Long long ago, when you and I were in college, Tom, publishing houses kept backstocks of books published but unsold in their warehouses. The titles kept were in greater or lesser numbers depending on their popularity, but as long as a title was selling a little, it would remain in print. The reason publishing houses could do this? Tax laws in the US stipulated that unsold backstocks of books were not taxed as assets in the same sense as other types of goods. Books were considered a special category of inventory.

Then, in a revision of the tax code, books were reclassified. They became inventory just like warehouses full of coffee tables and refrigerators and televisions. Anything held in a warehouse was considered a taxable asset. Publishers took a look at their backstocks and decided to liquidate marginal titles from which they could not expect a reasonable level of income in order to minimize their tax burden.

This has hit the youth book market especially hard. Hundreds of new books for children and teens are published every year. Publishers are of course eager to stock the new titles because novelty sells. This means that the stocks of older, slower selling titles are allowed to go out of print more rapidly, and very old books, unless they are recognized as classics by a broad swath of the reading public, go out of print never to return. The exception: old things brought back by a large generational readership that propels a nostalgia reprint. Thus we have the return of the Dick & Jane readers (yuck) and the older Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery series (pretty good). I could say a few things about the resurrected Elsie Dinsmore series, but there's enough profanity on the Net already.

I used to be able to count on letting a book grow on me before making a decision to buy for my personal collection. But now, as things stand, a book for children or teens stands a very good chance of going out of print within 2 years, never to return, unless the author or illustrator has won an award or is a best-seller. (More book awards exist, btw, than you have ever heard of.) Those items are classified as moneymakers, and so worth the price of storage and tax assessment.

For this reason, Dr. Seuss will never go out of print, nor will Marc Brown, whose Arthur character has his own TV show, computer games, and toy franchise. Eleanor Cameron is almost out of print not because her quality is poor but because her readership is specialized and small, without the clout of, say, Madonna's, another person whose work for children no one wants to hear me hold forth upon. (May she go O/P soon, and forever.) Bill Steig's books will stay in print because he won a Caldecott, and rightly so. But Remy Charlip's work is mostly gone, except when I read the very sweet Harlequin and the Gift of Many Colors as part of a Mardi Gras Story Time.

If you think about it, this also explains the great narrowing of offerings for adults by publishers that we have seen in the last several decades. They need to protect their profit margins, and this concern trumps the ability of their editors to champion and groom gifted unknowns with as much vigor as they used to.

It's just good business sense.

On the other hand, keep your eye on the small art houses with their tiny profit margins, and on the "vanity" (self-publication) presses. Self-publication often is only for the family and friends market, but some genuine gems come from that direction. For instance, almost all published works by black Americans up through the first few decades of the 20th century were self-published.