Yana Paskova / The New York TimesEdwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books, at the office in New York. Founded in 1999, NYRB has made a specialty of rescuing and reviving all kinds of ignored or forgotten works.

In 1882, writer Anton Chekhov, just 22 and beginning his literary career, submitted a dozen short stories to Czar Alexander III’s censors, who discerned a subversive intent and promptly forbade publication of the collection, called “The Prank.” The satirical tales then languished in official archives for more than 130 years — until last week, when they were finally published, in English, by New York Review Books.

Publication of an overlooked work by a master like Chekhov would obviously be a coup for any publishing house, large or small. But New York Review Books, the publishing offshoot of the literary magazine The New York Review of Books, has made a specialty of rescuing and reviving all kinds of ignored or forgotten works in English or in translation, fiction and nonfiction, by writers renowned and obscure.

In April, for example, the publishing house marked the 150th anniversary of the end of the U.S. Civil War by making Walt Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” available, unexpurgated for the first time since its original release in 1865. And in January, it inaugurated Calligrams, a new series devoted to literature about China, with a Tan dynasty work of literary criticism, a collection of ancient poems and a 100-year-old novel, “The Three Leaps of Wang Lun,” by German writer Alfred Doblin, best known as the author of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929).

“From the beginning, it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue,” said Edwin Frank, the house’s editorial director. “We set out to do the whole mix of things that a curious person might be interested in, which would take you back and forth from fiction to certain kinds of history.”

New York Review Books was founded in 1999, when the mainstream U.S. publishing houses were shifting their focus to big frontlist titles and paying less attention to their back catalogs, sometimes allowing the rights to books that weren’t selling well to lapse, and also cutting back on literature in translation.

“We were picking low-hanging fruit, only no one knew the fruit was out there, hanging from the branches,” Frank said.

Over the years, the publishing house has revived work by English-language authors including Henry Adams, Kingsley Amis, Edith Wharton and Angus Wilson. In translation, it has issued works by authors like Adolfo Bioy Casares, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Robert Walser and Stefan Zweig.

Writer and critic Ian Buruma, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, which was founded in 1963 and is published online and every two weeks in print, said the publishing arm fills an important niche.

“Because they are smaller and more nimble, they can do things that larger houses would be less inclined to do,” he said. “They pick up books that maybe 30 years ago, the big publishers would have done but now have to be careful about.”

Since the mid-1990s, some other small publishing houses have also emerged to pursue a similar approach, including Archipelago, Europa Editions, Melville House, Open Letter and Seven Stories Press. But New York Review Books has cast its net wider than most.

In addition to its classics series, which includes the Chekhov, it has divisions that specialize in children’s books, poetry (the Whitman book) and one edited by Michael Shae that produces collections of essays by contributors to the book review. A recent example is “After the Tall Timber,” a collection of Renata Adler’s nonfiction published in April, two years after it revived two of her novels, “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark.”

The imprint operates from the same quarters on Hudson Street in the West Village as the book review publication, and contributors to the review are among those who make recommendations to Frank on what he might want to publish. (There is also a corner of its website where readers can make suggestions.) But the two entities have sought to maintain separate identities and finances.

“There is a relationship between the two, but it’s fairly tenuous,” said Buruma, whose 1994 book, “The Wages of Guilt,” about the legacy of World War II in Germany and Japan, will be reissued by the publishing arm in September. “The paper will often publish the introductions to the classics as pieces adapted to the magazine, but that’s the only connection.”

Frank describes the publishing arm as analogous to “the great little vinyl record stores,” and the classics series as “a not so small vinyl bin” that browsers can riffle through in search of something they like. The books have a uniform typeface and design that give them a common identity, in much the way that Blue Note Records releases look similar and encourage jazz fans to dip into the catalog.

“As a long-term strategy, that’s really the perfect model, because it gives you more passionate fans,” said Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter, a competitor that specializes in literature in translation. “You are going to have a hard time competing on a grand scale with Penguin, Random House, FSG or whoever else. So they’ve said, ‘We are going to find the most passionate fans who love all of our books, rather than take one book and try to outsell Penguin.’”

The imprint has lucked into the occasional best-seller, which provides a financial cushion that allows Frank to take risks with more experimental works. A revival of John Williams’ 1965 novel, “Stoner,” for example, has been a commercial and critical success since its reissue in 2006, and not just in English: Translated into several languages, it has reached the top of the best-seller list in some European countries.

A 2006 translation of Vasily Grossman’s World War II epic, “Life and Fate,” is another novel that has found a larger-than-expected audience. But while the company makes money, its publishing philosophy seems driven more by aesthetic than by commercial considerations.

“This is not a nonprofit — it should make money, yes, so that’s certainly a consideration,” Frank said. “But the imperative is to publish good books. That comes first.”

Ventures like the Calligrams series are unlikely to make much money, at least at first. New York Review Books had previously published China-related material, from the poetry of Tu Fu to a collection of Simon Leys’ essays about Chinese art and literature called “The Hall of Uselessness,” but thought that more was needed.

“There is a tremendous amount of literature from classical China that should be known,” said essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger, who edits the Calligrams series. “There are so many other places publishing books about contemporary or modern China, so I didn’t want to go there.”

For Weinberger, the mere existence of New York Review Books offers a larger lesson: Even in this day and age of rampant commercialism, “you can run a completely successful publishing company just publishing serious literary books.”