The White Clips of Dover

Hayward and Blanche Cirker run publishing's revival show

A mind that philosophy, can music, embrace botany, magic, sculpture, mathematics and folklore belongs in the quattrocento, not in the Manhattan ware house district. But Hayward Cirker is content. The owlish founder and president of Dover Publications Inc. insists that he is precisely where he belongs. "I'm no Renaissance man," he maintains. "I'm just curious, is all."

That curiosity is reflected in Dover's vast and idiosyncratic offering of paper backs. Readers who let their fingers do the walking through the Dover catalogue can choose from 2,000 oddities, including The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Three Prophetic Novels by H.G. Wells, Persian Miniature Painting, Complete String Quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven and Build Your Own Inexpensive Dollhouse. "And that's only a beginning," says Cirker.

"Everyday we seem to find something different to publish. And every other day we do publish a new book."

New to Dover, and perhaps new to contemporary readers. But old (and often ancient) by other standards.

A large part of the company's volumes are reprints: books in the public domain, neglected illustrations, for gotten novels and manuals.

In theory, anyone with scissors could emulate Dover's vast output and multimillion-dollar volume. The prospect is pleasant: bygone writers do not require royalties, and artists from other epochs are in greater demand now than they were in their own lifetimes. "All it takes to maintain Dover," says its president and owner, "is judgment, hard work and luck."

But as a house author, one M. Hector Berlioz, has stated, "The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck." Cirker, 60, has been displaying that talent for 35 years. "I graduated from City College in 1936," he recalls. "The teeth of the Depression. I had studied art and science, and I was attracted by publishing. The only job available in that profession was shipping clerk for Crown. I was glad to take it." Six years later Cirker and his young wife, Blanche, took a deep breath and plunged their meager savings--a few hundred dollars--into a publishing house. "We didn't choose Dover for romantic English connotations," says Blanche, the company's executive vice president. "We named our business after the building we lived in."

Dover's first volume was not destined to be made into a major motion picture. Tables of Functions, a mathematical treatise, had been out of print for years. A physicist told Cirker that there might be a small market if it were reprinted; three decades later the book is still offered in the catalogue. "It became a bestseller in

the scientific world," says Cirker, "and it

showed us that there were profits to be

made outside the mass market."

Cannily, the Cirkers began to seek works that had gone out of print, but not out of style. For a dimly remembered volume on metallurgy, Cirker appealed to its translator, an engineer named Herbert Hoover. "Reluctantly," says Cirker, "he gave me permission, certain that another Depression would be caused in our bank account. De Re Metallica has since sold more than 30,000 copies--and it's still in print." So is a theoretical work by Albert Einstein, who protested that a reprint would not be worthwhile. When it became a Dover favorite, he admitted one of his few errors: "My former decision was, of course, not justified."

Einstein is one of 62 Nobel prizewinners whose works are published by Dover. Few of them protest when Cirker makes an offer. By now they have learned that his commercial sense has the infallibility of natural law. When the rules of the trade demanded that all paperbacks be of uniform size to fit drugstore racks, Cirker successfully printed outsize volumes. When art books were sold only at museum counters and specialty bookshops, he produced handsome editions for $5 and found himself widely copied. He published ragtime scores in time for the Scott Joplin craze, books on science-fiction cinema ahead of Star Wars and Close Encounters, chess texts before Bobby Fischer ever swallowed a poisoned pawn.

"The man has incredible instincts," says Science Writer Martin Gardner, another Dover author. "He knows what to publish, how to reach people who want to buy it and, most important, how to make a book that remains a pleasure to own and to read."

That pleasure is becoming rare in a field where most paperbacks give new meaning to the word biodegradable. Customarily, even hard-cover works are supplied with glue bindings, born to crack and wither within a few years. Dover still provides tightly sewn bindings and paper of remarkable whiteness and opacity.

Dover's gleaming, laminated covers and sprightly interiors belie their origins. Eighteen years ago, after shuttling around Manhattan, the Cirkers settled on Varick Street, a glum manufacturing area south of Greenwich Village. The industrial pallor of Dover's office walls suggests a place where parking tickets are paid, and the low clatter of sorting machines is more reminiscent of post office than publisher. But within those corridors the search for new volumes is as lively and noisy as a fox hunt. Some 200 employees are engaged in the tracing of new sources, designing covers and books, filling mail orders and printing. Of the 200, Blanche and Hayward remain the most relentless in pursuit of their quarry. When their son and daughter were grown, the Cirkers, now grandparents, moved from Long Island to Washington Square, and now their day, which begins officially at 9 a.m., never truly stops. Blanche Cirker ransacks the mail for the titles of favorite books remembered by readers; Hayward visits bookstores, bids for faded volumes at auctions and presides over one of America's last important family-owned publishing houses. Unlike most publishers, the Cirkers never hesitate when asked where they get their ideas: the large in-house library and mounds of letters testify to their sources. They have even formulated an answer to a perennial query: With the encroachments of conglomerates and the hundreds of imitators, what will Dover do to keep its catalogue fat and flourishing? "Well," says Hayward Cirker, reaching for an old book and new scissors, "we will just have to stay lucky."

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