Poor Folk
With outside investment that principally came from Horace Liveright's father-in-law, paper executive Herman Elsas, Boni &amp; Liveright incorporated on February 16, 1917. Though Liveright had no publishing experience (he had been a bond and paper salesman), Albert Boni recently had run a Greenwich Village bookshop with his brother, Charles. Boni's association with Village bohemia and his earlier success publishing a line of inexpensive, pocket-sized classics called the Little Leather Library served as inspiration for B&amp;L's debut list called "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books." A mix of well-known and hard-to-find literature priced at 60 cents apiece and bound in lambskin, the "Modern Library" in 1917, according to biographer Walker Gilmer, "reflected the avant-garde influence of [Albert Boni's] Washington Square book-borrowing friends: Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; Strindberg, "Married"; Kipling, "Soldiers Three"; Stevenson, "Treasure Island"; Wells, "The War in the Air"; Ibsen, "A Doll's House", "An Enemy of the People", and "Ghosts"; France, "The Red Lily"; de Maupassant, "Mademoiselle Fifi, and Other Stories"; Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"; Dostoyevsky, "Poor Folk"; Maeterlinck, "A Miracle of Saint Anthony"; and Schopenhauer, ""."