As I’d mentioned, the problem is not with the first printing, when our usual press run ranges from 7,000 to 15,000 copies, but with subsequent printings of a many of our titles. In many cases, a few years after a title’s initial publication, a three- to five-year supply can be as low as 500 copies. The cost to set up the book (called “make-ready” in the industry) is so high that the printing/binding cost per book is far more than most readers would be willing to pay. To “break even” on some of these titles, we’d have to charge $100 or more in bookstores, which would decrease sales even further. As it is, we subsidize those volumes with donations and with sales of other books.

“Notes from Underground” now sells eight thousand copies a year, “Crime and Punishment” twelve thousand, “The Brothers Karamazov” fourteen thousand, “Anna Karenina” twenty thousand.

Finally, in 2000, the book was published in the U.K. Penguin sold a few hundred copies in England. At Viking-Penguin in New York, Caroline White, a senior editor, ordered a print run of thirty-two thousand, with the hope that some strong reviews would mean that the new edition would displace Garnett, the Maudes, and other translations on the academic market.

A number of incunabula mention that 300 copies were printed, though this figure may have become formulaic. Most scholars assume that despite contextual variations, print runs generally increased during the sixteenth century—1,000 is often used as a ballpark estimate.181