Edwin Frank, who besides being the editor for the NYRB Classics series was also my neighbour when I lived in New York (and possibly the nicest guy I met there), is interviewed at the Amazon blog.

Amazon.com: How do the books come to you? Through your own reading and research, or through recommendations from other writers and readers you know? Are the writers who write your introductions often the ones who bring the books to you?

Frank: All sorts of ways. Readers write in recommending things, writers do the same, as do agents. Used bookstores, reference books, blogs, and libraries are all sources too. Henry James’s The Other House I discovered in a library, pulling it off a shelf when I didn’t recognize the title. When it turned out to be a novel I’d never heard of I felt dizzy with surprise and delight.

Sometimes introducers introduce the book to us; sometimes it’s we who first introduce the book to the introducer: for example, I sent Michael Cunningham The Pilgrim Hawk and he fell in love with it.

Amazon.com: A few years ago, Mark Moskowitz’s documentary, Stone Reader, followed his rediscovery of one forgotten novel, Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer. There’s a kind of romance to these lost classics that have barely survived the obscurity of time through the words of a few mouths or a single passionate reader. I know that sense of reading something nearly lost is part of the thrill for me of discovering (thanks to you) a book like Stoner or Hard Rain Falling. Is that part of the pleasure of publishing them?

Frank: Finding something lost gives us a sense of new possibility, don’t you think? There’s more out there than you were taught in school; more than your friends know about, too. It’s reassuring to think that old good things can survive the action of time–and when an old thing rings true and new it allows you to think the world can be remade.