Digital imprints rescue writers from the hole of history

If you were to look at sales charts, it would be easy to conclude that only two types of ebook are available: popular fiction and interactive adaptations of classics. There are, of course, myriad genres to browse through if you know what you are looking for but limited sources of inspiration if you don’t.

So where do you go to find offbeat or unusual titles in a marketplace seemingly dominated by frivolous trends? I have spent the past few months browsing the catalogue of three new digital imprints dedicated to reviving out-of-print work by (occasionally) well-known and (more frequently) forgotten writers. In most cases no reader reviews or rankings are available, so I have been acting on instinct, using nothing more than the publisher’s summary and my own (often embarrassingly limited) context to choose my next read. It has involved ignoring personal taste and leaping into the unknown. It has yielded many surprises, and a few disappointments, but it has been mostly a refreshing, exciting experience.

Bedford Square Books is the smallest of the publishing houses delivering out-of-print books to digital readers. Established by the literary agent Ed Victor, it has fewer than 20 titles, which are drawn from some of Victor's clients, including Edna O'Brien. It has reissued her 1986 book Tales for the Telling: Irish Folk and Fairy Stories (£3.69), a children's curiosity with several folk tales I had never come across before, including Paddy the Piper and The Magic Apples. It served as a surprisingly prescient introduction to O'Brien's greatest-hits collection, The Love Object: Selected Stories, just published by Faber (hardback, £20; Kindle edition, £9.89) – and reviewed on page 10 of today's Weekend Review.

Another title that piqued my interest was the forthcoming Good Opera Guide, an irreverent introduction to opera by Denis Forman (£7.72). Bedford Square also offers a print-on-demand service for those who find themselves seduced by its titles. The Forman might be one to take advantage of: first editions go for more than £100.

Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury and Pan Macmillan have launched similar out-of-print digital reissues. Bloomsbury's back catalogue, branded under the Bloomsbury Reader umbrella, is broader reaching, particularly in nonfiction.

Janet Todd, a scholar of early women’s writing, was a particular discovery for me. Todd introduced the Restoration spy and playwright Aphra Behn to popular consciousness, and her Secret Life of Aphra Behn (£6.99) is a thorough, readable account of a life dominated by secrecy and literary success that bucks all social and gender expectations. Todd’s Lady Susan Plays the Game (£6.99) is probably the earliest piece of Austen-inspired fiction. As one of the most important 20th-century Austen scholars, Todd takes up with the eponymous heroine as she attempts to avoid a life of doomed widowhood in the English countryside. The style is Austenian, and the character just as unsympathetic as Austen intended, though the risks Todd bestows on Susan in her manipulations are perhaps more than Austen might have imagined. It is less fun than Seth Graham-Smyth’s infamous Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Kindle edition, £4.98), perhaps, but it is certainly more intellectually and emotionally satisfying.

Hidden talent
Pan Macmillan's backlist imprint, Bello, takes the tagline "Hidden Talent Rediscovered". Its digital catalogue is the cheapest, with prices from £1.79, and it also features the most prolific of the out-of-print writers I came across.

But the familiarity of its authors turned my exercise into something else. It provided a shocking lesson in how easily big literary names can find themselves out of favour. I remembered Nina Bawden's work, for example, from my childhood; I reread Carrie's War (Kindle edition, £4.94) and The Peppermint Pig (Kindle edition, £5.49) until the pages fell out. I did not know, however, that more than half of her books were for adults, including her 1970 novel The Birds on the Trees (Kindle edition, £6.49), which made the Lost Man Booker Prize shortlist in 2010. Many of her novels, including Who Calls the Tune (£1.79), a thrilling murder mystery, are now out of print.

I was also surprised to see DJ Taylor on the list. As a student I often looked to Taylor’s criticism for social readings of working-class culture in postwar Britain, but I didn’t know Taylor wrote fiction himself. In English Settlement (£3.57), a study of national identity through finance, football and war, his literary interests perfectly complement his academic ones. At times the novel seems merely to be textual proof of his literary theories, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.

What was most striking across the out-of-print lists from all the publishers I surveyed was the domination of women’s voices. There were books by women I had never heard of but who were incredibly prolific. (Josephine Bell wrote 43 mystery novels in 45 years and was the most popular crime writer of her generation.) Then there were books by those I knew of but whose work has disappeared from the shelves (the poet Vita Sackville-West, for example, who usually gets mentioned these days only for her love affair with Virginia Woolf).

In a publishing culture still dominated by men, where books by women still struggle for review and recognition, it was a scary vision of the future, and a sobering lesson in the ephemerality of even the printed book.

Sara Keating is an arts journalist