In the leadup to 2029, its 175th year in publishing, Beacon Press is releasing a Beacon Classics collection drawing from its backlist. The Boston-based indie will release a dozen cloth-bound backlist titles per year in the countdown to the anniversary, for a total of 60 books in all, designed in a retro palette with matching blue spines by Beacon creative director Carol Chu. The collection debuted February 4 with four books honoring Black History Month.
James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, from 1955, is among the first releases. Beacon editor Sol Stein, “who had known Baldwin since high school, persuaded Baldwin to compile these essays into a book,” Beacon Press director Gayatri Patnaik told PW. “I can’t think of a writer who more effectively reflects the promise or peril of this country as acutely or unflinchingly as Baldwin.”
Additional February titles are Robin D.G. Kelley’s 1998 Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, Paul Robeson’s 1958 Here I Stand (Beacon published the 1998 edition); and Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III’s Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African American Students, originally published in 2004.
Series editor and Beacon assistant editor Alison Rodriguez told PW that the planning process began about a year ago. “Everybody had in mind that the anniversary was coming up” and decided to honor the milestone by celebrating the backlist, Rodriguez said. “James Baldwin and Viktor Frankl had to be there.” The Beacon Classics edition of Frankl’s 1946 account of his survival in World War II concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, comes out in September.
Beacon Classics “encapsulate how much publishing history has been made at Beacon, and show how diverse, progressive, and social justice-driven we’ve been,” Rodriguez said. Beacon was founded in 1854, and its publications include a five-volume, complete edition of The Pentagon Papers from 1971. Rodriguez said she and her colleagues are “rediscovering books that aren’t as top of mind,” and “anybody on staff is welcome to suggest a title for the series.”
Readers outside Beacon can recommend titles too. “We can’t wait to connect with various members of the publishing community—particularly booksellers and librarians—to nominate Beacon books they loved for our Classics series,” Patnaik said.
In keeping with the 12 books per year schedule, 2025 releases will take place only through October, and Beacon will release one book per month from 2026–2029. Among the dozen titles in the series slated for release later in 2025 are Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Aug.), which explores personal and public memory through the story of a Boston shoemaker, and Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s Thousand Pieces of Gold (May), a biographical novel based on the life of Lalu Nathoy, who was trafficked from China to America in the 1870s.
Patnaik also mentioned Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness (Oct.), which was called The Miracle of Being Awake until a Beacon editor convinced the Zen teacher “that the word ‘mindfulness’ would work better in the title—and the rest is history.” Other titles slated for rerelease this year under the Beacon Classics line include Miguel León-Portilla’s edited volume of Nahuatl translations, The Broken Spears (June); Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (Mar.); Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation (July); and Marcus Rediker’s pirate history Villains of All Nations (Apr.).
Patnaik emphasized Beacon’s longstanding mission “to support democracy, promote justice and anti-racism, and champion voices and perspectives from those holding historically marginalized identities,” adding: “Our backlist has a role to play in meeting the current moment.”
