Modern Library
| Parent company | Random House |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1917 |
| Founder | Albert Boni and Horace Liveright |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York City |
| Publication types | books |
| Official website | www |
The Modern Library is an American publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. Random House began in 1927 as a subsidiary of the Modern Library but eventually overtook its parent to became the parent company of what then only became an imprint of Random House.
The Modern Library originally published only hardbound books. In 1950, it began publishing the Modern Library College Editions, a forerunner of its current series of paperback classics. From 1955 to 1960, the company published a high quality, numbered paperback series, but discontinued it in 1960, when the series was merged into the newly acquired Vintage paperbacks group. The Modern Library homepage states:
In 1998, novelist David Ebershoff became the Modern Library's new Publishing Director. Ebershoff managed the imprint until 2005, when he resigned to concentrate on his own writing and to become editor-at-large at Random House.
In September 2000, the Modern Library initiated a newly designed Paperback Classics series. Six new titles are published in the series on the second Tuesday of each month.
At its onset the Modern Library identified itself as "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books". In keeping with that brand identity, in 1998 the editors created a list they called the "Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels", numbering 100 titles. Plus, they conducted an unscientific internet poll of public opinion, then produced a readers' list. (The lists were actually restricted to works in English, but titles of the lists do not represent this, and little attention was paid to that fact in publicity for the lists.)
The "top ten" of the editors' list is shown here—and the two "100 Best Novels" lists are linked below.
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Wikipedia