Suppose for a moment that you want a copy of The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume IX for your home library. Until recently, unless you happened to stumble across it at a place that deals in rare books, you couldn’t have it at any price. Now, though, you can — as well as any of about 100 other classics — because of a print-on-demand partnership between the Harvard University Press and Acme Bookbinding, a Boston firm that is the oldest binding company in the country.

Sure, it will set you back $95. But in six to 11 days, you’ll have a high-quality, hardcover version that looks and feels very much like an original edition.

" We have so many really important, significant works that have gone out of print and that were really expensive to print again in the traditional way, particularly in that the market was kind of unpredictable, " says Mary Kate Maco, publicity director for Harvard University Press. The problem, she explains, is that it’s much cheaper per book to print several thousand copies rather than, say, several dozen. " What do we do if we don’t think we can sell thousands of copies, but we’re sure we can sell tens or hundreds of copies per year? " she asks.

The answer to that question comes in the form of a partnership Harvard struck last November with Acme. The Charlestown-based, family-owned business, founded in 1821, has been doing quite a bit of digital copying and binding for libraries in recent years, says Acme’s president, Paul Parisi, who is himself a Harvard graduate. He adds that it was not a huge leap to move from the one-book-at-a-time work that libraries need to publishing small quantities of books for Harvard’s customers.

" The craftsmanship that went into these old books is extraordinarily complex, " Parisi says. " We’re creating a book that looks like the original, which was made perhaps 100 years ago. " The technology, he adds, allows publishers to keep alive old books that would otherwise become unavailable: " With our model, nothing is out of print, ever. "

For now, at least, Harvard University Press is focusing on long-out-of-print classics, including essays and other works by William James, Adams-family correspondence, the letters of William Lloyd Garrison, and Frank Luther Mott’s five-volume History of American Magazines, which encompasses the years 1741 to 1930. Eventually, though, Maco says print-on-demand technology will be used for some current works as well — ensuring that a writer with something important to say, but without a mass audience to say it to, will be able to get the word out years into the future.