Dover Publications

• 1. Introduction

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  Dover Publications takes its name from an apartment building. The building was called The Dover, and it stood in Forest Hills South, Queens, in New York. Hayward and Blanche Cirker lived there, and in 1941 they founded the publishing house that carried its name. Today the American company is known for an unusual promise. It finds books that their original publishers have let go out of print, and it puts them back on the shelf at a much lower price. Some of those books are scarce. Others are historically significant. Many have simply drifted into the public domain. How did a mail-order business selling leftover stock become a house with an enormous catalog? What did it do to the humble paperback? And what happened to it after its founders were gone?

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• 2. A Lucky Copyright Break

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  The Cirkers began with remaindered books sold by mail, not with a list of their own. Their first real publication came because of a wartime quirk. The United States voided German copyright as a result of World War II, which left certain German works free to reprint. The Cirkers chose Jahnke and Emde's Tables of Functions with Formulas and Curves. It is a dense mathematical reference, hardly a natural bestseller. Yet it sold unexpectedly well. That surprise set the pattern for the firm: publish esoteric works, and keep the price low. Another early success came from Albert Einstein. His book The Principle of Relativity became one of Dover's best sellers, even though Einstein himself was reluctant to see it republished. He worried that the material was outdated. Readers disagreed, and the book stayed in demand.

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• 3. What Dover Reprints

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  Classic works of literature sit at the center of the Dover list. So do classical sheet music and public-domain images from the 18th and 19th centuries. The company also carries a large collection of mathematical, scientific and engineering texts. Some books are aimed at a narrow audience, such as woodworkers. In 2015, Dover added graphic novel reprints to its offerings. Drew Ford oversaw that effort as acquisitions editor. He had earlier worked as a comics writer and editor. Most Dover books are photo facsimiles of the originals. They keep the original pagination and typeset, sometimes with a new introduction added. The paper-bound editions usually get fresh, more colorful cover art. Some titles are changed to suit modern speech and categories. Woodward's National Architect, for example, now appears as A Victorian Housebuilder's Guide.

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• 4. Sewn Pages and Cheap Classics

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  In 1951, Dover issued some of the earliest standard-sized paperbacks. That format later became known as a trade paperback. By the 1960s, the vast majority of Dover's titles were paper-bound, in a range of sizes. The binding mattered as much as the size. Most paperbacks were held together with glue, and their pages could drop out. Dover paperbacks had sewn pages instead. A second innovation arrived in the 1990s with the Dover Thrift Editions. This line reprints public-domain literature, and its books are generally priced at US$5 or less. Dover also keeps several lines of foreign language books.

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• 5. Records and Language Courses

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  Dover once ventured beyond print and into sound. Beginning in the 1950s, it issued a series of Listen & Learn language courses. Teachers from Columbia University prepared most of them. The company also published a catalog of LP phonograph records. Some were reissues of earlier monaural releases from other labels, such as selected Schubert solo and chamber works with the pianist Friedrich Wührer. Others were original. One extensive series documented the pianist Beveridge Webster, in music from Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata to the second piano sonata by Roger Sessions. Thrift shaped the records too. Dover recorded at lower levels, which produced narrower grooves and let each LP hold more minutes than usual. The cost was extra noise and a greater risk of scratches. The venture never matched the success of book reprinting, and the company eventually abandoned it.

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• 6. Passing Through Corporate Hands

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  Hayward Cirker died in 2000 at the age of 82. In that same year, Courier Corporation acquired Dover Publications. Courier was itself bought by RR Donnelley in 2015. When RR Donnelley split into three companies in 2016, Dover became part of LSC Communications. Then, in 2020, LSC Communications and 21 affiliated debtors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. In December of that year, the private equity holding company Atlas Holdings bought Dover. Blanche Cirker, the co-founder who had named the company after their apartment building, died in 2022.

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