Placing ‘moderns’ in a ‘classic’ series: the case of J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library

Abstract

This study offers a reappraisal of Everyman’s Library, the mass-market series of world 'classics' launched by the British publisher J. M. Dent & Sons in 1906. The collection’s reliance on the 1842 and 1911 Copyright Acts has fostered a misconception within literary studies: namely, that reprint series were ‘impervious to novelty’. Conversely, I argue that ‘liveliness’ and ‘timeliness’—being in line with current trends and (re)printed at the right moment—became fundamental ‘classic’ attributes during the interwar years. Everyman advanced a rhetoric of the ‘new’ besides a rhetoric of the ‘old’, based on the idea that what consecrated both terms was only the passage of time, a gaze from the future. When Dent’s series started featuring more contemporaneous authors, the American Modern Library (1917), formally considered its modern(ist) alter ego, began including more ‘classic’ literature instead. Both series exploited the tension between ancients and moderns as profitable: Confucius and Horace were advertised as ‘the classics which are still modern: the modern works which have become classics’. Exploring the blurry boundaries between ‘classic’ and ‘modern’ as marketing categories, this paper draws on the J. M. Dent & Sons Records, Chapel Hill to bridge the gap between modernism and mass production.