Friday, February 28, 2020

Dover Books

Karin Falcone Krieger tells the story of Dover Books: “This Is a Permanent Book” (Contingent Magazine).

Dover editions are permanent indeed. I just took down a Dover reprint of Richard Réti’s Modern Ideas in Chess, which I bought almost fifty years ago as a young chess fanatic. Signatures tight, pages unyellowed. It is a permanent book.

Another Dover reprint has been sitting out for everyday use, the scores of the Beethoven string quartets. A little beat up (in the manner of a well-used telephone directory), but it too is a permanent book.

Dover Thrift Editions of course are another story: cheap, cheap paper.

Now where is my Dover copy of Flatland?

Related reading
Dover Publications (All the books)

comments: 2

Chris said...

I loved Dover's reprints, and the quality was absurdly good. Those editions will outlast all of us. I just checked their website and some of my favorites are still in print, although others are gone. I wonder if recent printings still have the elaborate fold-out maps that some of them originally came with.

A few weeks ago I came across a set of Arthur Cleveland Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds in Dover editions, which I had never known about. I later bought the two volumes on birds of prey.

And of course my high school years wouldn't have been the same without the Dover Variorum Shakespeares!

Michael Leddy said...

I saw some of the chess books I had ages ago still available from their website, with the same covers.

Thanks for reminding me of the Variorum Shakespeare volumes, which I haven’t thought of in many years.