The McNally Editions office, on the third floor above the McNally Jackson bookshop on Prince Street in Manhattan's Nolita, is a single room of about 200 square feet, with a long table by the window and a wall of metal shelving holding one copy of every title the imprint has issued.
On a damp morning in early May, the imprint's editor Conor Broughan was reading proofs for the press's forty-seventh title, a reissue of the American novelist Anna Kavan's A Bright Green Field, originally published in 1958 and out of print in American editions since the late 1980s.
McNally Editions was launched in 2021 as a reissue imprint affiliated with the McNally Jackson bookshop, which was founded in Nolita in 2004 by Sarah McNally and has since expanded to six locations across New York City and Brooklyn. The editorial decision to start a press was made in late 2019. The first six titles appeared in spring 2021. The current rate is between eight and twelve titles per year.
The forty-six titles published to date are a useful sample to read the imprint by. The catalogue is heavier on American writers than on European ones, heavier on twentieth-century fiction than on earlier work, heavier on women than on men, and noticeably willing to include titles that other reissue presses had passed over.
Cree, who edits Threadcount's Reissues section from a small office at the University of Regina, has been collecting McNally Editions titles since the imprint's launch. The catalogue, considered as a single editorial gesture, is the most distinctive American small-press reissue list to emerge in the past decade.
The list includes several titles that had been on quiet recovery lists for years without finding a publisher. There is Bette Howland's Things to Come and Go, originally published in 1983 and out of print until McNally's 2022 edition. There is Eve Babitz's Black Swans, originally published in 1993 and out of print between 2001 and McNally's 2023 reissue. There is the Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower's The Catherine Wheel, which had a single American printing in 1962 and was unavailable in American editions until the 2024 McNally release.
Each of these reissues did, on publication, what reissues of overlooked mid-century women writers have been doing for the past fifteen years: it found a small but devoted audience, mostly through independent bookshops, mostly through word of mouth, mostly without major review coverage. The Howland sold, in its first year, somewhere between 4,200 and 5,500 copies. The Babitz did considerably better, on the back of the wider Babitz revival, with first-year sales of perhaps 18,000 copies.
The Babitz numbers are interesting because they suggest the upper end of what an American reissue press can achieve when a writer's revival has reached the point of mainstream attention. The Howland numbers are more typical. Most McNally Editions titles sell between 3,500 and 7,000 copies in the first year. A few do considerably better. Several do somewhat worse.
The economics of this kind of list depend on a combination of factors. The bookshop affiliation is significant. McNally Jackson's six storefronts give the imprint guaranteed front-of-shop placement in some of the highest-traffic literary bookshops in New York City. The estimated annual sales of McNally Editions titles through the parent bookshops alone is in the range of 18,000 to 28,000 copies, depending on the season.
The list also benefits from a small but distinctive cover design programme. The imprint uses a consistent format: trade paperback, French flaps, a single-image cover by a rotating roster of illustrators, and a series-mark on the spine. The series-mark, a small black-and-white woodcut of a fox, has become recognisable enough that some independent bookshops shelve the imprint as a separate section.
The wider American small-press reissue scene, of which McNally is now one of the leading members, has grown substantially since the late 2010s. The list of active reissue imprints in 2026 includes McNally Editions, NYRB Classics, Dorothy a Publishing Project, Verso's Vintage line, Library of America, Modern Library, the University of Minnesota's Bookworm series, Belt Publishing's Belt Revivals line, and at least a dozen smaller operations.
The total annual output of this group is now approximately 220 reissues a year, up from perhaps 140 in 2015. The increase is not evenly distributed. NYRB Classics has held steady at roughly thirty-five titles a year for over a decade. Library of America has, if anything, slowed slightly. The growth has come from newer imprints like McNally Editions, Belt Revivals, and Dorothy.
What this means, for the American reissue reader, is that a writer like Bette Howland or Eve Babitz or Elizabeth Harrower has a real chance of being recovered within a generation of going out of print. This is a meaningful change from the situation in, say, 1995, when the recovery of mid-century American women writers depended almost entirely on the Feminist Press and a handful of university presses.
The risk of the current boom, which Cree noted in an editorial in last autumn's issue, is the same risk that attaches to any expanding small-press sector. The titles that get recovered tend to share a set of characteristics that make them easier to market: short, voice-driven, recognisable to a current reader's sensibility, with a back story that can be summarised in a single sentence.
Titles that do not share these characteristics, including a great deal of mid-twentieth-century formally adventurous American fiction by writers who are not as photogenic as Babitz, tend to remain out of print regardless of how much critical work has been done on them. The recovery is real. It is also, like all such recoveries, partial.
McNally Editions has been somewhat better than most of its peers at including titles that resist the easy summary. The 2024 reissue of John Williams's Nothing But the Night, a difficult early novel by the author of Stoner, is one example. The Kavan reissue that Broughan was proofing on Prince Street is another. Anna Kavan's late work is genuinely strange, formally adventurous, and not particularly easy to summarise.
Whether the Kavan will find the audience the Babitz found is doubtful. The first printing is 4,500 copies, which is conservative by McNally standards. Broughan expects the title to sell through that printing in approximately fourteen months, with a possible second printing of 2,500 to follow.
The imprint, considered as a five-year project, has done meaningful work. The forty-six titles in print represent a coherent, mostly American, mostly twentieth-century, mostly female-authored shelf of fiction that would otherwise be considerably harder to find. The list is not the only such shelf in American publishing. It is one of the best-edited.
Cree left the Prince Street office with a proof of the Kavan and a copy of the imprint's autumn 2026 catalogue. The catalogue is twelve pages long, printed in two colours, and lists ten forthcoming titles. The lead title for September is a reissue of the American novelist Don Carpenter's The Class of '49, last in American print in 1979. It will be the imprint's fifty-fourth title. The wall of metal shelving in the editorial office, by year's end, will need to be extended.