Dover Publications
Dover Publications is an American publisher with headquarters in Mineola, New York (31 East Second Street). It was founded in 1941 by Hayward Cirker and his wife Blanche. After Hayward Cirker's death in 2000, the publisher went to the Courier Corporation, which was taken over by RR Donnelley in 2015 .
First they sold leftovers from publishers. In 1943 she published her first self-published book.
They have specialized in inexpensive reprints (in the manner of facsimiles ) of older literature in paperback format, and thus mostly in a non-revised form (sometimes a new foreword is added and sometimes the title is changed). Often the copyrights of the books in the USA have expired. The spectrum ranges from literature and children's books, mathematics, natural sciences, technology to music. A significant part of the sales took place independently of the book trade via mail order (which is why they were also referred to as the LL Bean of the book trade). Right from the start, they also attached great importance to high technical booking quality despite the low prices. Most books have a low circulation of less than 7000, they focus less on bestsellers than on serving niches in the book market and they have many longsellers in their catalog, whereby they try to keep books that have been published in the catalog as long as possible (After outraged protests by customers about this in the 1960s when some works were silently deleted from the catalog).
The first paperbacks appeared there in 1951, making the publisher one of the pioneers in the USA (in today's standard trade paperback format). In the 1950s they also published language courses and for a while also gave records. The first children's books appeared in 1960, which turned out to be a lucrative segment.
In the 1990s (from 1990) they published a number of classical literature (Dover Thrift Edition) at very low prices of $ 1 to $ 2.5, including works by William Shakespeare , Charles Dickens , Jane Austen , Stephen Crane , Joseph Conrad , Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe . Because of their value for money, they were also used in many schools and in the 1990s they were also often found in the "grave tables" of German bookshops.
In 1989 they had sales of $ 25 million (with pre-tax revenue of 10 percent). The publisher was free of debt at the time. In 1997 they had estimated sales of $ 28 million and 118 employees. In the 1980s, sales were $ 15 million. In 1983 they published 170 books a year and had 3,000 books on their backlist . At the beginning of 2000 they had 7000 titles in the catalog.
history
Founder Hayward Cirker studied Liberal Arts and Science at the City College of New York during the Great Depression and, since he couldn't get a proper job with his degree, started at the bottom of the mail-order division of Crown Publishers, where he did a mail order Department and rose to become a seller. In 1941 he and his wife founded Dover Publications with a few hundred dollars in savings and they initially sold remnants of academic books via mail order. The company was based in their apartment in Queens. The name of the company came from the house in which they lived at the time. In 1943 they moved to Manhattan on the cheaper lower part of 5th Avenue and published their first book, Tables of Functions with Formulas and Curves , an originally German publication, but whose copyrights, like that of all German books, expired in the USA during World War II. This was followed by an edition of Agricola's De re metallica with photographs of the original that were printed using offset printing. By 1987 the publisher had sold 40,000 copies of it, although the translator, ex-president Herbert Hoover , originally warned her that it could only be a loss. Soon afterwards, Cirker succeeded in obtaining Albert Einstein's approval for a reprint of his Principle of Relativity (Einstein himself thought the work was out of date). This later continued with Dover publishing works by 62 Nobel Prize winners by 1978.
In 1946 they published their first non-scientific book, Clarence Hornung's Handbook of Designs and Devices , and many more books on design and handicrafts (especially American handicrafts such as quilting) followed. They also published large-format art books at low prices (starting at $ 5) by Albrecht Dürer , Gustave Doré , Giambattista Piranesi and Goya, and later by many more. Books with photographs followed in 1955, such as Human and Animal Locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge . From around 1970 the scores of classical composers followed, but also, for example, ragtime by Scott Joplin . In the field of archeology, her reprint of Howard Carter's excavation report of Tutankhamun's tomb alone sold over 100,000 times a year. From 1957 they also published chess literature.
They also anticipated the renaissance of horror and fantastic literature in their reprints , thanks mainly to Everett F. Bleiler , who was hired in 1955 and who had studied anthropology and archeology at Harvard and had a wide range of language skills (including Sanskrit). They were also active early on in reprints of mythological and esoteric literature or classical works that were well received in these circles and published science fiction. From the early 1960s onwards, the publisher also had first-time publications, and the area made up 60 percent of the backlist in the early 1980s. One successful author, for example, was Tom Tierney with cut-out dolls. They were known for not giving authors a share of sales whenever possible, but paying one-time payments, sometimes with fairly low amounts. Another selling principle was that they did not take back any books from the bookstores and that the prices were calculated in such a way that the reprints were significantly cheaper than comparable books from the competition. However, from 1975 they wooed the book trade with free shipping for orders over $ 35 and other discounts.
In 1959 they moved to Varick Street in Lower Manhattan, which also housed a store for sales and printing. In 1983 they moved to Mineola, where the warehouse was until then, and only the editing and book design tasks remained in Manhattan.