"When we started the company I immediately wanted to do a novella line," Johnson said. "I always loved the form and felt that I should champion it. I felt it was neglected. Not only because I had written them and put them away: It just seemed like nobody knew that most of the great writers of history have written novellas."

Their decision to launch a line of classic novellas generated fierce opposition from advisers, and received outright disdain from colleagues in publishing. Johnson remembers a famous publisher, whom he wouldn't name, vowing he would "eat his hat" if they could sell Joyce's "The Dead" as a standalone volume. Thin-lipped sales reps promised that "The Art of the Novella," if greenlighted, would amount to a quixotic and very public form of suicide.

"No one had done it before," Johnson told me. "It was a new idea, and new ideas always meet resistance. The publishing industry, like anything else, is uncomfortable with change. If somebody hasn't done it before, the thinking goes, there must be a reason for it."

Industry consultants especially decried the simple—Johnson would say elegant—single-color editions. He remembers a sales rep angrily accusing him of "wasting the real estate of the cover."

Still, Melville House released their first five novellas, in print runs of 3,000, in 2004. Henry James's "The Lesson of the Master," Anton Chekhov's "My Life," Leo Tolstoy's "The Devil," and a forgotten Edith Wharton gem called "The Touchstone" were the first four. The fifth book was the Herman Melville classic "Bartleby, the Scrivener," available on its own for the first time.

It was large and risky investment, and prognosis, in some corners, was grim. But the strangest thing happened. The novellas began to sell. And sell.

Inadvertently, Johnson said, Melville House "had come up with a way of having a classics line that featured very famous names but lesser-known works in most cases." The series quickly became profitable. Because all the works were public domain, there weren't authors to pay—only translators, and not in all cases. They saved money on the simple design, which turned out to be a boon ("people really responded to not only what the books were, but the look of them," Johnson said. "People liked the look enough to show them off.") The end result was an eye-catching series of "new" and overlooked books by beloved authors, priced reasonably. Customers snapped them up.

"We were lucky in that it worked pretty well pretty quickly," Johnson said. Many of the first books, and the ones that followed, are in multiple printings—even James Joyce's "The Dead." So what about the editor who said it wouldn't sell?

"I have a hat here on my desk, waiting for him," Johnson said.

DESPITE THE SUCCESS of the series, contemporary novella writers still face an uphill battle. Encouraged by the success of their classics line, Melville House launched a sister series called "The Contemporary Art of the Novella," in 2006. Showcasing mid-length works from living authors, this collection of 15 books demonstrates the form's current diversity and vibrancy with works from well-known practitioners like Steve Stern and Lore Segal and young guns like Tao Lin.