Dover Books
| Parent company | RR Donnelley |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1941 |
| Founder | Hayward Cirker and Blanche Cirker |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Mineola, New York |
| Publication types | Books, sheet music |
| Official website | www |
Dover Publications, also known as Dover Books, is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward Cirker and his wife, Blanche. It primarily publishes reissues, books no longer published by their original publishers. These are often, but not always, books in the public domain. The original published editions may be scarce or historically significant. Dover republishes these books, making them available at a significantly reduced cost.
Dover is well known for its reprints of classic works of literature, classical sheet music and of public-domain images from the 18th and 19th centuries. Dover also publishes an extensive collection of mathematical, scientific and engineering texts. It often targets its reprints at a niche market such as wood working.
Most Dover reprints are facsimiles by photo process of the originals, retaining the original pagination and typeset, sometimes with a new introduction. Dover will usually add new and more colorful cover art to its paper-bound editions. They retitle some books to make them more in line with modern usage and categorization. For example, the book Woodward's National Architect was retitled A Victorian Housebuilder's Guide.
The Cirkers started the business selling remaindered textbooks by mail from their apartment in Queens, New York City. The company published its first book, Tables of Functions with Formulas and Curves, when the German copyright was voided by the United States as a result of World War II. The book was an unexpected success and established the Dover business model of publishing esoteric works at a low price. One of Dover's best sellers was Albert Einstein's The Principle of Relativity, which Einstein reluctantly agreed to republish despite his concerns that it was outdated.
Dover was influential in transforming the paperback book market. In 1951 it issued some of the earliest standard-sized paperbacks, a format that became known as a trade paperback. Since the 1960s, the vast majority of Dover's titles have been paper-bound books of various sizes. Dover paperbacks were noted for their quality of manufacture (see below), unlike most paperbacks which were held together with glue and subject to page drop-out.
Beginning in the 1950s Dover also issued a series of Listen & Learn language courses prepared primarily using teachers from Columbia University.
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