The Authors' Authors Are Out of Print
"The difference between in print and out of print is precisely the difference between life and death." - Donald E. Westlake
I was reading some books by Dorothy Day a while back, and one thing she does a lot is reference books that influenced her thought. I'm a pretty big fan of her writing, so I decided to look into a few of her recommendations.
Pretty quickly, I found that a lot of books she referenced are out of print. You can find Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist on Amazon for ~$35, but it looks like there hasn't been a new printing since 2011. Twenty Years A-Growing was a favorite of Day's mentor Peter Maurin, but there hasn't been a new printing of that book since at least 2000.
It feels like a lot of these books are in a sort of no man's land, being largely unavailable today, but also being too recent to be part of the public domain. That makes it a little tough to read the people who influenced my role models.
Anyway, if I get a chance sometime, maybe I'll have to track down a few old books.