One reality of modern publishing is that this season’s new books are next season’s remainders. This harsh fact is compounded by the inexorable disappearance of good used bookstores everywhere, with the result that many excellent books that have had their brief “frontlist season” are effectively forgotten; they simply disappear from bookstore shelves, rarely to be read again. Two things offer hope to those who want more nourishment than can be obtained on a “top ten” literary diet. On one front, the declining costs of POD (print on demand) technologies means that we will soon see the day when no book need ever go out of print. And until that moment has arrived, readers can still gorge on the eclectic backlists of niche publishers such as New York Review Books Classics, an imprint that has been saving good writing from oblivion since 1999. Over two hundred titles have been published as NYRB Classics, “masterpieces of narrative history and literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, cookbooks, memoirs, and unclassifiable classics.” To briefly consider three NYRB Classics titles: The Goshawk is a fascinating account of T.H. White’s attempts to tame a fledgling goshawk (“Gos”) according to the principles described in a Renaissance-era text on hawks. For White the process is akin to training “a person who was not human,” and it forces him to consider the “magical potency” of the word feral as it applies not only to Gos but to himself.