The Long-Lost Books You Loved as a Kid Are Coming Back

There's some very exciting news for Y.A. readers and nostalgists today. Via a new imprint, Lizzie Skurnick Books, an array of long-forgotten reads from the '30s to the '80s will be back.

There's some very exciting news for Y.A. readers and nostalgists today. Lizzie Skurnick, journalist and author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading (a great walk down book-memory lane) has a new imprint at Ig Publishing. According to Ig publisher Robert Lasner, writes Claire Kirch in Publishers Weekly, Lizzie Skurnick Books will “bring back the very best in young adult literature, from the classics of the 1930s and 1940s, to the thrillers and social novels of the 1970s and 1980s.” Oh yes. Those long-forgotten reads (or the books you may never have gotten to read) will be back, 12 to 14 titles a year. The first release will be Lois Duncan's Debutante Hill (that's I Know What You Did Last Summer/Down a Dark Hall/Killing Mr. Griffin Lois Duncan. Chills!).

Duncan writes on her website, "the very first book I ever wrote--DEBUTANTE HILL--will be having its 55th birthday later this year! To celebrate that birthday, it's going to be republished in September." It's been out of print for three decades after its publication by Dodd, Mead in 1958, writes Kirch.

Following that, there will be original releases as well, including in fall of 2014 Isabel's War, the first book in a trilogy by Lila Perl, author of 1972's Me and Fat Glenda (1979 cover from Clarion Books at left). Glenda, too, will be reissued and given a new look like that above, as will a range of titles you may remember, like 1982's To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie by Ellen Conford and 1979's Happy Endings Are All Alike by Sandra Scoppettone.

Skurnick notes that a lot of the books once loved by teen girls have fallen out of print (in contrast to those for teen boys) and hopes that "women who, like herself, came of age in the '70s and '80s, will form the core readership" of this new imprint, though of course it's hoped that newer Y.A. readers will pick them up and fall in love for the first time, too. It's a nostalgia-based publishing move, which, from this writer's perspective, certainly doesn't seem like a bad thing. If fact, far the opposite. Let's start dreaming up our ideal nostalgia reissue lists now.