David Borgenicht is the president and publisher of the Philadelphia-based Quirk Books. He founded the company after co-authoring the successful 1999 book The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, which has spawned nearly 30 sequels and a television series. Earlier this year, Borgenicht launched Quirk Classics, which published the best sellers Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (released on April 4) and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (released on Sept. 15). Borgenicht, 41, was born and raised in Utah. We spoke by phone on Oct. 9.

You were 9 when your mother, Nancy Borgenicht, started writing "Saturday's Voyeur." Did her putting a humorous bent on the news affect your future career?

I'm sure it did. She had been affected by years of growing up in a family that produced writers and actors. My grandparents had been doing the Kol Ami Temple Follies for years, which essentially took popular songs and lampooned modern Jewish life in Salt Lake City.

So I think the tendency to take elements of popular culture and mash them up with some other social commentary and humor probably runs strong in my roots.

My father's also a very dedicated writer as well, despite the fact that he's a doctor. He's a pediatrician and he actually wrote one of our books, with my brother, The Baby Owner's Manual.

How did growing up in Utah prepare you to look for the worst-case scenarios in life?

Growing up in Utah definitely gave me exposure to a lot of outdoor activities. Camping, animals, white-water rafting. Things that people in less outdoorsy cities or parts of the country just don't really get exposed to on a daily basis.

And because I had that ironic sense of humor as part of my DNA, I was probably always thinking about, "All right, what do I do if a bear attacks or if I run into a rattlesnake? What if I do fall off this cliff? Then what?"

How did the idea for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies come about?

Our associate publisher, Jason Rekulak, came up with the idea. He'd long been interested in the kind of videos that people were doing with segments of movies and the fan fiction that people would write, in which they'd take famous characters and put them in other stories, and he became really interested in trying to find a way for us to do something like that with a classic novel.

He made this list which was the top 100 great works of literature on the one side, and on the other side of the list were zombies and vampires and monkeys and sea monsters and everything else you could think of. And he just started drawing lines and trying to match them up and think about whether the story would work. When he drew a line from Pride and Prejudice to zombies, he just knew he'd found the one we needed to try.

Then he went to one of our funniest authors, Seth Grahame-Smith, with the idea, and Seth immediately loved it, too.

It's a different author for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. How do you decide who would best write these?

Seth just didn't want to write another mash-up. He wanted to write a totally original book. He went off and is publishing a book called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, that's coming out in the spring I think, with Grand Central Publishing.

So we selected Ben Winters, who we've also worked with before. He's a very talented writer and playwright and he just did an amazing job with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Why do you think people are so fascinated by the injection of horror elements into classic literature?

Monsters and horror movies are extremely popular right now. There's a huge resurgence in horror movies in general; you've got the Twilight phenomenon happening, all those vampire dramas on TV, zombie movies have resurged recently. So there's a hug fanbase for horror.

And Jane Austen is kind of unique in the world of classic literature in that she's on many women's Top 10 writers list. So you take this huge horror fanbase and this huge Jane Austen fanbase and mush 'em together, and strangely they mix.

And there's something about the contrast between this proper-society, comedy-of-manners type novel that provides a unique contrast with something so unmannered as zombies.

You haven't announced the third Quirk Classic yet?

We have not. We're announcing that, I think in a few weeks, probably. We've got three more planned for sure for next year.

What are a couple of your favorite titles that have been suggested that aren't usable because they're based on works that haven't passed into the public domain?

One of my favorites was The Color Purple Is Often the Color of Zombies. I thought that was pretty good. And there was As I Lay Dying Because a Zombie Just Ripped My Brains Out.

So you're partial to zombies, yourself, then?

Well, yeah. Those are definitely the more entertaining monsters.

Can you either confirm or deny the planning of Wuthering Bites?

Somebody's doing it, but we're not publishing it. We feel like there's too much vampire stuff out there. Many of these imitators are doing vampire Jane Austen novels. Jane Bites Back and Mr. Darcy, Vampyre are others. So everybody is like, "Oh, vampires," but we'd rather try to surprise people a little bit more with what we'll pick.

What makes you happy about Quirk Books in general?

It's a small group of incredibly creative, talented people who are making books that we all think need to exist.

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