Who Doesn't Love a Checklist?

Every Dalkey Archive Title ever.

Jun 03, 2024

For the past two weeks, I’ve been unloading and shelving every single Dalkey book I own, in hopes of creating a complete “Dalkey Archive” set—one that I can both brag about and use for actual research.

Here’s where I’m at:

Before I get to the main point of this post, I want to point out a few things. Yes, the Review of Contemporary Fiction section (second shelf down on the right) is quite sparse—I’ll get to those next—and the stack of books on the lower two shelves of the right-most bookshelf are all the books cut apart for scanning. The shelf above those has both every issue of CONTEXT I could find and a bunch of printed Dalkey Archive catalogs.

Above that? Bottom’s Dream and a USPS box containing the most complete version of the novel John O’Brien was writing when he passed away. Yes, a novel. More on that in the future.

In order to figure out which books are missing from the archive, I needed a complete list of every single Dalkey Archive book published to date. Which isn’t that easy to come by. There’s no easy-to-Google list online. The list of titles in Consortium/Ingram’s system doesn’t include limited editions, has a lot of missing information (like which “Literature Series” books belong to, misspelled titles, etc.). The sales reports—started in 1993 thanks to the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, with all previous sales data in a “Pre-1993” column—I was in charge of when I was there from 2000-2006 and am working with again, were riddled with inconsistencies and missing author names, typos, etc.

So, over the past week, I got laser focused on figuring this out. I won’t bore you with all the details—or how long it took to look up every single author’s name that was missing—but I think I did it.

Here’s a link to a Google Sheet listing every single Dalkey title in a few different ways. There’s a sheet detailing every unique title published through the end of June 2024 (956!!), which can be used as a checklist for anyone out there wondering about the size of their library. There’s also an “Every Edition” sheet that includes ISBNs for every distinct version published of every book (hardcover, paperback, ebook, Essential, limited edition, audiobook). And there are sheets detailing each of those different versions.

And for those of you who use Excel, you can download that below.

All Dalkey Archive Titles (june 2024)

169KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

A couple things this workbook is NOT;

It is not a list of Dalkey Archive titles currently available. Some of these books are out of print, or temporarily out of stock. Some I have never seen. But this is a list of everything I believe John O’Brien published in the history of the press, plus the additions since he passed.
It does not take into account different printings or covers. And I suspect some ISBNs were updated when a title was reissued. There’s no easy way to research either of these things, so I decided just to live with the fact that the “Every Edition” spreadsheet doesn’t include every ISBN associated with a Dalkey Archive publication.
It’s also not free of errors. Assigning “Literature Series” to 568 uncategorized books took ages, and I’m not convinced these are 100% accurate. And there are ones that are tricky. For example, John coded a number of titles as part of the “Lannan Selection Series” as a way of demonstrating what a funded series could be and look like. But not all of the Lannan funded books were tagged as such. Same with the “Coleman Dowell Literature Series.” (Coleman Dowell will definitely be the subject of a future newsletter.) Toussaint was listed as being part of both the French Literature Series and the Belgian one. (All his titles are now in the Belgian series, because, well, I think this solidifies the fact that Dalkey Archive has done more Belgian books than anyone. And I personally have a fondness for Flemish literature. The Big Belgian Books of Louis Paul Boon are favorites, and Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen will be featured here soon.) Point being: Lot of judgement calls here, especially in terms of what’s in the “Scholarly Series” and what is not.
Furthermore, my typing skills are based more in speed than in accuracy. There’s a 110% chance that I mistyped someone’s name somewhere in this spreadsheet.

The final takeaway from this is that if you find a mistake, whatever it might be, please email me and I’ll address it immediately.

OK, let’s finish this off with some fun statistics.

If you’re a fan of Three Percent, you’re likely aware of my obsession with statistics and ways of looking at data. And now that I have this base level of information about Dalkey Archive’s catalog—and will soon have sales data by title from the beginning of the press through today—expect some occasional data-driven missives here.

For today, I’ll keep things fairly simple:

As mentioned above, there are 956 distinct titles published to date by Dalkey Archive.
If you include every version of every one of those titles, there are 1,341 different publications (paperback, hardcover, ebook, etc.).
Dalkey Archive has published titles in 58 different “Literature Series” from Albanian to Tunisian, and including the Bibliographic Series and the Scholarly one.
I haven’t counted how many distinct authors Dalkey Archive has published to date, but I will . . . soon.

For today, I wanted to give a bit more context about the Literary Series. I know this is pretty much unprocessable, but here’s a graph of the number of books included in each series:

If you want to see the complete list, you can download it here.

Dalkey By Series

17.8KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

But for anyone not all that interested in all the data, here are the top twenty-one series by volume with the total number of titles followed by what percentage of the total they represent.

American Literature Series 247 (25.84%)
French Literature Series 107 (11.19%)
Scholarly Series 70 (7.32%)
British Literature Series 66 (6.90%)
Irish Literature Series 58 (6.07%)
Korean Literature Series 27 (2.82%)
Spanish Literature Series 26 (2.72%)
Russian Literature Series 25 (2.62%)
Norwegian Literature Series 20 (2.09%)
Slovenian Literature Series 20 (2.09%)
Swiss Literature Series 18 (1.88%)
Belgian Literature Series 17 (1.78%)
Brazilian Literature Series 16 (1.67%)
Japanese Literature Series 16 (1.67%)
Mexican Literature Series 14 (1.46%)
Romanian Literature Series 13 (1.36%)
Serbian Literature Series 13 (1.36%)
Argentinian Literature Series 12 (1.26%)
Estonian Literature Series 12 (1.26%)
Czech Literature Series 11 (1.15%)
Hebrew Literature Seires 11 (1.15%)

There are a number of observations that can be drawn from this, but personally, I think it’s telling—and tracks—that the top five series (American, French, Scholarly, British, Irish) are the backbone of Dalkey Archive’s catalog, making up 57.32% of the total publications.

It’s also worth noting that out of the fifty-eight series Dalkey Archive has launched, twenty-five consist of ten or more titles. There are thirteen “one-off” series, but otherwise, these series are series. Over the ensuing months, I’ll compare that to the overall numbers collected in the Translation Database to see which countries Dalkey Archive has done the most for relative to other U.S. publishers.

I’m sure that over time, I’ll explore all of these series, although after a diversion into polyamory and a Dalkey Archive + Open Letter piece, my immediate plan is to write about three different “unfinished trilogies.” Which happen to be from three different series.