 The catalog was named in honor of Virginia Woolf's two-volume collection of essays, entitled "The Common Reader" (1925) and "The Second Common Reader" (1932), which collected her lectures and writings about the nature of reading and how best to approach it.A Common Reader's in-house publishing imprint, the Akadine Press"," initiated in 1996, republished over 60 out-of-print books by authors such as Lillian Beckwith, Alice Thomas Ellis, Barbara Holland, Reynolds Price, and John Ciardi.A Common Reader was published up to 17 times a year, with a readership in the tens of thousands.