After discovering, during my research in the writing of my review of The Remarkable Life of William Beebe, that only three of Beebe’s nearly two dozen books were still in print, I set about to discover if the same sorry ratio held true for the work of other noteworthy naturalists. Looking up Marston Bates, author of The Nature of Natural History and many other fine books, it was even worse than that – zero of his books were still being printed.
However as I sat staring at the Princeton imprint of the copy of this aforementioned work by Bates, I made a quick check of that press’ website and made a most pleasing discovery: while the book is not still being regularly printed, it is still available through The Princeton Legacy Library.
For those not familiar,
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Thus for anyone seeking a nice, fresh, well-bound copy of such works as Bates’ The Nature of Natural History or any of the other 3,000 Princeton titles kept available to the reading public through this project, consulting the Library’s online catalog is a worthwhile activity indeed.
