An interesting piece on the pros and cons of the life of backlist titles. The market is moving toward niche, and other retailers are learning to appreciate the sales-over-a-lifetime of backlist items through online retailers, but booksellers have other concerns that may not make hanging around such an appealling strategy.

Each house has at least one title that seems to buoy the rest of the list. Warner Books’ edition of “To Kill a Mockingbird” sells in the “robust six figures” annually, said Beth de Guzman, the company’s paperback editor in chief. “The Catcher in the Rye,” a major title in Little, Brown’s backlist, sold more than 200,000 last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales in 70 to 80 percent of the domestic market, but doesn’t include books assigned for college courses — a major source of sales for some books. Penguin Classics — an almost all-backlist imprint that has 4,000 titles, some from the public domain and most with a newly commissioned scholarly introduction — sells “hundreds of thousands” of copies of its most popular titles, including “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Crucible” and “The Odyssey,” said Elda Rotor, the imprint’s executive editor. Some frequently taught newer titles also have steady sales. Tim O’Brien’s 1990 Vietnam War novel, “The Things They Carried,” routinely sells more than 100,000 copies a year, as does Howard Zinn’s left-leaning “People’s History of the United States,” originally published in 1980.

The backlist can also drive business acquisitions. Simon & Schuster bought Macmillan in 1994 partly for its backlist, which included “The Joy of Cooking.” The cookbook’s heavily updated 1997 edition has sold 1.7 million copies. (Several earlier editions also remain in print.) In 1984, Penguin bought a small English publisher, Frederick Warne, largely for one author on its backlist: Beatrix Potter, whose children’s books sell millions of copies a year. “We bought the company and isolated the key treasure in there,” said Peter Mayer, who was Penguin’s chief executive at the time and is now the president and publisher of Overlook Press.

You know, some times you read an article on publishing that’s supposed to be about thinking outside the box and hope, and you still come away depressed and feeling like you need a shower.