What makes a book a classic? Italo Calvino once suggested that the answer is ultimately a matter of personal choice. As he wrote in a 1986 essay for The New York Review of Books, “It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book” — one that you read and reread, always getting something from doing so. This is a nice sentiment, but most of us are accustomed to having classics chosen for us. The original classics enshrined as holy scripture by critics and scholars (tomes by Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, et al.) have, for a long time, served as the standard of literature against which all other books are measured. Like the Bible, these books never go out of print. Until the dawn of the twentieth century, pretty much everything else did.

Then, enterprising publishers began the process of elevating a new set of classics. The first series to position old works of literature as must-reads for the contemporary moment was launched in 1901 by a monocled playboy publisher named Grant Richards. His innovation was simple: to take manuscripts in the public domain and repackage them in affordable editions. For the inaugural title of the World Classics list, Richards reissued Jane Eyre with an introduction by Virginia Woolf; volumes by Charlotte and Emily Brontë as well as Leo Tolstoy and Robert Browning soon followed. His strategy worked too well. Within five years, unable to keep up with demand, Richards sold the series to Oxford and refocused on publishing contemporary literature and managing his aristocratic lifestyle. (He would later bring out Joyce’s Dubliners, go bankrupt twice, and divorce a Bonaparte.)

Richards’s model for reviving forgotten writers — primarily Europeans and Anglo-Americans — inspired imitators. Everyman, a London-based reprinter, and Modern Library, founded in New York, were early competitors. New Directions maintained a New Classics series from 1939 to 1955 that included The Great Gatsby, then officially out of print. Penguin Modern Classics, launched in 1946, would broaden considerations of classic literature to encompass reissues of international and postcolonial novels like G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr and Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps. Vintage Contemporaries, conceived in 1984, nourished reprints and originals from Joy Williams, Don DeLillo, Paule Marshall, and other living American writers. But in the 1990s, competition from other home entertainments and the migration of bookstores into shopping malls prompted many publishers to concentrate on front-list blockbusters and scrimp on their backlists. Hundreds of novels and other literary works lapsed out of print again.

The late ’80s and early ’90s saw the “canon wars,” the great humanities clash over what belonged in the literary pantheon. Students and activists like Jesse Jackson pressured English departments to replace curricula dominated by white, Western men with more women and writers of color. The emergence, in 1999, of a new line of classics from the New York Review Books imprint seemed capable of addressing two problems simultaneously: fraught university politics and the struggling publishing industry’s neglect of back catalogs. “The literature of the world out there,” the press’s founder and editorial director, Edwin Frank, later wrote, “where there were all sorts of extraordinary books that had never even been translated into English, and the literature hidden away in publishers’ backlists, these would be our resource.”

The NYRB Classics series, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, has since published hundreds of reissues to great acclaim. A seasonal NYRBC catalog parades a dozen or so commendable titles rescued from obscurity (with the help of an equally commendable list of translators), dressed in variations of the series’s now iconic book jacket design — a Pantone box of text over a sumptuous work of art. NYRBC has made reprints a status symbol, repopularizing authors like Renata Adler and William Gaddis. Its admirers are legion.

The imprint’s success has inevitably buoyed the very enterprise of reissuing vintage literature and crowded its market with competitors. Now you have imitators cribbing its style, dabblers committed exclusively to a single author’s reappreciation, and rivals blowing the dust off their own backlists or sifting their pans in peripheral waters that the press has barely toed. If you want classic Latin American literature, go to New Directions. Arab and African literature? Archipelago. Even Fitzcarraldo, a house famous for publishing only living writers, has launched a line of classic books, starting with Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma, a Brazilian classic of Joycean proportions. The world is becoming more readable to the West — hallelujah. But the business of literary classics will always be, in some sense, playing a game of catch-up. There are about the same number of NYRB Classics from Russia as there are from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and all of Asia and Oceania combined.

Although publishers like NYRBC have succeeded in shifting the debate from what ought to be read toward what deserves the chance to be read, the power to direct the attention of the Anglophone literary establishment and the reading public still lies in too few hands. It is difficult to avoid curators’ or algorithms’ biases; it is near impossible to go against your own. Even as the pool from which to discover such work expands — as does the assemblage of editors, scholars, professors, and translators angling to contribute — we still rely on others to anoint classics for us. That is, if we bother to read them at all. It is human to stick to what is known, but now is the time to encourage the growth and exploration of what we don’t know; to tend to this growing list of classics; to revisit, remake, and reshape it; to recover from the past and passed over those works of literary art that would be timeless and timely in our present and future. This is how eclecticism is practiced, and, like any discipline, it requires consistent rehearsal.