This Is A Permanent Book

I discovered the Dover Bookstore in Mineola, New York, as a bored suburban teenager in the 1980s. “The Little Bookshop,” a room the size of my then-bedroom, was attached to a noisy warehouse and printshop next to the railroad tracks. Books containing the oddities of philosophic and mathematical knowledge, children’s literature, design, and history filled shelves stretching up to the ceiling. As a budding zine publisher and visual artist, I purchased books of copyright-free clip art, vintage black and white photographs reproduced on postcards, and craft instruction books from the $1 “damaged” bargain bin.

While my proximity to the Dover Bookstore may have given me unique access to its huge and varied catalog, the publisher is well-loved by people of wide-ranging interests for its affordability, accessibility, and design. Started by Heyward and Blanche Cirker in their apartment in post-war Queens, Dover Publications produced 10,000 book titles over the course of 80 years. They built a profitable company through a number of unique and innovative publishing practices, most notably filling their catalog with republished versions of books that had fallen out of copyright.

Josh MacPhee, a Brooklyn designer and archivist, likes the striking graphic design of early Dover covers, but also the philosophy he sees behind the books themselves: the “nearly unique belief that bedrock math, science, logic, anthropology, and history texts should not only be available to a broad, general audience, but that if made affordable, this audience would buy them.” Dover, he argues, “is arguably as political a publishing project as the most anarchist of anarchist book outfits.”¹

For his part, Hayward Cirker told Time Magazine in 1978: “I’m no Renaissance man…. I’m just curious, is all.” Whether he was a publishing anarchist, Renaissance man, or “just curious,” Cirker was also a businessman. For sixty years, Dover Publications succeeded with a unique business model and a founder who was willing to defend that model against changes to copyright law that he believed threatened to undermine it.²

From the author’s collection of Dover books.

In 1941 Hayward and Blanche Cirker began their small business in their Forest Hills apartment, the Dover, for which the company is named. Hayward worked in the publishing industry briefly before deciding he wanted to be his own boss, selling remaindered textbooks. After discovering that the copyright to a particular German textbook had been voided by the federal government because of the war, Hayward published Tables of Functions with Formulas under the Dover imprint, photographing the pages and using offset printing to avoid paying a typesetter. This out-of-print reference work for physicists, mathematicians, and engineers became the first Dover Book.³

The venture was a success and a business model he would follow going forward: looking for materials whose copyright had expired and publishing them under the Dover imprint. The Cirkers and Dover’s editors combed the entire history of print for works that could be published under this model. Dover’s editors never revealed the secrets of exactly where or how they found the originals to reproduce, though editor Stanley Appelbaum recounts borrowing a “priceless” manuscript from a private library, personally escorting it to the photographer, and returning it the same day.⁴

To fill their catalog, editors at Dover seized on books of photography, design, herbals and cookery, musical scores, artistic motifs, crafts, birding, and many works of literature.⁵Among the wide variety of children’s titles to appear on their list over the years were collections of stories by Andrew Lang, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault—the original source material for the 20th century’s white-washed fairy tales.⁶

One of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Charles Perrault’s Les Contes de Perrault. Dover combined material from two early-twentieth century versions of Perrault and published Perrault’s Fairy Tales in 1969.

Dover also helped to give the paperback a new meaning by enlarging the size, using fine paper, stitching the binding, laminating the cover with cellophane, and declaring on the back cover: “This is a permanent book.” Previously disposable and tawdry, associated with pulp fiction, it became something new—the trade paperback.

From the back of a Dover reprint of the score of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Photo credit Erin Bartram.

Even as Dover strove to frame the trade paperback as a “permanent book” for its customers, it also created a wide variety of books meant to be marked up, cut out, and torn to pieces. Dover became notable for reviving paper dolls as a craft and children’s activity in 1975 when they published fashion illustrator Tom Tierney’s paper dolls of the Hollywood stars of the 1930’s.⁷ Cirker wisely stayed true to the size and shape he had distribution for: the book, so it required activity like cutting and gluing an envelope, or cutting out doll clothes, and then in his sneaky way was selling greeting cards and toys on the shelves of bookstores where he already had a distribution network.⁸ Most famously, Dover sold paper dolls of the presidents and their wives, and some sets are still available for purchase today.

Two clothing options from Richard M. Nixon and His Family Paper Dolls by Tom Tierney. Photo by author.

When working with a living author producing original work, Dover paid every author a flat fee, instead of royalties on sales. About his experience with Dover, film historian Leonard Maltin said: “I have never been paid so promptly or so cheerfully in my life!” Tom Tierney noted that he sold all of his paper doll books for a flat fee, but remarked: “. . . I don’t resent it because they took a big risk that the things would sell at all.” ⁹

Many of the titles Dover published—both new and old—were risky for the same reason they were potentially-profitable: they were often on niche topics, but that meant they were highly-desirable to people interested in those niche topics. For artists, crafters, and scholars, the Dover catalog was the only place that they could purchase vital texts at an accessible price point. To reach these niche markets, some in far-off corners of the rural United States and beyond, Dover sold books by mail order using an array of targeted catalogs. The inside covers of the books themselves contained lists of other books in a similar genre, and the final pages following the index were also a fully-annotated catalog, marketing to the present customer, the one with book in hand. In combination with traditional bookstore sales, these methods of direct marketing were successful.

The catalog from the back of American Samplers, by Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe (1973). Photo credit Erin Bartram.

But the Cirkers’ success cannot simply be put down to their unique list—whether inspired by curiosity, whimsy, or an anarchic commitment to spreading knowledge—or to their creative production and marketing strategies. Dover was profitable because it reprinted out-of-copyright texts, and Hayward Cirker was vocal and adamant about preserving the antiquated copyright laws that allowed his business to thrive.

When the Cirkers established Dover, the 1909 Revision of the US Copyright Act was still in effect: a copyright lasted 28 years, at which point it could be renewed once for another 28 years.¹⁰ But at the 1886 Berne Convention, the rest of the world had agreed to period of copyright following publication that could often extend far longer than 56 years: “As to the duration of protection, the general rule is that protection must be granted until the expiration of the 50th year after the author’s death.”¹¹

As average lifespan increased, Congress looked to align US copyright law with modern realities and the practices of the rest of the world. In the 1960s, Hayward Cirker vocally, unapologetically, and unpopularly spoke out against these proposed changes, writing letters to prominent journals like Science and testifying at length before a subcommittee of Congress at length. In his testimony, and elsewhere, he argued  that it was more important to let the public have these books at lower cost than to ensure a royalty was paid. By extending the default copyright length, he believed, authors and publishing industry at large would be conspiring to keep these materials away from the public, or at the very least, forcing them to spend more for the same product.¹²

One of Dover’s many reprints of historical texts, Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages had been published by Routledge in 1930 under a dated and offensive title. Photo by the author.

US copyright law was eventually brought into alignment with Berne Convention standards in 1976. As Hayward Cirker had known when he testified, this presented problems for Dover’s business model, something former Dover employee Joseph Esposito later called “The Shrinking Orphan Works Problem.”¹³ However, Dover continued to grow and be profitable. This was possible, somewhat ironically, because the company maintained such a deep back catalog of books and held copyright to their editions of those books. In the 1980’s, they employed up to 200 employees at a time, with editorial offices on Varick St. in Manhattan and a warehouse and catalog printing operation in suburban Mineola.¹⁴

A list of books inside the front cover of American Samplers, showing a book of needlework designs edited by Blanche Cirker. Photo credit Erin Bartram.

Dover was still a profitable company when Hayward Cirker died in 2000. In an obituary for his friend and colleague of over thirty years, long-time Dover editor Clarence Strowbridge drew attention to the powerful role Cirker had played in making Dover what it was and keeping it that way: “Every facet of the process by which a book is created and sold was equally fascinating to Mr. Cirker, and he was always actively involved in every part of the operation from editorial selection to production decisions, to sales, marketing, and distribution.”¹⁵

After Cirker’s death, however, the company was quickly bought by the Courier Corporation. Courier was in turn bought by RR Donnelly in 2015, and when RR Donnelly split into three entities the next year, Dover fell within the umbrella of LSC Communications.

On November 12, 2019, Newsday published a business short announcing that half of Dover’s last 50 employees would be laid off at the Mineola headquarters.¹⁶

The speed at which these acquisitions and splits took place, compared to the company’s previous stability, is striking, as are the goals of the current owners. LSC Communications is a marketing service, and it has made clear it intends to make the current fad of adult coloring books the main focus of its Dover enterprise.¹⁷ For many reasons, this is a publishing landscape quite unlike the one that allowed Hayward and Blanche Cirker to build such a unique publishing company in the postwar period.

In the midst of all of these shake-ups, the remaining employees at Dover honored the company’s 75th anniversary with a great deal of care and love in 2016. There was a readers’ contest, a timeline of publication milestones, and a 5-minute YouTube video. As with so much that is published, it is hard to know if any of these things will be readable tomorrow, but the legacy of the Cirkers and their 10,000 title catalog remains on millions of bookshelves around the world.

1. Josh MacPhee, “257: Dover Science and Math: Judging Books by Their Covers,” Justseeds, May 21, 2018.
2. “Books: The White Clips of Dover,” Time, March 27, 1978.
3. Jay P. Pederson, “Dover Publications Inc.,” Funding Universe.
4. Daniel Cohen, “How to succeed in publishing with nary a best-seller,” Smithsonian, July 1987.
5. Cohen, “How to succeed.”
6. Tom Reiss, “The Last Paperback Revolutionary,” New York Times, June 18, 2000.
7. “Interview with Tom Tierney.”
8. Joseph Esposito, “The Multifarious Book,” The Scholarly Kitchen, July 31, 2017.
9. Cohen, “How to succeed.” The book Maltin was likely talking about was his original work, The Art of the Cinematographer: a Survey and Interviews with Five Masters (Dover Publications, 1978).
10. “Copyright Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States,” Association of Research Libraries.
11. Summary of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), World Intellectual Property Organization, United Nations.
12. United States Congress, House Committee on the Judiciary, “Copyright Law Revision: Hearings Before …, Volume 2; Volume 4, Part 2.” You can also read Cirker’s exchange with Franklin Folsom in Science.
13. Joseph Esposito, “The Shrinking Orphan Works Problem,” The Scholarly Kitchen, Oct. 13, 2011.
14. Pederson, “Dover Publications Inc.“
15. Clarence Strowbridge, Clarence, “Heyward Cirker Obituary,” American Mathematical Society, 2000.
16. Victor Ocasio, “Mineola Publisher to Lay off 23 of Its 59 Workers,” Newsday, Nov. 12, 2019.
17. Ocasio, “Mineola Publisher.”