Authors, agents and even readers often complain that unless books continually sell at a certain level, they can slip quietly out of print, never to be heard of again. That's why Kodansha Globe's efforts to practice what it calls "literary archaeology," by seeking out and reintroducing out-of-print books from other publishers, are so unusual.
"Lots of great books get published, but the result of the cascade of new books is that worthy books for which there are still substantial audiences get buried," said Philip Turner, editor in chief of Kodansha Globe, the new trade paperback division of Kodansha America. "We're trying to dig them up and dust them off and say, `Look, there's great old literature around that's still worth reading.' "If Kodansha, a subsidiary of Kodansha World, an enormous Japanese publishing conglomerate, is known in America at all, it's known for commissioning the homespun best seller "The Delany Sisters Tell All" last year. Globe, which published its first books this spring, also intends to publish original books as well as paperback reprints of recently issued hard covers. But 30 to 40 percent of its list of two dozen books a year will be revivals of old books, Turner said.
On one recent list these included Helen Tworkov's "Zen in America," which fell out of circulation when its publisher, North Point Press, died in 1989; Ivan Morris's "World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan," published by Penguin; and Georges Condominas's "We Have Eaten the Forest: The Story of a Montagnard Village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam," published by Hill & Wang.
For the fall and winter, reissued books include Konrad Z. Lorenz's "Man Meets Dog," a definitive work on canine psychology published most recently by Penguin; Roger Shattuck's "Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron," published by Farrar Straus and Washington Square Press but out of print for a decade; and Leon Harris's "Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families who Built Great Department Stores," last published more than 10 years ago by Harper & Row and Berkley.