Henry Ford's Own Story
Most of Rose’s books came out before the magic year where copyrighted books currently pass into public domain. Several publishing companies have taken to reprinting these books. They don’t have to pay anything for the text, so except for the costs of actual book production, the entire price of the book is profit. I wrote previously on the Trundlebed Tales blog about copies of re-printed copies I purchased of The Making of Herbert Hoover and Diverging Roads, both by Rose Wilder Lane. These re-printed books were scanned from original copies; pages were simply printed from the scans and bound as a book.
Now, I’ve found another book re-printed in a slightly different manner. It’s produced by a different company called Dodo Press. Unlike those, this version of Henry Ford’s Own Story by Rose Wilder Lane was clearly re-typed. It doesn’t include any extras, like a table of contents. It’s just the title page and the text block. The book design isn’t the greatest, but the text is large and clear. Dodo says their mission is: “Where books are no longer in print or poorly available we are seeking to make them available again by republishing, we do this through 2 Imprints called Dodo Press and Asio Press.”
You can read more about their books on this website.
Besides Dodo’s own books, they also sell reprints and originals by other companies including other titles by and about Rose. I’ve only purchased the one copy from them, but I had no problems with the order.
Sarah S. Uthoff, Trundlebed Tales
There are even other companies than the ones you listed here that are reprinting Rose’s books. I, personally, buy copies of all these editions to add to the many different books in my library, but I do want to point out that the Kiplinger Press spent absolutely no time in making their books the slight bit presentable to sell. They look homemade. They could have at least scanned them, lighter in some cases, darker in others, straightened the pages on the scanner, so that they would not be crooked.
They are printed with all types of writing in some, notes on some pages, you name it. Trash! To tell you the truth, they should have let me provide the scans (clean perfect scans) of almost perfect first editions of Rose’s books. It looks like they borrowed an old beat up copy of each.
Their comments regarding these sloppy printed books, with nice covers are that they just want to get the original text back in print, but they left out the fact that it also makes them money.
All in all, I will say that I am glad that there are companies willing to do this for the public, so people who have never read Rose’s treasures are able to do so.