Sorry John, didn’t notice your question earlier and have been prompted into a response by the long anticipated arrival of my very own copy of the Rostron book. Battered, tattered and threadbare it may be, but all the pages are intact and that’s really all I care about at this point.
Would you believe reprints of obscure/rare works is a subject I’ve considered before? Well maybe not, but I’m sure others would. Anyway, one of the main issues with republishing/reprinting out of print works is the murky area of copyright and royalties. Then there’s the price of the potentially limited print run balanced against cost effectiveness.
My understanding is that Amereon (sp?) House and 7 C’s Press (working with THS) specialise in reprints of out-of-print Titanica, but I’m not sure how cost effective they are given the prices I’ve paid for some of their publications. A lot of publishers are now moving into ‘Print on Demand’ for their back catalogues too, but in my experience tend to be larger presses (such as Penguin) or the specialised academic/technical presses (such as Queensland University Press). I have also seen instances of corporate subsidy of reprints (my Royal Viking Line special edition of Maxtone-Graham’s ‘The Only Way to Cross’ being such an example) and reprints subsidised by individuals, of works still in copyright.
So, technically your idea has merit and has been done - up to a point. If there were sufficient market interest (or at least potential) and a convincing representation made to an appropriate publisher, there’s no reason a reprint edition wouldn’t work. It would probably come down to who could financially back such a venture and I suspect now the public’s interest is dying down, a genuine market opportunity has gone by. Woe, woe.
Of course, if I ever win a lottery or some such nonsense, I plan to reissue several scarce works for my own amusement.
