Liebling’s voice, the novelist and Francophile James Salter wrote in 1986, was “unmistakable, that of a large, unkempt man with a gift as exact as Cyril Connolly’s, rummaging around in a huge bin of what might be called demi-classical references: literary, gastronomic, sporting, historic.” It is Liebling’s very breadth of appetites and subjects that has kept his books sliding in and out of print in the four decades since his death. But his 100th birthday this October provides a happy publishing excuse to get some old Liebling works into new covers.

Liebling is recognizable to many current readers as a Francophile memoirist largely due to the reissued account of his student year, 1926-27, spent eating and wandering in Paris. “Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris” (North Point Press, 167 pages, $13) was Liebling’s last book, appearing two years before Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” a work beside which it stands with increasing ease. North Point has retained the superb introduction by James Salter.

But Liebling began as a newspaperman and writer of “low-life” pieces, some of which make up “The Telephone Booth Indian” (241 pages, $12 paper), newly reissued from Broadway Books as an oddly fitting part of its “Library of Larceny” series edited by Luc Sante.

New York-born Liebling’s infamous “Chicago: The Second City” recently reissued by Bison Books, (143 pages, $15.95 paper), while full of wonderful phrasemaking (and Saul Steinberg’s illustrations), is his single bit of extended peevishness. Chicago ironically embraced the insult (which lives on in the name of its comedy troupe) and would be lucky to receive it now. Bison Books has also reissued Liebling’s wonderful war reportage in “Mollie & Other War Pieces”(286 pages, $15.95 paper).

The centerpiece of the centenary publications is “Just Enough Liebling” (North Point Press, 560 pages, $27.50), with a fondly observant foreword by current New Yorker editor David Remnick. This sampler reflects its era’s sense of Liebling just as earlier ones (“The Most of A.J. Liebling”; “Liebling Abroad”) did theirs. The main Liebling genres – which he crossed and recrossed on nearly every page – are broadly represented. The press criticism is sadly if understandably minimized. The boxing writing contains some favorite clashes without poaching too much from North Point’s new edition of “The Sweet Science.” The war pieces, lowlife portraiture, and memoirs give enough of a taste that one hopes readers will go to the full books from which they are excerpted.

Outside of “The Sweet Science” my favorite Liebling book is one that, oddly enough, has been kept faithfully in print for decades, “The Earl of Louisiana” (Louisiana State University Press, 252 pages, $17.95). It is the gaudily engaging story of Louisiana Governor Earl Long’s last campaign, which has everything in it Liebling thrived on.