The recent successes of Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters and Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology are examples of the way the Library of America is "expanding what the notion of great American literature is," said Max Rudin, publisher of the 22-year-old nonprofit publishing house, whose mission is "to preserve America's most significant writing in enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts."
Grant enjoyed a spike in sales in June when the memoir was cited in numerous stories about Bill Clinton's My Life as the best presidential autobiography; the LoA edition now has 93,000 copies in print. Americans in Paris was released this spring, reached as high as 47 on Amazon's rankings, and now has 27,700 copies in print. The $40 hardcover is the latest in a special series of LoA anthologies that collect great writing about places (New York, Los Angeles) and themes (baseball, the sea).
Although LoA was founded in 1982 by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the house has been self-supporting for about 20 years, Rudin said, noting that about 90% of its funds come from book sales and 10% from gifts, grants and other sources. LoA's largest marketing channel is its subscription program, which currently has approximately 20,000 subscribers. Sales through bookstores have increased over the years with the expansion of superstores and sales through online bookstores have grown steadily, although Rudin said some of the sales at the e-tailers may have been at the expense of subscriptions. Like its for-profit counterparts, particularly ones that rely heavily on backlist, "it's a constant challenge to bring the P&L in line," Rudin said.
The need to sustain its operations without benefit of grant money has driven LoA into new areas. Its most ambitious endeavor was the 2003 launch of the American Poets Project, which is now in its third season and has 10 volumes in print. Published as $20 trade paperbacks, the series to date has featured such works as Walt Whitman: Selected Poems and Edgar Allan Poe: Poemsand Poetics. Upcoming volumes will include William Carlos Williams and the poets of the Civil War. Also scheduled for the fall is another first for LoA, a fully illustrated book on 21 houses of American writers, called American Writers at Home.
LoA's most recent release is the three-volume Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, and Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album, an illustrated biography. The publication of the Singer titles is part of a year-long celebration marking the centennial of the author's birth that is being directed by Rudin. In addition to the books, the Singer celebration, supported by a grant from the NEH, includes readings, panels, exhibitions and workshops as well as the creation of a Web site. LoA's involvement with the Singer project "is in keeping with our mandate to be not just a nonprofit publishing house but a nonprofit cultural institution," Rudin explained.
Notwithstanding its expansion into other activities, the core of LoA's publishing program continues to be the publication of its signature black-jacketed hardcovers featuring a collection of works from American writers. LoA has just published its 150th volume in the series, which now has more than six million copies in print. New this year are two-volume editions of the writings of Theodore Roosevelt (The Rough Riders: An Autobiography and Letters and Speeches), as well as Kaufman & Co., which focuses on Broadway comedies by George S. Kaufman and his collaborators. "Our mission continues to be to foster an appreciation of great American writing, with books that will stay in print forever," Rudin said.
