Hayward Cirker, founder and president of Dover Publications, died March 8 in New York City. He was 82. Cirker began his career as a salesman for Crown Publishers and started Dover shortly before joining the navy in World War II.
Beginning in the 1950s, Cirker was a pioneer in developing the trade paperback format; eventually, inexpensive reprints of classical works became a Dover trademark. Dover reprinted titles in a wide range of fields, including science, art, photography, crafts and children's literature; he also built an extensive list of classical music scores. In recent years, Cirker oversaw the launch of the Thrift Edition series, which reprints more than 250 unabridged classics of world literature in paperback volumes priced as low as $1. The Dover catalogue now contains more than 7,000 titles. One of Cirker's innovations, which he never saw widely emulated, was that he sold all his books nonreturnable.
In Dover's early days, Cirker operated as a publisher, printer and bookseller in a single building in lower Manhattan. The company subsequently moved to Mineola, Long Island. During his career, Cirker won numerous awards, including the Carey-Thomas Award for Creative Publishing.
Correction: In our Feb. 28 coverage of the AAP's PSP meeting, Audrey Melkin's statement that her company, Catchword.com, offers libraries access to content upon request and then checks the subscriptions later, should have mentioned two points: to participate, the libraries requesting access must already have subscriptions, and the publisher must agree to the procedure.
