Random Notes

■ America’s Canon. It began with Edmund Wilson, with the great critic’s admiration of the European tradition of comprehensive, quality collections of literary classics: Editions Pleiade, Scrittori d’Italia. In 1961, Wilson wrote his Random House editor, Jason Epstein: “It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form.” Mr. Epstein agreed and set about to make it happen, but by the time of Wilson’s death in 1972 the project was in limbo. Still Mr. Epstein, always as much entrepreneur as editor (he founded The New York Review of Books in 1958, The Reader’s Catalog in 1989), refused to give up. Since money was the problem, he went where the money is—to the Ford Foundation. By 1979, Literary Classics of the United States had funding from Ford and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and had set up shop in an office sublet from the Children’s Television Workshop. In 1982 the first volumes in the renamed Library of America were published: Typee, Omoo, and Mardi by Herman Melville, Tales and Sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Three Novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Poetry and Prose by Walt Whitman.

The Library of America (LOA) approach is a book publisher’s fantasy. (In reality, of course, the conceit is achievable only through subsidy. New books manage to pay for themselves, but keeping all LOA titles in print is possible only with grant support.) Everything about the series is Olympian: the trim size (4⅞’ x 7⅞’) is based on the “golden section”; the typeface is a modern adaptation of the legendary sixteenth-century Granjon; the paper is Ecusta Nyalite—acid-free, of course; bindings are sewn and glued; the binding cloth over the flexible boards is designed for maximum durability. Each volume receives three separate proofreadings; in one, two people work together—as one reads aloud, the other follows along and corrects the text. (LOA offers a free book to any reader who discovers a textual error.) Top scholars oversee each volume and add notes and chronologies, but not introductions; the authors alone speak.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

National Review

■ America’s Canon. It began with Edmund Wilson, with the great critic’s admiration of the European tradition of comprehensive, quality collections of literary classics: Editions Pleiade, Scrittori d’Italia. In 1961, Wilson wrote his Random House editor, Jason Epstein: “It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form.” Mr. Epstein agreed and set about to make it happen, but by the time of Wilson’s death in 1972 the project was in limbo. Still Mr. Epstein, always as much entrepreneur as editor (he founded The New York Review of Books in 1958, The Reader’s Catalog in 1989), refused to give up. Since money was the problem, he went where the money is—to the Ford Foundation. By 1979, Literary Classics of the United States had funding from Ford and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and had set up shop in an office sublet from the Children’s Television Workshop. In 1982 the first volumes in the renamed Library of America were published: Typee, Omoo, and Mardi by Herman Melville, Tales and Sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Three Novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Poetry and Prose by Walt Whitman.

The Library of America (LOA) approach is a book publisher’s fantasy. (In reality, of course, the conceit is achievable only through subsidy. New books manage to pay for themselves, but keeping all LOA titles in print is possible only with grant support.) Everything about the series is Olympian: the trim size (4⅞’ x 7⅞’) is based on the “golden section”; the typeface is a modern adaptation of the legendary sixteenth-century Granjon; the paper is Ecusta Nyalite—acid-free, of course; bindings are sewn and glued; the binding cloth over the flexible boards is designed for maximum durability. Each volume receives three separate proofreadings; in one, two people work together—as one reads aloud, the other follows along and corrects the text. (LOA offers a free book to any reader who discovers a textual error.) Top scholars oversee each volume and add notes and chronologies, but not introductions; the authors alone speak.