Reprints Revisited: Recollections of a Publisher (and a User)

A twentieth-century reprint is a publication that has used an optical technology—photography or scanning—to reproduce a publication that had previously been brought out by a publisher other than the reprinter. Today, reprints represent a small segment of the publications with which music librarians deal, but during and after World War II, reprints were a major form of music publication, and, arguably, the principal means of making the canonical works of the West's musical heritage available for performance and study.

Reprints in music were primarily a North American phenomenon, and began on a substantial scale during World War II, when German editions of standard orchestra, chamber, and solo works were unavailable in the United States and Canada. In the 1950s and 1960s, the expansion of higher education created a need for the collected editions, historical sets, and journals that had been published before World War II, but which had gone out of print. Reprints filled this need. In the 1960s, when academic researchers needed access to original sources, reprinters provided facsimiles (best understood as a form of reprint), first for library use and, in the 1980s, in forms that individuals could afford.

The completion of many of the new collected edition begun after World War II made reprints of such publications superfluous, and, more recently, the availability of much primary and secondary source material on the Internet has substantially reduced the need for facsimiles, leaving reprints a viable form of publication in only a few small markets.