About Valancourt Books

James D. Jenkins is Publisher and Editor for Valancourt Books. He holds an MA from Chicago and a JD from Minnesota, and in addition to running Valancourt Books, he practices law in Missouri. Besides publishing 18th & 19th century books, he also studies and writes about them. He has presented at numerous academic conferences in the US and Canada and has recently published his first article, on the law and Gothic literature (co-written with Diane Hoeveler) in European Romantic Review. A past resident of Minneapolis, Seattle, Dublin, and Lyon, he currently lives and works in Kansas City.

Ryan Cagle is Design Editor for Valancourt Books. He makes all those pretty book covers y'all love so much. Lately, he's also started taking a role in deciding which books we should publish (Demon of Sicily and Castle of Berry Pomeroy were his ideas). Originally from New Orleans, he now lives and works in Kansas City.

Valancourt is the furry, purring spirit who haunts our offices. We rescued him from a very Gothic imprisonment at the Seattle Animal Shelter in November 2004, and he has brightened our lives ever since. Valancourt enjoys eating, playing with artificial mice, and lying on the porch in the sun. (And a big thank you to Francis King, who recently helped us identify Valancourt as an "American Ragdoll")

The heterochromic Vathek is the latest addition to our family. We adopted him the day after Thanksgiving 2005 at Harmony House in Chicago. He loves to chase strings, have his back scratched, and eat. Possessing something of a split personality, he is usually docile and as loyal and loving as a dog, and yet when encountering mice, birds, and other cats, he morphs into a killing machine, unleashing the full power and fury of his razor-sharp claws and teeth. As you can see from the picture, he also enjoys proofreading (proofeating?)

Valancourt Books is an independent small (micro) press founded in March 2005 and presently based in Kansas City, specializing in quality new editions of rare literature from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gothic Classics, our flagship series, reprints rare Gothic fiction from the 1790s to the 1820s. Many of the titles in the series existed in fewer than five copies worldwide before our new editions; scholars and readers interested in reading these wonderful texts were forced to travel thousands of miles to a university rare book room or pay thousands of dollars to obtain a copy from an antiquarian bookseller. Within the Gothic Classics series is a set of the "horrid novels" read by Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, five of which have already appeared, with the other two currently in the works. We have also begun to release some of the rarest Gothic novels in limited hardcover editions, including The Forest of Valancourt; or, The Haunt of the Banditti (1813) by Peter Middleton Darling, a novel so rare that it has survived only in a single copy, at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Forthcoming volumes in the series will include works by Charles Robert Maturin, Charlotte Dacre, Francis Lathom, Ann Radcliffe, Eleanor Sleath, T. J. Horsley Curties, and many others.

Valancourt Classics seeks out unjustly forgotten literary classics and makes them newly available in annotated scholarly editions. Recent volumes to appear in this series include Ann Radcliffe's posthumous Gaston de Blondeville (1826), Baron de la Motte-Fouqué's masterpiece The Magic Ring (1825), Arthur Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp (1894), and Forrest Reid's The Garden God (1905).

We have a new series of popular literature of the 1890s, which spotlights lesser-known works by celebrated writers like Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard and resurrects forgotten bestsellers by such authors as Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, and Bertram Mitford.

Recently we have also begun to republish neglected works from the 20th century. So far we have issued novels by Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, and Forrest Reid, and many other books, including two by Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo) are in the works. We are also moving into contemporary fiction with an edition of Francis King's An Air That Kills (1948) and forthcoming reprints of Stephen Gilbert's The Burnaby Experiments (1952) and C.H.B. Kitchin's magnificent The Book of Life (1960).

Finally, although we do our best to seek out all the older books deserving republication, we sometimes miss one, and we always welcome suggestions as to new additions to our catalogue.