As always, we look to any year's reprints as a barometer of the publishing industry's imagination, if not necessarily its overall health. Reprints can be driven by explicitly commercial factors, of course – the vast academic book-market is entirely positioned on the base of selling reprinted canonical classics to students – but often they're passion projects on the part of enthusiastic readers inside the industry. 2021 had an encouragingly wide array of interesting reprints. These were the best of them:

10 Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories (Library of America) – The great science fiction author gets her own volume in the signature American reprint series, including her masterpiece Kindred, giving a broader readership – and old devoted fans – a sturdy volume to read and re-read.

9 Jean Stafford: Collected Stories & Other Writings (Library of America) – The Library of America reprint series revisits the writings of Jean Stafford, here collecting for the first time her short stories and groundbreaking nonfiction occasional writing. This volume forms the perfect companion the LOA's earlier collection of Stafford's novels.

8 Superman by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason Omnibus (DC Comics) – The greatest, most iconic superhero of them all, the last son of the doomed planet Krypton, has had many incarnations over the decades, and this one – written by Peter Tomasi and drawn by Patrick Gleason – was the most recent truly great Superman comic book run, giving readers a thoroughly grounded Man of Steel as husband and father.

7 Aesop’s Fables, translated by V.S. Vernon Jones and illustrated by Agnes Miller Parker (Bodleian Library) - Blessings on the University of Oxford for lavishing such meticulous production values on this reprint of Vernon Jones’s eloquent century-old translation of Aesop, paired with the magnificent artwork of Agnes Miller Parker, one of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century. To put it mildly, there’s no shortage of illustrated editions of Aesop - but it’s wonderful to have the best of them in a new printing.

6 Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy (Library of America) – This further triumph of the Library of America line collects Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea by the pioneering author of Silent Spring. This new volume is even prettier than its LOA predecessor, and the “Sea Trilogy” represents some of Carson's most eloquent, personal writing.

5 Sabriel by Garth Nix (25th anniversary) (HarperCollins) – It's almost impossible to believe that it's been a quarter of a century since this first volume in what became Garth Nix's “Old Kingdom” series appeared, and here it gets a smart reprint to bring its elegant tale of healing and redemption to a new readership.

4 The Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian (WW Norton) – Kudos to the good folks at WW Norton for giving Patrick O'Brian's epic Napoleonic-era seafaring saga this beautiful relaunch with new cover art. Anything that gives these endlessly enjoyable (and disarmingly funny) novels greater currency is to be applauded.

3 The Lord of the Rings Illustrated Edition by JRR Tolkien (HarperCollins) – This gorgeous new edition of Tolkien's masterpiece is the first to feature all of the author's own artwork, in addition to half a dozen other special features designed to tempt even long-time readers who have an … immoderate number of earlier editions already.

2 The Letters of Shirley Jackson, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman (Random House) – Shirley Jackson's son here assembles many previously-unpublished letters by the great author, shaped together into an endlessly interesting and surprisingly touching epistolary biography. These letters shed light on every period of Jackson's life and every stage of her creativity; her delightfully sharp tongue and unerring eye for psychological detail fills these pages.

1 The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, annotated by Merve Emre (Liveright) – Brilliant scholar Merve Emre here makes the shrewd decision to load Virginia Woolf's comparatively slim and brilliant novel with an almost daunting amount of annotation, elaboration, and illustration. But Emre's insights are so perfectly suited to Woolf's writing, and the result is both the most entertaining edition of Mrs. Dalloway but also the year's best reprinted work.