The Dalkey Archive Press warehouse, since 2023, has occupied a single bay of a larger distribution facility on a service road off Interstate 35 in Dallas. On a Tuesday morning in late April, the press's managing editor Will Evans was supervising the unboxing of a fresh print run of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the imprint's 412th in-print title.
Dalkey Archive was founded in 1984 in Elmwood Park, Illinois, by the editor John O'Brien. The press moved several times during its first three decades, settled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006, decamped to the Irish city for which it is named in 2014, and returned to the United States in 2018 under increasingly difficult financial circumstances.
O'Brien died in October 2020. The press, for which he had been the only editorial constant in thirty-six years, struggled for eighteen months before being acquired in March 2022 by Deep Vellum, the small Dallas-based translation publisher run by Will Evans. The acquisition included Dalkey's backlist of approximately 800 titles, its imprint rights, and the obligations attached to its in-print catalogue.
Four years on, the post-acquisition list is large enough to assess. Deep Vellum's Dalkey imprint has, between March 2022 and May 2026, brought 184 titles back to print, issued 31 new titles, and allowed perhaps 290 previously in-print titles to lapse into out-of-print status.
Devlin, who first encountered Dalkey through the press's Flann O'Brien reissues in the late 1990s, has been watching the transition with the wariness common to readers of small presses that change hands. The wariness was warranted. The early post-acquisition lists, in 2022 and 2023, were uneven. Some reissues appeared in print runs too small to reach independent bookshops. Some new titles arrived with minimal copy-editing. The catalogue's design coherence, which had been one of Dalkey's quiet strengths, wobbled visibly.
By 2024 the operation had stabilised. The 2025 list, which included new editions of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew and a long-promised first English translation of the Slovenian novelist Vlado Žabot's The Sukub, looked more like a Dalkey list than the immediate post-acquisition output had.
The spring 2026 list, twenty-three titles, looks even more like one. The Flann O'Brien reprint is one of four reissues of writers who were central to O'Brien's original Dalkey list. The others are reprints of Harry Mathews's The Conversions, Aidan Higgins's Bornholm Night-Ferry, and the Hungarian novelist Miklós Szentkuthy's Marginalia on Casanova.
Each of these is a signature Dalkey title. Each was out of print before the acquisition, in one case for over a decade. The fact that the post-acquisition press has chosen to bring all four back, in a single season, is the clearest signal yet that Evans and his team understand what Dalkey was for.
What it was for, considered at the level of editorial mission, was the preservation of a particular line of experimental and post-war modernist fiction that the major publishers had abandoned and the university presses had not picked up. O'Brien's list, across thirty-six years, was idiosyncratic in its inclusions but coherent in its underlying conviction that certain books had to be kept available regardless of their commercial performance.
The list included not only the obvious figures (Stein, Beckett, Queneau, Mathews) but the second tier of writers who had been their actual contemporaries and conversation partners (Robert Pinget, Christine Brooke-Rose, José Lezama Lima, Camilo José Cela, Yuri Olesha). The second tier is where Dalkey did its most distinctive work. Without Dalkey, the English-language reader would have had almost no access to Pinget after the 1980s, or to Brooke-Rose after the 1990s.
The acquisition put this second tier at risk. A press the size of Deep Vellum cannot, in practical terms, keep 800 backlist titles in print indefinitely. Selection had to happen. The selection that has happened, four years in, has been mostly defensible. The lapses have mostly been of titles that had not sold in years and that had not been likely to find new readers without significant editorial work.
The losses, considered specifically, include the press's smaller Latin American titles, which have largely passed out of print, and a number of the press's Eastern European reissues from the 2008-2012 period, when O'Brien had been particularly active in commissioning translations from Hungarian, Czech, and Romanian.
Some of these titles have been picked up by other small presses. The Romanian novelist Mircea Cărtărescu, whose Dalkey edition of Nostalgia went out of print in 2023, has since been reissued by Archipelago Books. The Hungarian novelist Géza Ottlik, whose Dalkey edition of School at the Frontier lapsed in 2024, has been picked up by NYRB Classics for a 2027 reissue.
The market, in this sense, has done some of the work of preservation that Dalkey would once have done alone. Whether this is a sustainable substitute for a single press with a long memory and a coherent editorial mission is a different question. Different presses will make different choices. The titles that fall between presses will simply go out of print.
Evans has said, in conversation and in trade interviews, that he understands the imprint's responsibility to its backlist and that he intends to keep the most important titles in print on a rolling basis. The qualification is in the phrase the most important titles. Importance is a judgment, and Evans's judgment is not O'Brien's.
What Devlin came away with, after reading through the spring list and a sample of the 2024 and 2025 catalogues, is that the post-acquisition Dalkey is doing what could reasonably be expected of it. The mission has narrowed. The catalogue has consolidated around the more durable second-tier figures. The truly marginal titles have been allowed to lapse.
This is a smaller Dalkey than the one O'Brien ran. It is not, on present evidence, a worse one. The selection is more conservative. The print quality is, by 2026, fully back to professional standards. The introductions are written by serious readers. The covers, while not identical to the original Dalkey design, are visually coherent enough that a shop can shelve the titles together without confusion.
The Flann O'Brien reprint, which was being unboxed in Dallas on a Tuesday morning, is in some sense a statement. Of all the writers Dalkey published, Flann O'Brien is the one most tied to the imprint's identity. To keep him in print, after the founding editor's death and a corporate transition, is to say that the imprint is still itself. So far, it mostly is.