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NEW YORK–One of the most remarkable cultural projects ever undertaken celebrates a milestone this year.

The Library of America (LOA), a non-profit publishing house that has dedicated itself to the preservation of America's literary heritage, turns 25 in May, having sold 7 million books over the years.

LOA was dreamed into being by the great critic Edmund Wilson. "It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form," he wrote in 1962. What was needed was the principal American classics "complete and compact" for the ordinary reader.

Many doubted Wilson's idea could fly, but later on, the project did attract seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation.

"Wilson died in 1972 and we started publishing in 1982," explains Max Rudin, publisher of LOA. "Daniel Aaron (a literature professor at Harvard), his literary executor, was one of our founders."

The LOA has an advisory board of nearly 40 eminent scholars and critics who, along with the publisher and staff, help decide who is fit to stand alongside Mark Twain and Henry James on the shelves. The only living author who currently qualifies is Philip Roth, whose novels and stories the library began reissuing in 2005. This fall LOA will reissue its third volume of Roth, his original Zuckerman trilogy.

"Roth thinks of publication by us as a nice capstone to his career," comments Rudin.

You would not expect such a rigorous publishing effort would flourish in an anything-goes age, when gatekeeping is falling away. Indeed, in the tidy, carpeted offices of Library of America on East 60th St., near Central Park, there is a buoyant, even giddy, feeling that people experience when they've succeeded against the odds.

"It started as two cardboard boxes in my apartment," says Cheryl Hurley, president and chief executive of the press. With a degree in French, she had previously worked for the organization of university teachers of literature, the Modern Languages Association. "Max was here from the beginning, as a research assistant while he was in grad school at Columbia University, working on a PhD in American literature. Richard Poirier was here, too." Poirier, a noted critic of Henry James, is the former chairman of the board.

Sales do not cover publishing costs and Hurley has been ingenious in raising financing from individuals and corporations. "We are extremely fragile financially," Hurley says. "We have no endowment. We keep books in print even if they sell very slowly – that's part of our commitment – and that's expensive."

So are royalties. In the United States, books are in copyright for 95 years after publication and some authors, Ernest Hemingway for one, have not appeared in LOA editions since their heirs make exorbitant demands.

In one money-raising scheme, foundations or individuals are invited to pay $50,000 to be named "guardians" of a title. Hurley opens a volume of political speeches to show me the dedication indicating the Berkley Foundation of Greenwich, Conn., is the book's sponsor.

The press has brought back many out-of-print books and restored texts, notably the work of Richard Wright and William Faulkner, that had been bowdlerized or censored. In its first year, the press issued eight books by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Twain, Jack London and William Dean Howells – the beginning of its core series, printed on fine acid-free paper with a ribbon bookmark, uniformly jacketed in black. By the end of its first decade, LOA had put out 61 books in the "black series." Today that number has risen to 169 and includes work by James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Dashiell Hammett and Louisa May Alcott.

A separate poetry series includes 25 volumes, among them a charming book of lyrics by Cole Porter.

To persuade people to engage with older books is "a huge challenge today" according to Hurley. "Our mission," she says, "is to get people to recognize and appreciate great American writing, not just belles lettres but the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, sermons, memoirs, journalism, political speeches, criticism, plays, film writing.

"We want to showcase all types of American writing because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

The press has published collections of the best reporting from World War II and the Vietnam War, an anthology of writing about New York, and one about baseball – its fastest selling volume. On its spring list is an anthology of the best American writing about food since the late 18th century, edited by Molly O'Neill, former food writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Founder Wilson was inspired by the Les Pleiades editions of high-brow French classics. "Our notion of American writing is more broadly construed," explains Rudin.

Eighty-five per cent of the books sell to individuals, about 20,000 of whom are regular subscribers. About 700 collectors are in the "100 plus" club, since they own at least 100 of the black series.

One of these is Roland Le Blanc, a retired Toronto educator, who has all 169. Originally a subscriber, he now buys his books through Book City. They are, he says, "a delight to use. The notes and the chronology of the author's life are really helpful." LOA does not add introductions because they tend to date.

The books, about $40 each, are distributed here by Penguin Canada and sell surprisingly well according to David Leonard, Penguin's publicist.

Penguin is pushing a volume of four novels from the 1960s by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, to be released in June. It is the first time science fiction has entered the LOA canon, which already includes the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, who died in 1937. "Lovecraft was the missing link between Poe and Stephen King," says Rudin, in defence of such pulp fiction.

The success of LOA speaks of the great confidence of Americans in even their genre writers. But what about Canada? Do we need a similar project?

The closest Canadian equivalent is the New Canadian Library, started by Malcolm Ross for McClelland & Stewart 50 years ago this year. But the NCL, with about 100 books in print, is nowhere near as ambitious, restricting its selections to novels and short stories in cheap mass-market paperbacks.

General editor of the NCL, David Staines, the University of Ottawa literary scholar, says that for now we do not need anything more. "Our literature is too young," he says. (Later this year NCL will get a new look, with some books upgraded to trade paperback format.)

Robert Brandeis, chief librarian of the Pratt Library at Victoria University at the University of Toronto, believes that there is no danger of important Canadian authors being lost to posterity. "Library of America does make things accessible but there are more and more e-books now, so a lot can be found in electronic format," he says.

Publisher and author Barry Callaghan, who has struggled to keep the work of his father, novelist Morley Callaghan, in print, favours creating a comparable high-quality, wide-ranging Canadian reprint house but thinks the logistics would make it impossible. "Who is going to be the senior editor? Who is going to make the decisions? To have a `Library of Canada' you'd have to offend half the academics in the country. And you'd have to do everything in two languages."

Things are more simple in the U.S. On East 60th Street, Cheryl Hurley surveys her bookshelves with satisfaction.

"Max and I worked with our staff to develop the organization," she says. "This has been our life for 25 years. What can be more rewarding?"