Karl Whitney: Opening a world to books that beg to be unearthed

Irish Examiner

09-05-2025

In Colm Tóibín's introduction to a beautiful new edition of Henry James' Washington Square (published in April by Manderley Press), he sketches the lost New York of the author's childhood over a few paragraphs, outlines the relationship between that world and the book you're about to read over a few paragraphs — and then it's over. It's a sharp introduction that doesn't outstay its welcome.
I asked Rebeka Russell of Manderley Press, who commissioned Tóibín, what she looks for in an introduction.
It should bring 'something fresh and alluring to the table — in effect it needs to appeal to new readers and satisfy those who already have a good understanding of the novel'.
'Every book on the Manderley Press list is deeply influenced by a building, place, city or landmark,' Russell tells me, and the introductions she commissions often seek to gauge 'the effect of location on the author'.
Tóibín's introduction is tightly focused, concentrates on place, in line with Manderley's ethos, and gives the reader just enough to pique their interest.
I've seen relatively short books dwarfed by introductory materials and explanatory footnotes.
Sometimes it's necessary: The book might be 2,000 years old and needs significant context and explanation if it's to be understood by a contemporary reader.
At other times it's not: The notes tend towards over-explanation, and it can be difficult for the annotator to know where to stop.
There's a balance to be struck. Does a classic need an introduction?
Often it does, simply to impart some biographical information and set the scene for an uninitiated reader who might be coming to the author's work for the first time.
Does it need notes? Not always. And, if it does, maybe five to 10 pages of notes might suffice.
Another aspect to consider is that lots of classics are out of copyright, and therefore freely available for anyone to print without paying royalties.
What makes your edition of a book distinctive in a potentially crowded marketplace is the quality of the materials you add:
The introduction, footnotes, and the cover (you'd be surprised by how many people — even, or perhaps especially, in the publishing industry — judge a book by its cover).
For a couple of years, I worked as an editor at Penguin Classics. A significant part of my job was commissioning introductions.
Over time, older introductions, perhaps written in the 1960s or '70s, had remained in print but were now due for a second look.
Other introductions had been removed and never replaced.
My job was to identify the right person to act as an introducer, tracking them down by reading the latest research on a particular author, watching videos of academic conferences, or listening to podcasts about a book or an author.
This gave me an idea of the current research on, say, F Scott Fitzgerald or Franz Kafka, and a list of names of potential introducers.
The process prompted me to think about the way we discover books — and how that discovery is shaped by others.
Sometimes it's as direct and obvious as an introduction that orients us in a way of reading the book it precedes. At other times, an enthusiastic review will send us to the bookshop.
Occasionally a bad review that we believe to be unfair will have us buying a book in solidarity with the author.
Then there are the moments when, browsing in a bookshop, we stumble across a book we like the sound of.
We may never have heard of it before and take a chance. Sometimes these are the books that we end up loving the most.
The basement of Hodges Figgis on Dawson St in Dublin has long been a source of bargain books — not second hand but remaindered:
The piles of books that remain in stock when bookshops have sold all they think they can of a title and publishers don't want to keep them in the warehouse anymore.
Some get sold cheaply, others get pulped (as an author it's difficult not to take this aspect of the trade personally).
Certain bookshops sell a significant amount of remaindered books; others don't get involved in that side of things, preferring to concentrate on new books and top-selling backlist (older books kept in print).
For years, I haunted the basement of Hodges Figgis and the many secondhand bookshops that, at that time, dotted Dublin's city centre.
This was before the online trade in secondhand books really kicked in and rising rents made it less sensible to have a business full of mouldering paper waiting for book pervs to wander in, searching for oddball masterpieces.
Fortuitous encounter with a book unknown to you
But there's still a lot to be said for a fortuitous encounter with a book that was hitherto unknown to you. I can think of plenty of examples.
I'm a fan of the films of the Marx Brothers, and for a while, I kept an eye out for books by a humorist called SJ Perelman, who co-wrote a couple of Marx Brothers films (including one of the best, Horse Feathers), and who had been a writer for The New Yorker.
While browsing the shelves, I noticed two other names where I expected Perelman to reside: Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a Spanish novelist who I never investigated further (although I understand that his books involve a lot of fencing), and a French writer called Georges Perec, whose playful and brilliant work became deeply familiar to me.
I went on to write about Perec's work, visiting his archives in Paris. His writing, especially his work about the French capital, came to influence my own work.
Somewhere in my files, I have a letter from his niece, granting me permission to view his archives. All because he happened to be in the place where I expected Perelman to be.
Another discovery took place in the basement of Hodges Figgis: A non-fiction book called The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan.
The subject grabbed me immediately: An exploration of the strange interzone of wetlands, warehouses, and industrial yards that sit on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, within view of Manhattan but a world away.
The playfulness of Sullivan's approach made a deep impression on me, first as a reader but, eventually, as a writer too.
Serious but also fun, it made me want to write my own books, to read more of what he had written, and to investigate the authors who had influenced him — which led me to read John McPhee's The Pine Barrens and Ian Frazier's Great Plains.
Both Perec and Sullivan were important influences, and both were encountered by chance.
I can't say that I immediately changed the way I wrote or what I was writing about, but eventually both shaped the extent of my ambition — of what I thought was possible.
When I read about people 'discovering' and republishing 'lost classics', I often think: Well, they were in print once.
Someone believed in them, shepherded the work to publication, and it succeeded or failed based on the whims of the market.
I wasn't the first person to stumble across Georges Perec. Translators played a big part in putting those books on the shelves.
The academic David Bellos and others such as the journalist John Sturrock translated his work from the original French in the 1980s and '90s.
An editor at Granta bought The Meadowlands from its American publisher and published it into the British and Irish market.
Books sit on the shelves until we are ready for them. But we're not discovering them, not really: They've been put there by others in the hope of introducing them into our lives.