Steer clear of archival reprints!

For this blog entry, I'm going to explain why you should stay completely away from archival reprints of vintage novels.

But first, what is an archival reprint??

Simply put, an archival reprint is a reprint edition of any vintage book, (and by vintage, I'm referring to anything fifty years old or older,) that treats the book as an historic relic to be preserved for future generations. The idea itself is not bad, but the way they do it is flawed on many levels.

I'll take a few moments, before I go too far into this, to name some examples of companies that do the kind of thing I'm talking about here.

• Kessinger Publishing
• BiblioBazaar
• Nabu Press
• Forgotten Books
• Literary Licensing, LLC

I'll elaborate more on my own experience with these publishers, but first I'd like to share another blog entry by somebody who had a similar experience with a book from Kessinger. As you can see from his screenshots, there has been absolutely no effort at all from the publishers in ensuring that the book looks even halfway decent.

In the first screenshot, you can see a library marking that says "Stanford University Library," which can often be spotted in these reprints, and it is also very common to see the library's checkout card in the front of the book. (Obviously, one can surmise that these books are borrowed from libraries for this purpose.) In the second, one page is darker than the other. (Seriously, WTH?)

And why do they do it?

This can best be summed up in an Amazon product description for a Nabu Press reprint:

"This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book."

And that's their excuse?? Oh, never mind that you can't even read the darn things, just as long as they have "elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed books worldwide." (To say nothing of the fact that some of the flaws are "introduced by the scanning process." That just gives them away as careless and without class!) As Puck so famously put it, "what fools these mortals be!"

Now, for the icing on the cake... my experience!

And this is the moment you've all been waiting for. What was my experience, and why do I have such strong feelings about this.

I bought three Nabu Press books around Christmas of 2012, and they were basically readable, but I was absolutely floored by so much of what I saw in these books. A few of the scanned pages had big chunks ripped out of the corners, (which ended up in the reproduction;) the text on some pages was all warped so it looked like it was yanked out of the scanner before it finished scanning, (which it probably was;) the images were so blurry that I sometimes couldn't make them out; the images were sometimes reproduced as binary black and white images, (i.e. no gray areas,) and since these images were originally halftones, you can probably imagine how that must have looked. I didn't raise the issue at the time because I knew what to expect, and I wanted the books for another purpose besides my own enjoyment, but now it has me perturbed.

In October of 2014, I ordered a BiblioBazaar reprint copy of "The Ne'er-Do-Well" by Rex Beach, and, when it was delivered, I was very disappointed to see that the book was around a foot high and nine or ten inches wide. That's way too huge and bulky to curl up and relax with. I didn't even look at the inside of it before I put it in an estate sale. I just didn't think that wrestling with half a ton of book was exactly what I had in mind when I bought this. (Yup. Size does matter, Folks!)

And, just within the last month or so, I bought a Forgotten Books reprint of "In the Fog," by Richard Harding Davis. (Excellent book, by the way. Check out my reviews for it. They are the previous entries.) Knowing what happened with my BiblioBazaar debacle, I checked Amazon's height and width stats, and was pleased to find that it was a 6X9. That's a pretty comfortable size for a novel. I had visited the publisher's website, and it seemed like they were more or less with the program, (although I wasn't too thrilled that they didn't bother to include links to where they were selling their print versions.)

I was excited when I received it, and I took a look inside. I wasn't even halfway through my scrutiny of the book's quality when I found a page missing. Disappointed and furious, I sent it straight back for a full refund.

But how do you get a good reprint?

Always examine the book itself. The sales page on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, (or wherever you go to buy your books,) should give you a pretty good idea what you're getting into. If the description summarizes the book individually rather than going into that "This is a reproduction of a pre-1923 title..." tirade, that's a pretty safe bet that it should be good--but it doesn't end there. The cover should be fairly well designed, (after all, the cover is the most important selling point of any book, and a quick look at the "bad" reprint editions I'm referring to here will reveal that a good cover seems to be next to the bottom of their priority list;) and also, the publisher should have a website that elaborates more on what they're about. If it just looks like a poorly organized catalog with no logical arrangement, then they're probably not worth your time, but if they make it clear to you what they're trying to do and how they are going about doing it, and there's an integrity to their business model as they explain it, that should make it fair game.

If there aren't any quality reprints available for the title you're looking for, you can always search for it on worldcat.org, and you'll find many libraries that hold the original editions. (eBay usually also has them, if you'd rather buy, but that can sometimes be expensive.) And if nothing else, you can always read the eBook. That's what I did with "In the Fog," (but only because my house isn't very well-lit. ;) )

Thanks very much for reading this, (even if I might have sounded a bit whiny in some odd places,) and I hope this has been helpful. Remember this, though: books are our best friends, so please buy them from people who treat them as such.