Forty Years of Dalkey Archive (Part I of V)

Like ESPN's "30 for 30," but not.

This is the second significant Dalkey Archive Press anniversary I’ve been around for. My first stint at the press—as Associate Director—took place from 2000–2006 with the press’s 20th anniversary landing right in the middle at 2004. An anniversary for which . . . I don’t remember doing anything special? Looking back, a lot of great books came out that year (Flann O’Brien’s At War, the paperback of Julian Ríos’s Larva, Vedrana Rudan’s Night, Curtis White’s America’s Magic Mountain, etc.), and I remember having a wonderful event for Meredith Brosnan’s Mr. Dynamite in which a couple professional actors presented an interpretation of the early sections of that book, but other than that . . .¹

My knee-jerk reaction is that John O’Brien probably hated celebrations of this sort, given both his interest in promoting the work itself—and his fixation on literary quality over Barnum & Bailey type boosterism—and his very dark, wry sense of humor that would’ve likely led him to support a “countdown” sort of anniversary: “Well, there’s only 32 more years of this bullshit till it’s over!”

That said, it makes sense to bring some attention to Dalkey Archive’s 40th—that’s a lot of years! Especially for a press that, in some regards, started as an afterthought or, maybe more appropriately, as an outgrowth of unexpected success.

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Before getting to any of that though, I just want to point to this post detailing the giveaway going on to celebrate Dalkey Archive’s 40th.

To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we will be giving away a complete set of the Dalkey Archive Essentials that have been published since the series began in the spring of 2022. (U.S. residents only.)

To enter, head to the Dalkey Archive website and contribute a minimum of 5 dollars (USD). Every penny donated contributes directly toward the future of the press.

Donating 40 dollars (for 40 years) will enter your name into the drawing a second time, and you will receive a signed “thank you” from Dalkey staff on a broadside print, featuring a quote from founder John O’Brien.

Additionally, all books available through the Dalkey Archive website are 25% if you use the code “DALKEYBIRTHDAY” at checkout.

[Note: Since Dalkey Archive is an imprint of Deep Vellum, donations will be processed by and given to Deep Vellum. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused!]

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Although it’s true that the first four books from Dalkey Archive (or “Dakley Archive”) came out in 1984, the press’s origins truly reside in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which launched in 1981 with an issue dedicated to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, and was initially announced via this flyer:

I love that Ishmael Reed’s name is hand corrected on this, yet “Nicholas Mosely” is not.

The goals of RCF are pretty clearly stated above, but the tl;dr version is that John wanted to create a space where all the scattered fans of under-discussed writers could find a home. And that by producing thoughtful pieces on these books and authors, a discussion connecting them to past writers and movement would also help pave the way for future readers and scholars.

This concern about “preservation” of particular books and aesthetics is ever present in John’s interviews and actions—although it’s taken from the Flann O’Brien novel, the “Archive” of the press’s name is no coincidence. (Although John did have mixed feelings about that when certain people referred to the press as a “dusty museum.”) It’s commonplace now for small presses to include in their mission statements the goal of keeping all their books in print forever, with the stated or implicit belief that by doing so, the titles would find new readers in the far-flung future. (How true this is in an era of sheer abundance and overwhelming decision fatigue is another question for another post.) That sentiment is even present in this quote from a 1974 letter to John from Gilbert Sorrentino:

In about 15 years, Imaginative Qualities [Ed Note: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a sort of ur-book for John’s aesthetic and latent contempt for bullshit “artists”] will be “discovered.” I know this almost as a certainty. And it has little to do with the fact that the assaults on certain specific figures will then be blunted by time. Somehow, someone will see that the book has an inner structure that is absolutely trim and tight . . . it will be recognized as a book that is not a sister to Up, or The Painted Bird, or Barth or Barthelme. Maybe 20 years, then.

It’s even in the document above in which it’s stated that RCF will “feature . . . out-of-print books that should be reissued.” And that’s where Dalkey Archive is truly born from: The desire to put back into print works that have been abandoned due to poor sales, yet fit within the grand, over-arching literary taste promoted by RCF.

Nowadays, given the smashing success of New York Review Books, this might not seem all that novel, but in 1984 . . .

Given tax laws surrounding obsolete inventory, it was advisable to sell-off or pulp books that were no longer selling at sustainable levels. (This is still the case made even more relevant by Ingram’s—and other distributors’—draconian “excess inventory” charges.) A ton of books that had a limited, yet deep impact on a particular set of readers had vanished from the scene, and Dalkey Archive became the only game in town to reintroduce them to readers who, given the passing of time and, frequently, their relative youth, had never before encountered them. Every reprint is a new book to somebody.

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Along the lines of my dark joke above, John was someone who planned for failure, but desired success. It was a dream to encounter people in the wild reading a Sorrentino book, for instance, but his realistic-idealistic-pessimistic viewpoint made the, very rational, assumption that no one was going to want to spend money on an experimental work by whomever, when they could just as easily spend that same money on a book by Saul Bellow—or anyone whose prose wasn’t nearly as demanding as, say, Ralph Cusack, whose Cadenza doesn’t follow a linear plot or represent the “world as we know it.”

But as much as he predicted and expected failure, the press kept generating more and more sales and attention, and more and more respect among readers, critics, booksellers, librarians, prize juries. John never ever sought out a best-seller (paraphrasing, but “that’s the quickest way to kill a small press—by feeling the need to find the next best-seller”), but nevertheless, the press was sustained, on one level, by a series of hits, starting with Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson and continuing through Chromos by Felipe Alfau and Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley, Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley, Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein, At Swim-Two-Birds and Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, and, more recently, Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich and the works of 2023 Nobel Prize winner, Jon Fosse.

Dalkey was always staunchly a nonprofit, John seeing the for-profit world as a sort of trap, a space in which you were restricted by sales and bottom lines, in which doing a book that was so out there (Arno Schmidt isn’t the worst example) that it would probably only have 200 (if that) readers would be verboten, despite the fact that said book was a legitimate addition to the literary world. Something never before seen, but something that offered up new techniques, ideas about art and culture, etc. I mean, those 200 devoted readers—some of whom likely had their life altered by this fictitious book—deserve literature too!

Being a nonprofit comes with its own set of challenges, such as convincing wealthy people (and foundations) to part with their money in order to support an art that, well, is perceived as dying and/or replaceable, is much less sexy than other artistic giving opportunities (in part because literary publishing generally doesn’t have a space where the art is performed), and for which one rarely knows more than a fraction of their supporters/readers/potential donors.

And yet . . . with the right argument, editorial chops to rest your laurels on, and a sophisticated development person who can think in the right ways and parlay access to a national (or global) set of donors . . . Publishing, in terms of the arts, is cheap.

But a real nonprofit press truly has to have a literary backbone to prove it’s worth. It’s one thing to do books that “can’t be sustained by the marketplace”; it’s a different thing entirely to have an editorial vision and know how to follow through on it. (And just to be clear, many nonprofit presses have and do. But those not in the know don’t know what they don’t know and can assume that all sales-inhibited books are created equal.) Dalkey’s fundraising efforts had their highs and lows, their ambitious ideas and squandered opportunities—but editorial value? That never wavered.

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Over time, Dalkey Archive has expanded and grown in ways that are, in retrospect, totally expected.

From reprints, John added on the idea of doing new titles. Then, as was present in the RCF announcement, to international literature. Translation series of underrepresented regions and countries. Young experimental authors. Established authors looking for a home. Scholarly books that carried on the RCF tradition. Anthologies. “Essentials.”

Dalkey Archive has evolved both internally and with the times. And say what you will about particular books (“no book in history has ever been for everyone”), or about John, or about the covers, or the marketing, distribution, employee policies, whatever—all of these books taken together, these forty years of books, totaling over 900 titles, these books tell a story.

As my contribution to this 40th anniversary brouhaha, I’m going to highlight 40 books from the 40 years of Dalkey Archive’s history. This’ll be broken up over four posts (I mean, as you know—even if this is your first time ever reading me—I write long) and will feature not the “best” book from each year, or the one that was most “noteworthy,” but one that has a story or highlights what was going on at the press or in culture at that time. Or a book about which I have a bad joke. So buckle up and stay tuned! I’ll be back next week with the first two of these “listicles.”

1. I had this mostly confirmed by long-time Dalkey Archive employee and true keeper of DAP lore, Angela Weaser. She didn’t remember doing anything in 2004, but said that John would frequently do special ads for the anniversary of RCF (which fits in with the rest of this post), which he viewed as the actual start of the press.