Out of Print Books Quotes

I guess I never grew up. I was still reading kids' books in high school and college. I was always interested in writing or illustrating children's books, and I started collecting out-of-print books when I was about 10 years old.

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.

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.

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

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.

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.

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