What’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected

March 1, 2024 1:49 AM

The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between. from We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them by Brad Bigelow [The Neglected Books Page]

The essay mentioned from the NYT: We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them by Apoorva Tadepalli

posted by chavenet (16 comments total)

Twas ever thus, when it comes to the arts, unfortunately. See also: The vast majority of artists whose work almost no one ever saw, let alone bought.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:47 AM on March 1 [4 favorites]

But how does a publisher get a reader who knows nothing about the book, the writer, or the publisher’s reputation to look at, let alone buy it? If the publisher has a respectable checking account, they can flood critics, bloggers, BookTok influencers, magazines, and stores with copies and marketing materials to try to win precious review column inches or display table space or staff guinea pig readers. If the publisher is just getting by — which is most of them — then it comes down to developing a reputation, word-of-mouth enthusiasm, and luck.

Bookselling is an interesting field in that one person can truly make a difference. I've heard tell of books that sold significant amounts for an indie novel just because a normal person got excited about it on Twitter. There's a lot of depressing stuff posted on metafilter that we can't do anything about, but in this case we can get people excited about books!

Of course, excited readers have to also be able to buy those books. A month ago, we discussed the choke hold Ingram, the largest book distributor, has on the industry. If you are in the US and want to purchase a book from the Recovered Books series mentioned in the article, you'll probably need to order it online. However, this is another place where individuals can make a difference. If you have a local bookstore that sells indie books, and you're the type of person who reads chavenet's posts on the blue, that bookstore probably recognizes you when you walk in. You can ask them to start carrying the books you are interested in. Or to a host a bookclub for the book you want to read, then they buy a handful of copies to sell to the club.

I brought this up last time we talked about Ingram, but I want to once again plug Asterism Books, an online bookstore for indie publishers created specifically because of the U.S. distribution problem.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:40 AM on March 1 [10 favorites]

The medium of a book, where one author does a deep-dive broadcast to a large audience with hardly any feedback, has never really worked that well. It works for a few who are lucky enough to break through for a while. But there are other media for both fiction and nonfiction, especially now that the internet exists. Mostly they are nonrenumerative, but most books don't sell well enough to be profitable either.

Personally, I'm much happier as a popular game master running weekly role playing games for excited interactive audiences/co-creators than I ever was as a struggling "writer."
posted by rikschell at 4:57 AM on March 1 [2 favorites]

The medium of a book, where one author does a deep-dive broadcast to a large audience with hardly any feedback, has never really worked that well.

This is factually incorrect by any reasonable estimation. You personally may not have experienced success as a writer (and I feel you on the challenges), but you're claiming that one of the dominant forms of publishing for the last half-millennium is somehow unsuccessful. Whether you are talking about the format (the codex, electronic books, or niche versions of either) or the types of content a book may contain (fiction, nonfiction, verse, records, etc.), you seem to be extrapolating the challenges and oddities of the current market to centuries of publishing and book history. Centuries that witnessed the transmission of the majority of intellectual and cultural history of humanity... via books. You can talk about the value of journals, letters, games, and all sorts of oral formats for transmission of knowledge, but, uh, yeah: books.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:44 AM on March 1 [29 favorites]

Thanks, chavenet, this is a good article.

I have been searching for neglected books for over forty years and the one thing I can say with unshakeable confidence is that there are more great (and even just seriously good) books out there in the thickets off the beaten path of the canon than I or anyone else can ever hope to discover.

I agree with this, and I am glad to see good works recovered, but a healthy garden requires weeding. Some books are fine, or slightly less successful versions of similar stories that did rise to the top. Sometimes that rise was an accident, sometimes it was due to unfair biases in publishing, but I've read more than my share of obscure books that didn't pass the test of time. Some were quirky and interesting and are unfairly neglected, but plenty just weren't good enough.

For instance, the 1980s and 1990s saw the appearance of many "white boys or young men in a small U.S. town band together to fight a cyclically recurring supernatural evil" novels that went out of print and haven't come back. They got beaten out by King's It, Simmons' Summer of Night, or McCammon's Boy's Life. Some of the also-rans were good; not all were. I'd be delighted (in some ways) to have all of the books published ever available, but it's impossible to read everything, or to have meaningful discussions about infinitely large sets of books.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:56 AM on March 1 [4 favorites]

McNally Editions is your one-stop shopping site for Neglected Books. I read the strange and delightful Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul last month, one of many fascinating books rescued from oblivion by these people.
posted by kozad at 6:02 AM on March 1 [8 favorites]

For those with an interest in horror and related genres, a number of publishers bring back lost classics or underexposed titles in a variety of formats, from trade to special. Some of them do it as their main focus, some an occasional sideline:

Valancourt Books
Tartarus Press
Subterranean Press
Centipede Press

Not in horror, but see also: Persephone Books, which "reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century."
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:17 AM on March 1 [7 favorites]

In related news Handheld Press is shutting down. Adding some emphasis to key points,

Handheld Press will be publishing their last books in July 2024, and cease trading in June 2025. Handheld Press was founded by Kate Macdonald in 2017, specifically with the aim of bringing brilliant but overlooked works by women writers back into print. With their striking cover art and gorgeous design, Handheld Press titles were immediately recognizable on sight. And the reader could rest assured that the contents would match the packaging – Handheld had a knack for choosing exciting and surprising novels and collections and matching them with introductory essays by experts and comprehensive notes on the text. As such their releases were essential to both fans and scholars of the early days of the Weird and the fantastic. And as Handheld Modern they published a small but brilliant selection of modern titles.

So it might be a good time to browse their current catalog by subject and pick up some things before they disappear (again). Their books are typically available at US book dealers too.
posted by Wobbuffet at 7:23 AM on March 1 [6 favorites]

I guess I meant that while books are a great way for a very few individuals to reach a large audience (they have indeed worked very well for that), they are overall a very flawed medium. Most books fail to sell through. Most books that do succeed have modest print runs. It’s the few bestsellers that make the rest financially possible. It manages to succeed as an industry, but for any given author it’s traditionally been very hard to reach an audience.

The internet is a tool that at its best allows an author to find their audience more easily, but usually at the cost of not being able to monetize that audience. Matching writers and readers is difficult, and the blend of industrial and artisanal methods that worked for book publishers and independent bookstores (and libraries) has been disrupted so many times in the last 50 years it’s a wonder anything remains. Good on em for keeping it up, but for people who are more interested in sharing stories than trying to make a career as an Author, there are a lot more avenues of communication.

Of course, Sturgeon’s Law applies to all these things, whether they be blog posts or bestsellers or the forgotten books of yesteryear.
posted by rikschell at 11:03 AM on March 1 [2 favorites]

Here are some books with a very low number of ratings on Goodreads that I think deserve a wide audience why not:

King of Paris by Guy Endore (1956, 60 ratings)
A brilliant fictionalized biography of Alexandre Dumas, and the kind of biography that I think the great author would have wanted; one that is never restrained by mere fact.

It's Hard to be Hip over Thirty by Judith Viorst (1968, 86 ratings)
Perhaps best known for Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day, Judith Viorst's poetry, once popular but now on the obscure side, deserves a look. This is her first book of poetry, and possibly also her best.

The Masters of Solitude & Wintermind by Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin (1978 & 1982, 215 & 87 ratings)
Two midlist SFF authors got together in the 70's and 80's and produced a duology of epic sweep about encounters between two postapocalyptic societies, one technically advanced, and one far behind them. Imaginative and brilliant.

Rakóssy by Cecilia Holland (1966, 128 ratings)
Cecilia Holland deserves a reputation as one of the best authors of historical fiction ever to write, and this book about Hungary preparing for a Turkish invasion is one of her strongest.
posted by kyrademon at 11:28 AM on March 1 [5 favorites]

Do you know, I was next-door neighbors with Michael Hart when the Gutenberg Project was him recruiting grad students to transcribe texts in lieu of rent. His thinking was that *any* text that had been good enough to get published somehow in the past was good enough to be worth turning into data. Probably we need more rewards for people to turn books into data.
Google has probably already accomplished way more than Hart ever dreamed possible but of course the results are all locked up as Google's IP.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:30 AM on March 1 [3 favorites]

"The second question — availability of rights — is of no interest whatsoever to the critic. ...
Unfortunately, for a publisher interested in staying out of civil court, it’s a crucial
consideration."

Yes: for instance, The Journal of Wordplay would love to reprint the notorious "palindromic novel" Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo by Laurence Levine (1986), but the trail has gone cold as to whether the author has any living relatives to ask permission from.
posted by graywyvern at 2:11 PM on March 1 [2 favorites]

It's Hard to be Hip over Thirty by Judith Viorst - available in an absolutely beautiful edition from Persephone Books, as mentioned by cupcakeninja above.
posted by goo at 4:24 PM on March 1 [2 favorites]

Amazonnn... which started out as a great resource to find obscure books (that was part of their original function way back when) has now turned finding obscure books into a shit-show.

Old books which are low volume + low demand, which usually would be $5 or $10 or so at a used bookstore, are now listed on Amazone for hundreds or thousands of dollars, because bots bid against each other the highest price unimaginable. They could fix this by tweaking their dials, but they don't give a fuck because it doesn't affect their profits.
posted by ovvl at 7:01 PM on March 1 [5 favorites]

Damn right. When everything a potential "long tail" sale, there's no reason for pricing to reflect reality. And it can apply to relatively new books, as well! No respectable bookseller would price gouge on a 2014 book released in a small (if not tiny) print run, for an author with a small-to-modest following, that's fiiiiiinally gone out of print, but I see it all the time these days.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:58 AM on March 2 [1 favorite]

As a Greek and Latin major, I used to take part in a lot of parlor games involving lost literature. What would be your top thing to rescue; what would you trade for what? My own feeling is that anything by Sappho that's rescued is going to be golden. Then there was Cornelius Gallus, who was referred to with reverence by other Roman poets. But when a papyrus was found it caused huge consternation, with reactions ranging from "This is really shitty" to "Come on, it's not that bad" to "This is not really by Gallus." I remember professors arguing it was no accident that some things had been lost and some saved, but I thought their reasoning was pretty flimsy in some cases. Certainly it's no accident that Horace's and Vergil's works were saved given their social and political positions, but otherwise I think it has to be a combination of merit and luck and different in any one case.

I admit this is all tangential to the current discussion because we are mostly not talking about published books in the modern sense. A poem of Hroace's was probably considered published the day he gave a public reading.
posted by BibiRose at 7:13 AM on March 2 [2 favorites]