Reprints and Rarities
A very bossy ode to physical media
Long, long ago, in the true Before Times of 2019, was the last time Dames Karen and Sophie got to hang out in person. It was a lovely, leisurely afternoon in a used bookstore. We were quite literally ensconced in a space devoted to out-of-print books finding new and loving homes on the shelves of readers who were going to find them via either serendipity or dogged, perhaps years-long pursuit.
We thought this would be a fun topic for the newsletter, and Dame Sophie was filled with optimism (which turned out to be hubris, whoops!) that we could cover it in under 1000 words, but that’s…not what happened. Are we surprised? No. This little back-and-forth as we were jotting down notes about what to include captures the situation nicely:
Dame Karen: this doesn't seem like a particularly "light lift" as you asked for yesterday hahaha
Dame Sophie: haaaaa a classic Sophie move. "i have a nice little idea"
*hours pass*
"ok, well now it's a sprawling 7-volume treatise but I think we can do this"
Dame Karen: haaaaaaaa classic and wonderful
Dame Sophie: just being a maximalist for funsies
Let’s dive in, shall we? Books, movies, music: we have thoughts and some helpful links to guide our fellow OOP fans (not to be confused with OPP, an entirely other thing that we also love) as you seek out contemporar-ish popular entertainments that are somehow also in short supply.
Books Books Books!!
Dame Karen is a connoisseur with a keen eye for re-prints of under-appreciated books by, for, and about women. Fortunately, there are a bunch of companies and imprints paying attention and doing a bunch of work in this area!
Always look for the distinctive forest green Virago spines at used book stores; their website uses the exact shade. Virago Press was started in London, England in 1972 as an offshoot of the feminist Spare Rib Magazine. They published their first original title in 1975 and launched Virago Modern Classics in 1978, “dedicated to the rediscovery and celebration of women writers, challenging the narrow definition of Classic.” They published new editions of old books featuring introductions written by modern writers and continue to do so. They introduced me to Sylvia Townsend Warner, Molly Keane, Barbara Comyns, Rosamund Lehmann, and Ann Petry, among many, many others.
Another British project is Persephone Books, which “reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly mid-twentieth century. All of our 143 books are intelligent, thought-provoking and beautifully written and are chosen to appeal to busy people wanting titles that are neither too literary nor too commercial.” The books are beautifully designed with end papers and a matching bookmark patterned after a vintage fabric and also feature prefaces from modern authors. Persephone also has a wonderful magazine/catalog, the Persephone Biannually. I love the way in which they classify the books into assorted categories, including shopping, sex, and cookery. The shipping to the U.S. is expensive; one option is finding used copies via AbeBooks. AbeBooks is a good source for out of print books in general; I recently used them to find long out of print books by Way Bandy, the 1970s makeup artist to the stars who paved the way for Kevyn Aucoin and, well, every modern makeup artist--don’t take my word for it, Wayne Goss will tell you.
Spurl Editions published a new edition of actress Barbara Payton’s absolutely wild and tragic 1963 autobiography I Am Not Ashamed! and therefore has my heart forever. I haven’t yet checked out any of their other offerings but it looks like a treasure trove of dark, weird, compelling stuff, including Witches’ Sabbath by French writer/mal vivant Maurice Sachs who called his autobiography “a statement of account, a moral memo. Or should I say immoral?” and The Big Love by Mrs. Florence Aadland, an account of the relationship between an extremely past his prime Errol Flynn and young dancer Beverly Aadland in the 1950s as told by…Beverly’s mother?! Gross! Sign me up, please!
Dame Sophie has a couple more recommendations that should be useful for readers of all ages, though they skew a little more towards children’s literature. First up, the late, lamented Lizzie Skurnick Books, which was devoted to bringing back into print lost classics of children’s & YA titles. The imprint’s special focus was on books by Black, Jewish, and under-appreciated female authors. You may well be a fan of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family, but did you know she wrote four sequels, and a stand-alone book, to boot? Another favorite is Harriet The Spy author Louise Fitzhugh’s much lesser-known and wonderful Nobody’s Family is Going to Change, about Emma and Willie, two Black kids from New York in the 1970s whose dreams for their futures diverge pretty wildly from their dad’s expectations. Very sadly (and with a soupçon of bitter irony for readers) Lizzie Skurnick Books ceased production a few years ago, but the website is still up, and both new and used copies of many of their titles are available in various online book emporia.
Another favorite house that does incredible work reviving previously lost classics – especially works in translation and gems of the 19th century languishing in obscurity – is New York Review Books (aka NYRB). We can’t lie, this website is dangerous. NYRB does run a great sale in the summertime, so keep an eye out for it so you can splash out in a more budget-conscious way. Dame Sophie has long been devoted to NYRB Children’s, especially Esther Averill’s droll Jenny and the Cat Club series (read-aloud bangers) and D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths (featuring a preface by Michael Chabon!). The Elephant Who Liked To Smash Small Cars is very enticing, and sounds like it is, as the kids say, a whole mood. [Dame Karen has gifted this book to several children of varying ages and interests--all were fans! – Ed.]
Music!
Fellas, get on our level and listen to Tusk in its entirety already
Raise your hand if, in the age of Spotify and Apple Music and every other streaming service, not to mention the vinyl revival, you still enjoy and acquire music on…CD. We are Young Olds, and we still love to rock a CD in our car and at home. Dame Karen’s boyfriend buys them all the time because they’re such a steal. We both are happy to see vinyl making an amazing comeback, but should people be paying $25 for a copy of Rumours? We vote no. Dame Sophie has come to grips with the fact that many of her own vinyl purchases are for *~aesthetics~*, and that’s fine, but the reality is that for everyday listening purposes, she’s streaming via her phone or playing a CD in the car. And because we’re both format-agnostic, we love to see a thriving multi-format economy!
A very incomplete list of music labels bringing great albums back into print:
Light in the Attic Records - This label does extremely thorough and impressive re-release extravaganzas. A deluxe remastered re-release of folk pioneer Karen Dalton’s In My Own Time album for its 50th anniversary! The first LP release of Digable Planets’s beloved 1993 classic Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)! [Dame Karen: Sold out! Waaaaah! Dame Sophie: I wonder if I still have my copy on cassette?] A years-long, sprawling investigation into Jim Sullivan, a singer-songwriter who made one album, U.F.O., on a tiny private label and then drove into the desert and disappeared! [Also sold out, which highlights how this all works, right?]
Numero Group - Perhaps best known for their Eccentric Soul comps documenting the output of small regional soul labels from across the United States (Purple Snow: Forecasting The Minneapolis Sound, anyone?), they are a treasure trove all the way down. Anyone who puts out Whispers: Lounge Originals, “14 lounge originals from across the entire easy listening spectrum. A spent matchbook’s worth of crooners, bossa nobodies, seafood jazzers, and Donca-Matic enthusiasts all in search of their ticket out of a red leather booth hell” with old-timey matchbook packaging has my attention.
Vinyl Me Please – A little bit of a cheat, but worth including! VMP don’t bring OOP titles back into print, but they do strike exclusive deals with artists to create fancypants packages with nice-to-have (and yes, *~aesthetic~* bells and whistles like pretty colors of vinyl, liner notes booklets and so on).
Dusty Groove: their storefront in Chicago is a treasure trove of new and used music, and through their eponymous label, they work with larger music labels to license reprints of great music that would otherwise be lost. Their staff are knowledgeable and kind and dogged; if you find yourself in the Windy City, make a pilgrimage.
Nostalgia!
Dame Sophie’s Thoughts On Movies (and TV):
Movies (and TV) go out of print all the time! It’s a huge issue for culture preservation and transmission, driven in part by how quickly home video formats are prone to change (though of course there hasn’t been that much change since the debut of the DVD).
Yes, we can buy used DVDs for our home libraries, but there’s a limited supply, particularly when it comes to smaller budget, artsy, non-blockbuster, foreign movies, which never had huge DVD runs in the first place. Libraries and archives can’t rely on the serendipity of eBay or yard sales to build and maintain close-to-comprehensive collections.
There’s also a popular line of thinking that everything is streaming, but A) no, it is not; B) films and TV shows are licensed to streaming platforms and then removed all the time; C) streaming is not permanent, offers no privacy, is an ongoing cost rather than a one-time cost; D) streaming platforms themselves can close down with little warning and no recourse; and E) when we rely entirely (or even just primarily) on streaming options, we lose so much.
One of my favorite examples of the problem with relying on streaming is the disappearance of DVD extras, directors’ commentary, and the detailed production credits that you can just read right off the physical media. Don’t even get me started on the death of liner notes in the age of streaming.
Streaming gives the illusion of availability, but it’s not permanent! Physical media can be destroyed, of course [and here we pause for Dame Sophie to rage-cry about the Universal Music Group Fire of 2008], but at least we make an effort to protect physical media. Without a physical form, streaming media seems less real, less needy of protection and preservation, when it is in some ways even more vulnerable in that state.
A very incomplete list of film companies bringing often-niche movies back into print:
Criterion Collection – The big fish in this particular pond. They’re mostly famous for releasing prestige-y extras-laden releases of classics (some well-known, some less so). They also bring films back into print, but unfortunately, they also take some out of print, ironically, which means no one has them. For example, they were the first to put Sid and Nancy on DVD, and then it was gone for years. Shoppers’ alert: they’re running a 30% off sale through the end of May.
Vinegar Syndrome - Vinegar Syndrome restores and distributes primarily horror, um, erotica, grindhouse, exploitation, and stuff you might have seen on USA Up All Night in the late ‘80s if you were a young, curious teen with insomnia, often putting them on DVD for the first time. They’re having an amazing Halfway To Black Friday sale RIGHT NOW!
American Genre Film Archive - Similar to Vinegar Syndrome (VS actually distributes a lot of their home videos), American Genre Film Archive “exists to preserve the legacy of genre movies through collection, conservation, and distribution.” I (Karen) just ordered What Really Happened To Baby Jane? And The Films of the Gay Girls Riding Club and am now going all in on the Gay Girls Riding Club, which “took California’s 1960s underground gay scene by storm with drag spoofs of classic Hollywood films”?!?!? Put it in my veins!
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
Golden State Warriors Coach (and son of a man who was assassinated by gunmen) Steve Kerr using his platform to demand action on gun control in this nightmare nation whose federal legislature is filled with ghouls and cowards
Playlist king Matthew Perpetua’s latest, What Was Alt-Rock 1991-1996, is also available as a YouTube playlist complete with MTV promos from the time period in question in case you, too, want to combine puberty and perimenopause vibes into one exhilarating freak-out.
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This was delicious, dames! Very Unpopular Opinion From Someone Who Lived Through The Vinyl Era And Survived: vinyl is a pain in the ass. So easily scratched or warped, difficult to transport and fussy! Give me a CD any time. Now album covers and liner notes - those I will sigh over with the best of them.