…two years ago I started work as an editor at McNally Editions, the publishing imprint of the New York City-based independent bookstore chain McNally Jackson. We launched early last year and like to describe the books that we publish as hidden gems; titles that are not widely known but have stood the test of time, remaining as singular and engaging as when they were first written…Most of the time, my work feels more like that of a detective than an editor. Falling down endless online rabbit holes is an occupational hazard. I read old reviews in digitised newspaper archives, and trawl obituaries, looking for interesting tidbits. Internet Archive—the non-profit digital library that houses millions of books—is an indispensable resource, not least because so many of the titles it holds can’t be easily found IRL. But none of this would work without access to various bricks-and-mortar collections, especially the London Library. You’ll find me in the stacks, rootling out books that—as revealed by the stampings inside—no one’s read since the 1980s, or earlier.
…Coincidentally, shortly after my column was published, Brown independently came across a copy of the novel in the Oxfam bookshop in Bath and was as instantly taken with it as I’d been. She put her particular set of skills to good use, and tracked down Dick’s literary executors and signed up the estate. To date, the novel’s been sold in 9 territories globally and its new fans include Lauren Groff, Claire-Louise Bennett and Margaret Atwood. “It’s incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten”, Brown told the New Yorker’s Sam Knight last year, in an article about Kay Dick’s rediscovery. “That almost never happens.” She’s right. There are myriad reasons why some books fall out of print while others remain in the spotlight. Genius, it rather depressingly turns out, is no guarantee of longevity, nor is one-time notoriety.
…As a young wife and mother in the early 1970s, Brooke published 4 novels, after which she became an ardent feminist, got divorced, and turned her house into a commune. She then moved to India to live in an ashram. (This accounts, at least in part, for her novels having fallen off the radar.) As such, the task of tracking her down proved more daunting than usual, so imagine my surprise when our sleuthing revealed that she wasn’t just alive and well but living only a few streets away from me, in north London…
Curiosity—and a dash of competition—is important, but I’ve come to realise that patience and perseverance are characteristics that serve us backlist editors best. Discovering the book is often only the beginning. Brown regularly finds herself haunting the virtual halls of the UK probate search service, tracking chains of copyright through wills. Then comes the trickiest part: reaching out to the current beneficiaries. “I’ve done just about everything you can think of, whether it’s ringing an estate agent to find out whether they’ve retained an address for someone who moved out 8 years ago; direct messages on LinkedIn, Facebook etc; writing speculative letters; contacting university alumni groups; sending sweat-inducing emails saying things like, ‘Excuse me if I’ve got this wrong, but I think you might be the great-niece of someone I’m trying to contact…’”
But faint heart never won forgotten book. When, last year, Griffiths published the first British edition of the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1953 luminous coming-of-age novel, Maud Martha, it was the culmination of months of extensive discussions with Brooks’s estate. And it took me nearly 18 months of correspondence with family members, solicitors and agents to secure the rights for A Green Equinox.
Kate Macdonald, the founder and editorial director of Handheld Press, enjoys this legwork, but admits it can be frustrating, too. She’s trying to track down the estates of two completely forgotten women writers—“Author A” and “Author B” as she terms them; we all know better than to disclose details of our quarry while the hunt is still on—but is finding herself stymied. “The family of Author A are enthusiastically looking too, as they are delighted that their relation’s book might come back into print”, she told me, “but it seems that A’s will has been lost, and is not showing up in the government probate site, and thus the crucial connection between her literary estate and the family’s title isn’t proved. Maddening for everyone. Author B also seems to have died intestate, and I’m now beginning to wade through her husband’s autobiographical material, and hope to hear from her brother’s descendants, to see if a will is mentioned in his papers.”
As these efforts illustrate, rediscovering a lost book is often a process of reanimating a forgotten life.