An uncredited leader titled “Out of Print” published in the April 14, 1961 issue of the Times Literary Supplement opens with the announcement that Christopher Burney’s Solitary Confinement (1952) was being reissued in a new edition by Macmillan: “It seems possible that the period of hibernation may have done it no harm. At least the book’s depth and range of reference are more evident than before: that richness which is there to be dug into not only by ordinary readers but by philosophers, psychologists, priests who want to see their ideas tested by an intelligent and sensitive individual in an extreme state.”
“But how often are books raised from the dead in this way?” the writer goes on to ask. In the noise of the marketplace, many books have “only a short time in which to sell or die — sometimes as little as three months.” It is much easier, he argues, “to think of works which stupidly petered out and are now only known to a handful of devotees,” and he offers the following examples:
- • The Bridge in the Jungle (1929, first English pub. 1938), by B. Traven
- In 1961, the ever-mysterious B. Traven had largely been forgotten, but he is solidly in the canon now. All of his novels and story collections set in Mexico are available under Rowman & Littlefield’s Ivan R. Dees imprint, and most of his other books are in print as well. Some people consider The Bridge in the Jungle Traven’s best novel, almost a parable about the insensitivity of capitalism to the plight of the people it impacts, summed up by the bridge without railings set up by a mining company that allows a little boy to fall to his death in the alligator-filled river below.
- • Land Without Heroes (1948), by G. F. Green
- Someone might have been inspired by this article, because Land Without Heroes was reissued by Four Square in 1963. Although it’s been out of print ever since, Green’s 1952 novel, In the Making was reissued in 2012 as a Penguin Modern Classic. The TLS greeted that event with an article by Peter Parker, who wrote, “Of those writers who were well known in their day but have since sunk almost without trace, few have lain buried deeper in the thick silt of ‘lost’ twentieth-century authors than G. F. Green.” Of Land, the Spectator’s reviewer compared Green to D. H. Lawrence and wrote, “The stories are all tragic—frustration, squalor, unemployment, disappointment and murder are their themes—and they are told, like Mr. Henry Green’s Living, in a sparse language which here sometimes touches on stringiness. No attempt is ever made to jerk the emotions by a false situation. A writer of Mr. Green’s integrity, whatever his limitations, must deserve our respect and admiration.”
- • The Tribulations of a Baronet (1933), by Sir Timothy Eden
- Dedicated “To all those who are interested rather in character than in names, in failure than success, in beauty than progress,” this portrait of Sir William Eden. “Here was a man who, with every encouragement from nature and from circumstance, should surely have set his mark upon the world. And yet he failed to so do.” This failure, Sir Timothy argues, “should be at least as interesting and as instructure as the successes of more limited and more commonplace personalities.” In a way, Tribulations appears to be a bit like Joe Gould’s Secret, another masterful portrait of a man of great promise and much disappointment. Certainly Sir William seems to have idled at difficult: “It is not easy to understand how a terrible tornado of oaths, screams, gesticulations and flying sticks can be seriously prompted by a barking dog,” the author admits, although he excuses this behavior because Sir William was “too eager for suffering, too susceptible to beauty, too easily unbalanced by opposition and obstruction, by noise and ugliness” — or in the words of a great Ben Vaughn song, “Too Sensitive for This World.” Tribulations is available in electronic format on the Internet Archive (Link).
- • Of Love And Hunger (1947), by Julian Maclaren-Ross
- Depicted in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as X. Trapnel, gregarious bohemian novelist, Maclaren-Ross’ name was known from decades while his books remained out of print. In the last decade, however, he seems to have been safely restored to the canon of 20th century British literature. In an overview of Maclaren-Ross’s work in The Guardian, DJ Taylor wrote that Of Love And Hunger “has a queerly provisional quality, full of staccato scene-setting, telescoped descriptions (‘Rain’d almost stopped. Sun made a white rim on the edge of a cloud’) and nervy dialogue that looks as if it was written more or less on the hoof.”
- • Nightmare (1932), by Lynn Brock
- Lynn Brock was a prolific English writer of mysteries best known for his series featuring the detective, Colonel Gore, some of which will be reissued in The Deductions of Colonel Gore as part of Collins’ Detective Club Crime Classics in 2019. When Nightmare was first published in 1932, the TLS reviewer wrote, “Here is a thriller that ought to have been written by Poe. Every now and again Mr. Brock lives in the nightmare he has created by the trigonometry of detective fiction, and gives you a vivid glimpse of it that startles you into a gasp not only of horror but also of fervent admiration. Full justice to his subtle insight into character and contrasts of character could be done only by revealing the secrets of his plot, which is not permissible…. There is genius in Mr. Brock’s power of charging a moment with noises, colour and feeling until it seems more real than life.”
- • Rudder Grange (1879), by Frank Stockton
- Most Americans who took high school English will recognize Stockon’s name from his story, “The Lady or the Tiger?” Rudder Grange is a dead-pan comedy about a married couple living on a canal boat, and contemporary readers liked it so much that Stockton wrote two sequels, Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories (1891) and Pomona’s Travels (1894). Many of Stockton’s books are in print, but they’re also all in the public domain, so you can find them on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Personally, I prefer Stockton’s desert island comedy, The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, which repeatedly demonstrates that the two middle-aged women of the title, put up as comic figures, are more resilient than the bright young gentleman who shares their fate: “I soon perceived that it would have been difficult to find two more valuable assistants in the bailing of a boat than Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine. They were evidently used to work, and were able to accommodate themselves to the unusual circumstances in which they were placed.”