On a long shelf in a private library in Newton, Massachusetts, the bibliographer and collector Esmé Wallander keeps the Borzoi books in chronological order. The collection runs from 1915, the year Alfred A. Knopf founded the imprint with his then-fiancée Blanche Wolf, to 2025, the imprint's hundred and tenth year of operation.
Wallander began the collection in 1979, while she was a graduate student in publishing history at Columbia. She has added to it steadily for forty-six years. The collection is not complete. By her count, she is missing two hundred and eleven titles of the approximately seven thousand the imprint has published.
The exercise of reading even the surviving books in sequence is not, Wallander said, something she has attempted. "I have read about a tenth of them," she said. "And that has taken me twenty-five years."
What she has done instead is to compile, by hand and over many years, a catalogue card system that records each title's first edition, jacket designer, translator (if any), and the editor whose name appears in the dedication or acknowledgements, where one is given.
The card system now occupies nine wooden drawers in a cabinet in her library. It is, as far as Wallander knows, the only complete record of Knopf's editorial assignments outside the Random House archives at Columbia.
From this record, certain patterns emerge that resist the imprint's own publicity. The first is that Knopf's reputation for European modernism is, in the early years, a slight overstatement. The imprint published Thomas Mann, Sigrid Undset, and André Gide, but its early bestsellers were more often American non-fiction.
The second pattern is that the imprint's translation list, often cited as one of the great achievements of twentieth-century American publishing, was largely built between 1947 and 1973. Before 1947, the translated titles averaged about three a year. After 1947, they averaged eleven.
The expansion was the work of a single editor, Herbert Weinstock, who joined the imprint in 1944 and remained until his death in 1971. Weinstock's editorial card, in Wallander's system, is the densest in the cabinet.
The third pattern, and the one that most interested this reviewer, is that the imprint's literary taste has remained, across three changes of ownership and four generations of editors, recognisably continuous in one specific respect.
Knopf has consistently preferred long sentences to short ones. This is not a frivolous observation. Wallander tested it by sampling thirty pages each from the first novel published by Knopf in every fifth year between 1920 and 2020.
The average sentence length, across the sample, was 27.4 words. The lowest year was 1955, at 21.6 words; the highest was 1985, at 33.1. Even the lowest figure is well above the standard American trade-fiction average for the same period.
This is, of course, partly a function of the writers Knopf has published — John Updike, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Anne Tyler. But the causation, Wallander argued, runs in both directions. The imprint has selected for the kind of writer whose sentences run long, and those writers have, in turn, defined what the imprint's reputation rewards.
Other patterns are visible in the data. The imprint's translation programme contracted sharply after 1990, recovered slightly in the early 2010s, and now publishes about six translated titles a year. The poetry list, which existed continuously between 1920 and 1968, was discontinued and has never been revived.
The non-fiction list, by contrast, has grown steadily across the imprint's history. In 1915, non-fiction accounted for about thirty per cent of Knopf's annual list. In 2025, it accounted for sixty-one per cent.
Some of this is the displacement of poetry. Some of it is the rise of the literary biography, which Knopf has published in unusual concentrations since the 1970s. Wallander's system records ninety-two biographies of single writers published between 1971 and 2024, an average of nearly two a year.
The acquisition of Knopf by Random House in 1960, and Random House's subsequent acquisition by Bertelsmann in 1998, has not, by Wallander's measures, changed the imprint's editorial behaviour as much as is commonly assumed.
The number of titles per year has remained remarkably stable. Knopf published approximately eighty-five titles in 1925, ninety-two in 1965, eighty-eight in 1995, and seventy-nine in 2025. The dip in 2025 reflects industry-wide pandemic-era contractions that began in 2021 and have not yet fully reversed.
What has changed, Wallander observed, is the imprint's relationship to its own back catalogue. The Vintage paperback line, established in 1955 and now sister imprint to Knopf within the Penguin Random House structure, has progressively absorbed the reissue function that once belonged to Knopf itself.
The hardcover imprint, in other words, now publishes almost exclusively new books. The reissue of older Knopf titles, including those whose hardback rights remain with the imprint, is generally handled in Vintage paperback.
This is a sensible division of labour and probably good for the books themselves. It does mean, however, that the visible Knopf list of any given year is now a less complete representation of what the imprint stands for than it was, say, in 1965.
Wallander closed our conversation by pulling one volume off the shelf. It was the 1947 American edition of Albert Camus's The Stranger, in the Stuart Gilbert translation, with the original blue Borzoi colophon at the foot of the spine.
"The list is not a single thing," she said. "It is a hundred and ten years of separate decisions, made by people who mostly did not know each other. The colophon is what holds it together. The colophon and the long sentence."