Out of Print Quotes

When I was young, my favorite picture book was 'Fletcher and Zenobia,' written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It's long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children's book for the times.

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell.

Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.

It's depressing when you're still around and your albums are out of print.

Well, it wasn't really a decision on my part although you always hope as an author that a book that goes out of print somehow winds up back in print. These days publishers like to put out-of-print books into e-book form, but I really wanted to do an update.

I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

Hinde Esther Kreitman is a forgotten literary foremother, her works largely lost, ignored and out of print.

If you're going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.

The best of Donald Westlake's pseudonymous thrillers about Parker, the toughest burglar who ever lived. . . .Out of print for years and years, Butcher's Moon is the ultimate Parker novel, best read as an installment in the series as a whole but comprehensible and wholly satisfying on its own.

Somebody brought up the idea of reissuing 'Tribute To 1' because it was out of print on vinyl.

Now, past middle age, with so many books written I still care about and only a few still in print, I know the feeling of being overlooked.

I am not interested in releasing best of stuff and I have not given my permission. You release best of packages when you're a has-been and have nothing new to offer.

My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.

But, right now, the situation is that almost all of my writing is out of print.

Ebooks have many advantages - publishers don't have to make guesses about how many books to print, books need never go "out of print", and hard-to-find books can be easily available. So far, the only limitation seems to be finding a way for the writer to be paid.

As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.