The Custodian of Forgotten Books – The New Yorker
In recent years, many publishers have come to the same realisation —that the graveyard of literary history includes many works worth resurrecting. ‘It’s a pretty striking change in the last decade or so,’ Edwin Frank, the editor of the Classics series from New York Review Books, told me.
Frank believes that publishers have the power to change the canon, but only if they’re truly open to lesser-known titles. ‘Those books are there to search you out,’ he said. “They can exist to change your mind about what a book can be.’ Paradoxically, the new interest in neglected books can be seen as a reaction to the decline of book culture. Books used to be a centrepiece of both education and entertainment, but television and the Internet have challenged that role.
Frank believes that among book lovers, ‘there’s a kind of sitting and looking—a kind of assessing the culture’ going on. We’ve become more aware of what could be lost forever.