are also very reasonably priced.

Norton Classics - These books are almost exclusively meant for classroom use, and as a result they're very expensive, but the books are good. There's a certain kind of book, particularly one that's in early-modern or middle-English, where I don't necessarily trust Penguin Classics to do it well. I feel like they'll somehow abridge or dumb it down. Norton always does a fantastic job. When I read the KJV, I got the Norton Critical Edition, for instance, because if I'm going to spend fifty hours with something, I want it to be perfect. I also personally like the various Norton anthologies, which I also keep in my study and occasionally look into just to see if I can discover a new author. The two-volume Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy is how I discovered Schiller’s On The Aesthetic Education of Man, for instance.

Library of America - I am not a fan. Their volumes are expensive, the type is very small, they often don't have Kindle editions. I like the feeling of completeness you get from these books: I own all their Edith Wharton volumes, for instance. They look attractive on a shelf, and it's nice to just be open to open up an Edith and glance around to see if there's any stories or tales or memoirs I haven't read yet. But for serious reading, they're not good. I will make an exception for their novel compilations. Their taste is great, and my introduction to noir came through these books.

Vintage - A lot of wonderful books come out from Vintage. They publish most of V.S. Naipaul's ouevre, for instance. My experience with Vintage mostly comes from books I’d consider to be classics, but which are actually still under copyright, and for which Vintage is usually the only publisher. As such, I don't consider them a classics line, per se. If you want to read V.S. Naipaul, you'll read a Vintage book, because...that's who publishes Naipaul, same as how Scribner was for a long time the only publisher of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They have a Classics line that publishes, you know, H.G. Wells and Dickens like that, but I don’t think Vintage Classics has a real niche.

FSG Classics - Same as the above. Not a lot of coherence here. To really succeed as a classics line, you need to put your stamp on an author. FSG’s attempts to do this always seem a bit half-hearted. For instance, they publish a number of Solzhenitsyn volumes, but their selection seems rather haphazard: Cancer Ward but not In The First Circle; two volumes of his Red Wheel quadrilogy, but not the last two. It just seems like they continually start out with an author, have some high hopes, and then lose interest. But to really launch or re-launch an author in the U.S. you need commitment, and it feels like that’s really lacking here.

New York Review of Books Classics - These books are great, but...mostly they're books you're reading because you trust the NYRB. A lot of these books weren't necessarily classics (at least in English) before the book came out. They don't do that many reprints of books I'd consider genuine classics, but there are a few. I recently read their Fathers and Sons and my love for Turgenev was reignited. Their Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is another example of a genuine classic that they've republished, which I enjoyed. The books are attractive. But…the intro and prefatory material are nowhere near on the level you’d get with Penguin or Oxford Classics. I would say NYRB is not really a classics line, more of a forgotten-classics reprint press (which I discuss separately below).

Harper Perennial Classics - Always strike me as somewhat low-effort. Oftentimes, they're books that are in the public domain that are printed with very plain covers. The value these add over Project Gutenberg editions is minimal. To be fair, that’s something you could say about Modern Library and Everyman’s Library too, but at least with those they often reprint long books and price them very modestly. With Harper Perennial, they don't have that niche. And even the covers are very bland.

Hackett Classics - I really tend to avoid these books. They seem to specialize in putting out cheap editions of philosophical texts (perhaps for use in freshman intro classes?). I feel like there’s almost always another publisher who’s doing the book better. Something about their presentation just seems very low-effort to me. If my bias against Hackett is unfair, please let me know.

AmazonClassics - Somewhat similar to Harper Perennial, except they do amazing audio versions. There are many classics for whom audio versions only exist because of Amazon. The stand-out audio version of theirs that I listened to recently was Narrative of the Life of Harriet Jacobs. The narration was really great. My impression is that Amazon does do really good works bringing a lot of these classics to audio in an extremely professional way.

Naxos Audio - Somewhat similar to Amazon, in that they do audio versions of classics for which you wouldn't think unabridged audio versions would normally exist. Also extremely good. I listened to their Faerie Queene and Decameron and Golden Ass earlier this year. Highly, highly, highly recommend. If there’s a choice of audio versions, I always choose the Naxos version. They also did the audiobook of Last of the Mohicans that I'm listening to now. What Naxos does is incredible. Out of all the classics reprints publishers, they’re doing the best work. Other people are content to just hire some academic to write an intro to an edition of Faerie Queene, but Naxos gets a guy into a recording book and records him saying the poem for sixty hours! That’s a huge investment of time and money. They do it very professionally, very nicely. I am so happy they exist.

Project Gutenberg - This is not really a publisher. It’s just a website that offers text versions of public domain books. Most of my early classics reading was through Project Gutenberg versions. I read Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Dickens, Sinclair Lewis—all in Project Gutenberg versions. Even as late as 2015, I used their Plato translations, because they use the Jowett, and I find his translations to be the most readable. I mean…it is what it is. For non-English books, the translations are usually a hundred years old and they feel Victorian. There’s also usually not much in the way of introductions or footnotes, unless those things were also present in the 100 year old public domain book that they use as the basis for their version.

But I think they’re the baseline. Unless you’re adding significant value over Project Gutenberg, either in terms of formatting, glossing, or presentation, then why are you wasting my time? I mostly read ebooks, so at least for texts originally written in English, the difference between a Project Gutenberg version and a Penguin Classic genuinely isn’t that much—it comes down to whether the Penguin has a good introduction and decent footnotes. Oftentimes it doesn’t, so…it’s sort of a waste of ten dollars. Nowadays I reflexively buy the Penguin because…I have more money. But I have much more respect for Project Gutenberg than I do for most publishers.

Internet Archive - If you’re looking for a book that’s relatively old, and it’s not on Project Gutenberg, then Internet Archive will probably have it. For instance, I found a copy of Sturlunga Saga on there. And I read a bit of the Shahnameh on Internet Archive. But in practice, with the way their interface works, it’s a little hard to spend serious time with their books. What they do is, arguably, book piracy, but…so what? They keep information alive. I’m glad that this website exists.

Specialty Classics

The second type of press is the specialty press. They've developed a sideline, republishing a particular kind of book. The purpose of this press is to serve the existing audience for this type of book, but it's also meant to grow the audience for that book. One reason I was able to develop such an interest in Middle English texts was that there's a great non-profit publisher of these texts, which has developed a unique business model and a particular way of cheaply-producing print-on-demand versions of these texts. The existence of a good reprint press will ultimately drive demand for their product books in that area.

Other areas aren't so well-served! I don't really think Chinese or Sanskrit texts have really been done well in America—in part that's because the linguistic and academic expertise doesn't exist, and in part that's because there isn't necessarily a huge audience for these books.

Here I list presses that I think have done a stand-out job of serving their particular niche:

METS - These guys have an amazing business model, I am highly impressed. They publish Middle-English classics online for free, and then you can pay money to get a paperback version. The books have the original Middle-English text with a fair (but not excessive) amount of glossing to help you understand difficult words. The books are these very tall, brick-like trade paperbacks—they look and feel like a stack of printer paper—that are extremely ugly and not-very-professional-looking, but I appreciate that these books exist.⁴ I assume the publisher found a very cheap print on demand press and decided to use the cheapest possible settings, and that's what allows them to stay in business despite what surely must be extremely small order sizes for each volume. The book of theirs I’ve spent the most time with is Four Romances of England: a collection of some of the very earliest Middle-English writing. If you click on that link, you’ll see you can read the entire book online or download it for free. Very cool business model.

Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library - If you're looking for Old English, these are the guys. They'll give you an Old English text with facing-page translation. Bit like Loeb Classical Library, but, you know, Old English. It's not necessarily the easiest thing to find readable Old English texts, and I'm glad these books exist, even though they're quite expensive. I buy paper editions; don’t think they have Kindle versions and anyway Kindle wouldn’t be good for what they do. I’ve spent a lot of time with their reprint of the Old English translation of Boethius.⁵

European Classics - I went through a phase where I was reading a lot of Soviet-era Russian books and Northwestern University Press has made this into their specialty. The books are very handsome. The standout here was Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petroevna, though I also liked the volumes of Trifonov's stories. I think this press offers one of the best possible examples of how even an imprint without many resources can develop a reputation by focusing on an otherwise under-served area.

Russian Library - Columbia University Press has several classics lines. Their Asian Classics series is okay, but I have a better opinion of their Russian Library, which basically translates, you know…the other Russian books. These books are good, but you haven’t necessarily heard of them. Perhaps could be considered more of a forgotten-classics imprint, because the volumes are done in trade paperback and are very reasonably priced. I liked their City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya and Sentimental Tales by Mikhael Zhoshchenko.

Broadview Editions - This is the best publisher of 18th-century English books. I own a number of their books, but the one I actually remember reading was Memoirs of Emma Courtney, by Emma Hays. In general, I love browsing their catalog: I feel like their pricing and criteria of selectivity are good. I wish their books were available on Kindle. You have to use Google Play to get them instead, which is annoying, but I assume there is some reason for that.

Cambridge Texts In The History of Philosophy - I’ve learned that if I’m going to read a serious work of philosophy (e.g. Hegel or Kant) then I ought to pick these guys. Everything about their presentation feels weighty, serious and complete (sort of the opposite of a Hackett Classic). Usually I get the paper version, actually, because the text itself is often so abstruse and difficult to understand that I want to be able to actually look at the page and confirm to myself that the text isn’t somehow messed-up. Footnotes and introductory material are good, but…at the end of the day, you can’t really explain Hegel using footnotes. It is confusing. It is very confusing. Footnotes would just muddle up the matter. You look up glosses elsewhere online, and you do your best. I trust Cambridge to present the text to me about as well as it can be presented.

Forgotten Classics

These are books that have been out of print for a long time and are brought back into print by a particular publisher. Sometimes there was a pre-existing interest in this author (as with New Directions reprinting Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai). Other times, the publisher is gambling that they can generate some new interest and market the author as a discovery.

These are also the kind of presses that will speculatively translate or re-translate an existing author (as New Directions has with Clarice Lispector)—hoping that they can grow interest in this author and turn them into a perennial-seller in America. In most cases, this press will be the only English-language publisher for a given title. These titles are also not usually intended for class-room use, and they tend to have a minimum of front-matter, footnotes, and other glosses.

Here I evaluate each press mostly on the basis of their judgement. Have they published so many good books that I now respect their judgement? With my favorite forgotten classics presses, I actually browse their catalog just to look for authors I haven't heard of before. Other presses haven't yet gotten that kind of credit with me.

Presses that stand out in this category include:

Hard-Case Crime - I am a big HCC fan. With a press like this (and all the ones further down on this list), you're really trusting to their selectivity. You believe in their judgement, and you're willing to give their books a chance just because it's they who's publishing them. Yes, some of the authors they publish (Lawrence Bloch, Donald Westlake and Megan Abbott) are known quantities who I've heard of, but a lot of times I've never even heard of these people before! I particularly like their graphic novels. As I mentioned on Notes, I recently read fifteen volumes of the Quarry series, about a Midwestern hit-man who targets other assassins.⁶

Persephone - I am very fond of these books. They're presented in tidy and very attractive grey covers. They tend to have something of a cosy, mid-century British quality, but...so what? I like that.

New Directions - I have a lot of respect for New Directions. I belonged to their book club for a while. If you want to read a fancy European autofiction, they're your guys! Many of their books are good, but...I wasn't necessarily interested in a lot of what they sent me as part of their book club, so I let my subscription lapse. They seem to specialize in European modernist novels, with a strong sideline in 20th-century Japanese and Latin-American novels. My problem is sometimes the books feel a bit pretentious, and I’m not always convinced there’s enough substance to merit spending time with them, as with these recent Danish books by Solvej Balle. But they also publish stuff I'd never see otherwise—like this Croatian novel, On The Edge of Reason, by Miroslav Krleza. What a fantastic book.

And I also often like the modernist European books too! For instance, I’ve recently enjoyed their reprint of Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzberg and their translations of Dag Solstad’s oeuvre. So...they don't have unlimited credit with me, but they do have some. What I especially like is that when they commit to an author, as they have to Clarice Lispector, Cesar Aira, and László Krasznahorkai, they just republish everything: book after book after book after book, reaching deep into the authors ouevre. I think I’d probably like them more, if they’d invested in some author that I truly loved (as Pushkin Press has with Stefan Zweig), but they’re certainly amongst the best presses of this sort.

NYRB - I still belong to their book club. There's a definite aesthetic here, the books are often slim, modernist novels or the minor works of major authors. But...I do read about one or two out of every twelve books they send me as part of their book club. Last year they sent me Kapo, by Aleksandar Ticsma, and I became obsessed with this author and read the other two books of his that they republished. Their introductions are usually pretty sparse; footnotes are nonexistent. The conceit of these books is that they’re supposed to be relatively accessible; I think that’s why they eschew extensive prefatory material. I mostly skip their introductions, it’s true, but I have loved so many of their books: Stoner, Skylark, Talk, High Wind In Jamaica, Augustus, Post-Office Girl, Beware of Pity, The Dud Avocado, Lolly Willowes, The Inverted World, Rogue Male, Hons and Rebels, Angel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. I could probably list two dozen more, if I tried. What other publisher has given me so much pleasure? I don’t think there’s another publisher whose books I enjoy so consistently. Is every work revelatory? No, but almost every book is decent. That’s pretty amazing.

Femme Fatales - My own publisher, Feminist Press, does a lot of classics reprints, but I don't necessarily read them, because they often seem somewhat experimental, formless, or otherwise niche. However, they do have a line of noir reprints, the Femme Fatale line, and these are excellent. The best of the bunch was Laura, by Vera Caspary, about a detective who becomes obsessed with the woman whose murder he is investigating.

Verso Books - I have very mixed feelings about this left-wing publisher. A lot of their books feel very heavy and abstruse and Marxist, and they just seem like too much effort for what you get (a problem with Marxist literature in general). But they also publish and keep in print some genuine classics that I have enjoyed, like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney or Democracy Against Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood. They have a Verso World History series that I've browsed, and which seems very interesting. So...it's a mixed bag.

Virago - I don’t have much to say about Virago. I think it's mostly a British publisher, so when Virago books get republished in the US, it's by some other publisher. I have passive good feelings about them though.

Pushkin Press - A reprint press doesn't really get credit with me until I read one author for whom they are the go-to. For Pushkin Press, that author is Stefan Zweig. They do an amazing job keeping him in print in English. I love Stefan Zweig, ergo I love Pushkin.

Boiler House Press’s Recovered Books - Have only read one of their books, so I feel unable to fully recommend them, but I am quite interested in their approach. They seem to specialize in curiosities: the books they publish aren't just weird, but they're also weird in their weirdness. Like, when you think of a weird book, you're probably thinking of a certain kind of book: a book that mixes genres, that's somewhat formless, that has very long paragraphs or doesn't use punctuation. These books are weird in a totally different way! The one that I read was called Pull Devil, Pull Baker, by Stella Benson, where the conceit is that this woman, Benson, was in Shanghai, and she meets this exiled White Russian Count and starts writing down his stories, which are very wild and...might be true? It's hard to say! We think this count really existed, but...we don't know for certain. Part of the story of the book is that the author starts grappling with the Count to get more truth out of him.

The Dorothy Project - I've only finished one of their books, but whenever I’ve looked into them, they’ve struck me as a little too arty, honesty. It feels like a lot of books that combine fiction and memoir and essay (what the French call a recit) in a way that's sort of fine, I guess, but the particular books I've read just haven't done it for me: the only one I've completed was A Suite For Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger, but I own a few other books of theirs that’ve put me off in a similar way.

Melville House - They have two classics lines, The Art of the Novella and The Neversink Library. I’ve read and enjoyed books from each collection, but I have reservations. Perhaps that’s unfair on my part, but when it comes to the novella line, the books are almost always available elsewhere as part of a larger collection. I don’t know if anyone is really excited about the idea of spending $10 for a standalone Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or standalone Benito Cereno. For The Neversink Library, I’ve read their two Udon Von Horvath books, which were excellent, but I don’t yet fully understand the vision of their line.

Smith And Taylor Classics - A new imprint out from Unnamed books, edited by Brandon Taylor. The selections are good: I like The Odd Women and Twilight Sleep, but all the books they’ve published so far are in the public domain and easily available from Project Gutenberg, so I wonder about how much value is really being added here.

Dalkey Archive / Europa Editions / Open Letter Books / Deep Vellum / Two Lines Press - All of these presses publish a lot of books in translation. I applaud the work. I have passive good feelings about all of them, but I don’t know enough about their catalogs to feel comfortable making a judgement. If you’re interested in Dalkey Archive, Chad Post has been publishing fantastic Substack posts about their history.

Join my writing community!

This post is a bit of a departure for Woman of Letters. I don’t normally do listicles or service-journalism. But this is an article I’ve really looked for elsewhere on the net and haven’t been able to find. Although more classics lines exist, I wanted to only write about ones where I genuinely had some personal experience. I hope to come back and update it whenever I start to develop strong feelings about a new line. If you found this post interesting, please share it with others.

On a more personal note, I work most days at an arts-space in San Francisco called The Ruby. I am typing this post from a chair in the corner of our main room. It is such a fantastic place: a wonderful community. I’ve been a member for three years, but only started coming regularly in the past year. I’ve met some people here who’ve rapidly become dear friends. On any given weekday, this is where you’re likely to find me. The Ruby is for women and non-binary people, but other than that it’s not particularly exclusive. Over time I've really come to detest the clout-chasing and status games of the literary world, and the Ruby is shockingly free from that kind of thing—it is very different from most arts communities.

Many of the members are writers, but others are welcome too. The space is in SF’s Mission District, and if you’re local and looking to belong to a community, please join. People use this community in a lot of different ways. There are plenty of events and groups to belong to; it’s also just a great place to get work done.

I am a fair-sized donor to the Ruby, but I don’t run it or anything: I don’t get money if you join. It’s just a place I care a lot about. It has members, but it could definitely use more. You’re also welcome to message me or respond to this email if you have more questions. You can also reach out directly to the Ruby. The website is here, and it has a contact form.

Is it possible for a novel to have a bad style, but a good story?

I wrote a paid post about the lessons I learned as a young science fiction writer:

In retrospect, I now see that there was a strong suspicion of style, voice, innovation in these books. Yes, it's somewhat ironic because it's sci-fi, so it's a literature that ostensibly celebrates innovation. But there was a reason for this distrust of style. And I think it's because when you read stories by aspiring science-fiction writers, it can often be very hard to tell what's actually happening!

1. A follower online told me actually Oxford Classics does end-notes and not footnotes. This seems bad. Footnotes are much better. But when you’re reading on the Kindle, it’s all the same, you just click on the little icon and the text shows up at the bottom of the screen. Ironically I think that what I like about their footnotes (the length and level of detail) is a result of the fact that they were originally intended as endnotes—which can be longer, because they’re off at the end, rather than taking up space in the text itself.

2. Penguin Classics India has in the last ten years put out a number of books for the Indian market that seem quite exceptional (including the Bibek Debroy Mahabharata I’ve been reading).

3. I wrote more about Nine-Cloud Dream and about Korean literature here.

4. It is quite comical the degree to which these books just look like a stack of printer paper. They’re honestly like nothing else you’ve ever seen in printed and bound form.

5. As in, more than a thousand years ago, someone translated the Latin classic, Consolation of Philosophy, into Old English, and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to read it in Old English, just to practice my Old English.

6. I also once pitched a crime novel (they publish some originals) to their editor Charles Ardai, and he was really nice and responded to my email, which most of the editors I pitched did not do. He passed it to a different editor, and that editor actually did get back to me, rejecting the book. I really appreciated that.