Shelf life

D. G. Myers makes the reasonable suggestion that bloggers "would perform a more essential service to readers if they rescued books that do not deserve to be forgotten."  On that note, he reminds us that according to Cyril Connolly, "a book had achieved immortality if it was still being read ten years later."  Connolly, however, perhaps undershot the mark.  As a Victorianist, I can't help being noticing an interesting publishing phenomenon: novels stay in print for about three generations, then vanish.  That is, Victorian fiction remains available in cheap popular editions--by which I don't mean Broadview reprints--for eighty, ninety, or even one hundred years, then...disappears, never to be seen or heard from again.  (Figuratively speaking.  And until somebody like me comes along.) For example, just looking at the old Everyman's Classics in my library, I see W. H. Ainsworth, R. D. Blackmore (Springhaven, not Lorna Doone), Dinah Mulock Craik, John G. Edgar, Mrs. Gatty, G. P. R. James, Anne Manning, Frederick Marryat, James Morier, Mayne Reid, Michael Scott, and Mrs. Henry Wood.  Some of these names are recognizable to those acquainted with nineteenth century fiction, and a couple of them may even be read on occasion (Marryat, for example, still has a following), but virtually none of their work remains easily available to non-academic readers. And yet, at the time, all of these novelists clearly seemed to have staying power; the editor of one of Manning's novels even refers to it as a "minor classic."  Connolly's decade may be a useful shakedown period, but it appears that it takes about a century for the real Day of Judgment to arrive...