Modern Library

About Modern Library

The Modern Library is an American reprint series of classic and modern literature, founded in New York in spring 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of Boni & Liveright, and now part of Random House within Penguin Random House.

At first it styled itself "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books". Unlike Britain's Everyman's Library, it reprinted recent works by arrangement with their original publishers as well as older classics, and for decades it was the main inexpensive series of serious literature sold widely in American bookshops and department stores. In 1925 Bennett Cerf bought the series and with Donald S. Klopfer formed The Modern Library, Inc. The torchbearer emblem dates from 1925, designed by Lucian Bernhard and later redrawn by Rockwell Kent.

In 1927 Cerf and Klopfer began issuing limited editions under a new imprint, Random House, which soon outgrew its parent. The firm was reorganised as Random House, Inc. in 1936, and the Modern Library became its subsidiary and later one of its imprints.

The series was originally hardback only. Modern Library College Editions followed in 1950, and a numbered paperback line ran from 1955 to 1960 before being folded into Vintage. Random House revived the torchbearer for the 75th anniversary in 1992, and in 1998 the imprint published its much-debated lists of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century.