I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty and substance perish out of print — because the ideas they conduct are not the easiest and most marketable, because amid a culture that reduces literature to a commodity and binds readers in a moral paradox they ask us to think more widely and feel more deeply.

Having always believed that the most valiant way to complain is to create, I have joined forces with my friends at McNally Jackson — New York’s most beloved independent bookstore, and the independent publisher with whom I partnered on my Almanac of Birds — to launch Marginalian Editions: an act of resistance to the erasures of culture and a loving corrective for the collective selective memory called history.

Every year, Marginalian Editions revives three such out-of-print treasures that offer a torchlight in our search for meaning — from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s books. I introduce each with a reflection on how it has shaped my inner world and why our world needs it. Some are forgotten books by beloved writers like Margaret Wise Brown, Henry Miller, and Diane Ackerman. Some are books of timeless resonance by forgotten visionaries like Kathleen Lonsdale (the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and peace activist who became the first woman to preside over the British Association of Sciences and helped keep the Cold War from ending in a nuclear holocaust), Jane Ellen Harrison (the iconoclastic historian who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, bridged science and religion, and influenced writers as various as Virginia Woolf and Mary Beard), and Hockley Clarke (a onetime teenage soldier who spent a decade befriending a family of blackbirds).

This is our inaugural trio: