In case you haven't noticed, the old "blog" function has migrated to the message board (the "discuss" link).  So check it out!

We've added a "Message Board" accessible from the main page.  You can post any comments or questions you have about Valancourt Books, or start a discussion about one of our titles, or anything you like.  We're new to the whole message board concept, so this is something of an experiment.  Go ahead and post something...you know you want to!

We hope everyone is receiving their books and enjoying them!  We are still waiting on more copies, so if you ordered it since the 25th, yours is not on the way to you yet.  But it will arrive eventually.

We sent J. Sheridan Le Fanu's The Rose and the Key (1871) to the printers this morning, and it should be up for order within 10 days or so.  It should be a tremendous edition -- or at least it certainly ought to be, for all the work we (and the editor, Frances Chiu) put into it! 

In November we will be finishing up the herculean projects of GWM Reynolds's The Necromancer and Corelli's Sorrows of Satan, as well as Shelley's The Cenci.  From now until December, it's mad crunch time to get as many wonderful editions out in time for MLA in December.  Then, in January, we're shutting down the computer for a month and taking some much needed time for R&R!

I shipped all copies of the Halloween special for which I had received orders as of this morning.  Any orders that come in between now and Halloween will not arrive in time for Halloween, as our initial print run was exhausted and we would have to wait for more copies to arrive.  However, everyone else should have theirs by Halloween, including European customers, unless the UK postal strike holds things up. 

Also, a new Marsh book is available for order, Philip Bennion's Death.  We issued it with a vintage 'pulp fiction'-type cover, and in a slightly smaller size format, to replicate as far as possible the experience of an early 'dime' mystery novel.  We hope you like it.

Greetings from Winnipeg!  I'm just back from a most interesting trip to look at Montague Summers's papers and effects.  I'm one of very few people to have seen these since his death, and likely the first to see them who actually had some idea what they were.

I was a little skeptical at first when I received an email from a woman claiming to have his papers.  After all, how could his papers have ended up in Manitoba, of all places?  As it turns out, this woman's uncle was Montague Summers's secretary and presumably lover, since he was made Summers's legatee and is buried in the same grave with him.

The papers were contained in four fairly large boxes, along with a small case and a large suitcase.  The papers in the suitcase, unfortunately, had been exposed to damp and many of them were stuck together, or their ink had run; these papers were also covered in a great deal of dirt.  The papers in the boxes were in better shape, although unless held together by rusty staples or rusty paperclips, these papers were hopelessly dissheveled and out of any kind of order.  The papers' owners informed me that some other boxes, mostly containing newspaper clippings, but also some other papers, were irreparably damaged in a flood and discarded.

Before examining the papers, which I had only a couple hours to do -- woefully inadequate for a proper inspection, the woman (whose name I won't print here, in case she should object) showed me some of Summers's religious objects.  He had a dozen or more reliquaries, each containing a piece of bone or hair from a Saint; one of them purported to have a piece of wood from the Cross on which Christ was crucified.  The woman seemed to believe it was authentic, and Summers, who was a better Catholic and a better scholar than I am, must have believed it, so who am I to doubt?  They also had a wooden box, which opened into a sort of portable writing-desk, monogrammed with Summers's initials, "M.S." on the top.

The papers were extremely desultory in character.  Summers was apparently a bit of a pack-rat, conserving every scrap of paper he ever accumulated in his life.  There were countless newspaper clippings, sometimes reviews of his books or reviews of theatre productions, countless playbills and other theatre-related memorabilia.  A couple of these playbills were wrapped separately in a sheet of paper, with Summers's admonition to future possessors, "Careful!  These are rare and apparently unique!"  A huge quantity of letters to Summers, including some on Fortune Press letterhead, and a great many from readers of his books on Witchcraft, &c., asking him questions or praising his work.  One of the Fortune Press letters I read was interesting -- the publisher acknowledged Summers's request for payment for his books, but said the publishing trade was tough, he had no money, &c., &c., and asked if Summers would accept 20 or 30 copies of the book as payment instead!  One can imagine Summers was not impressed with that arrangement.

Summers's will, a couple copies of it, along with the will of his sister (bequeathing him any of her books he wanted) and the will of his father, giving Summers an income from a trust account, were all among the papers.  In his will, Summers left his estate to his aforementioned secretary with an income for life, and the remainder to go to two women, Mrs. Grenville-Somebody and Miss Somebody.  The provisions of his will were relatively few, and interestingly do not mention his literary estate, copyrights, &c.  He did specify, in item #4, that he was under no circumstances to be cremated, and that his body was to be "decently interred."  He also requested, although noted that it was nonbinding, that his relics and religious artifacts go to a certain nunnery, which he named.  Apparently this was not carried out.

Significantly, some have questioned over the years Summers's use of "Rev.", perhaps assuming that like Frederick Rolfe, the eccentric Summers had assumed a false religious title.  In fact, his ordination papers were among the papers, thus proving Summers was no impostor.

One item I was fascinated by was a notebook, with a handwritten title on the cover, "Gothic Novel Notes".  On the first page, the first entry, is Lathom's The Midnight Bell; the next page has notes on Lathom's Young John Bull and Live and Learn.  To me, this suggests that Summers, like myself, was first and foremost interested in Francis Lathom.  Sheafs of papers containing notes for what was to become The Gothic Quest were also there.  Pages and pages of reviews, copied out by hand from 1790s issues of The Monthly Review, etc., and even entire chapters copied out by hand from novels like The Mysterious Baron and The Mysteries of the Forest.  Also, there were numerous letters from librarians at the Bodleian and elsewhere, responding to Summers's requests for information on various authors.  I found one from one library, detailing what was known of William Radcliffe, Ann's father.

A number of Summers's manuscripts and typescripts were also there.  There were twenty or so pages of manuscripts of poems, which may have been of some of Summers's early Uranian poems, but as I know little of these and had no time to examine the manuscripts, I cannot be certain.  There were several manuscript outlines for what was to become The Gothic Quest; the MS outlines are titled variously, The Gothic Romance, History of the Gothic Romance, and Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic Romance.  There was also a very thick sheaf of papers, bound up in twine, which appeared to represent a complete draft manuscript of The Gothic Quest; I did not undo the twine and examine them in detail.  Also present were a MS and typescript for six ghost stories by Summers.  One very interesting item I found was a bound typescript for a play, entited William Henry, and with, as characters, William Henry Ireland and his father Samuel.  The play was in several acts and appeared to be complete, and presumably dealt with the forgery of the Shakespeare papers.  There were dozens of typescripts and manuscripts for articles, on everything from Ouida to Anthony Trollope, to various places in England.  I assume most of these were published in various magazines or journals, but perhaps some of them were unpublished. 

Also present were a great deal of papers belonging to S. (Stewart) M. Ellis, author of an important book on Harrison Ainsworth.  There was a large 4to volume containing reviews of Ellis's Ainsworth book, together with letters from important personages, including Ouida, Marie Corelli, and Dickens's sister-in-law, and Thackeray's daughter.  I don't know anything about Ellis or why all his papers were mixed in with Summers's.  Were they lovers?

It has long been rumoured that Summers was working on a sequel to The Gothic Quest, entitled The Gothic Achievement, and focusing on Mary Meeke, among others.  However, I found no trace of this among his papers, although of course I did not have the time to examine each one in detail.

Now to wax poetic -- although it was very exciting to look at these papers, it was also very sad.  To think that the work of a lifetime, thousands of pages of notes, accumulated at length at various libraries in England, &c., should end up in the possession of people who have no regard for it is galling.  One almost understands those writers who direct their executors to burn their papers.  And as I looked through the papers I couldn't help but feel a certain affinity for Summers.  I, too, have -- in the filing cabinet in my office -- a small notebook, containing manuscript notes on Francis Lathom.  Among Summers's papers was a handwritten family tree for "Rosa Matilda", listing her father, John King, her sister Sophia, her brother, her children -- I have done a similar thing for Francis Lathom's family.  There's something vaguely sad about the idea of a man of Summers's abilities, spending decades in libraries, writing notes, publishing books that will be condemned as "unscholarly", dying alone, desperately hoping not to be cremated, and leaving all his money to his secretary.

Hopefully all of you got the email about the Halloween special, James Jenkins the Miser.  If you've bought anything from the website before, you should be on our mailing list.  If you want to be on our mailing list (we only send out emails about 2 or 3 times per year -- you won't be spammed, don't worry), email us.

Nada the Lily is up for sale on Amazon.  I don't think anybody's bought one yet, so I'm guessing people either aren't thrilled about the meditative looking African man on the cover, or else the title sounds fairly tame.  Actually the book is a lot of fun -- the highlight is Galazi, who is king of an army of evil ghost-wolves.  Hopefully some of the readers of our other titles will give it a chance -- even if, like me, you're not terribly into African-themed novels, this one really is a page-turner.

The Rose and the Key will be off to the printers within the next week.  It features a brilliant and groundbreaking new introduction by Frances Chiu (who previously edited Gaston de Blondeville for Valancourt Books), who argues for a new view of Le Fanu. 

Our latest Richard Marsh novel, Philip Bennion's Death, is being printed, and should be available for order within a week or so.  Sometimes I feel bad about churning out Marsh novel after Marsh novel, when there are so many other great authors out there waiting to be reprinted, but hey, if sales are any indication, our readers prefer the Marsh books to anything else we do.

Finally, Valancourt Books is off to the Arctic Circle for a few days (well, Winnipeg, anyway -- isn't that close enough?) for the Canadian Society for 18th Century Studies conference.  So site updates and emails might be a bit sporadic until Monday.

Expect to see many new releases this month.  Manfroné and Glenarvon are already available, and H. Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily will be up for order in the next few days.

We are also publishing the following books this month (and probably all within the next week): Anna Maria Mackenzie's Monmouth (1790), a book so rare that it exists in only two known copies (one of which I have the good fortune to own), Sheridan Le Fanu's The Rose and the Key (1871), Bram Stoker's Miss Betty (1898) and Richard Marsh's Philip Bennion's Death (1898).

Depending on how badly I want to overwork myself to death, Sorrows of Satan (1896) and/or The Necromancer (the 1850s GWM Reynolds novel) will head to the printers late this month or early the next.

Meanwhile, we're headed tomorrow on a long journey to the Midwest American Society for 18th Century Studies conference, taking place about a mile up the road, to display books, followed by a longer trip to Winnipeg next week for the Canadian Society for 18th Century Studies.  Hopefully we sell lots of books at that one and bring back lots of Canadian dollars, since American ones are so worthless at the moment!

We're excited -- another Valancourt title has just received a positive review in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement.

Here's what Jon Barnes wrote of our edition of The Garden God: 

THE GARDEN GOD. A tale of two boys. By Forrest Reid. Edited by Michael

Matthew Kaylor 102pp. Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books. $14.95;

distributed in the UK by Bertram's. Paperback, £7.99. 978 1 934 555 04 0

Forrest Reid was not a man with whom it was politic to be too publicly

associated. His novel, The Garden God, published in November 1905 in a

lavish limited edition bound in vellum and gold, was dedicated to Henry

James ("this slight token of respect and admiration") but, after

reading it, James abruptly and irrevocably ceased all contact with its

author. Reid cuts no less troubling a figure to the modern eye. The writer

of sixteen novels and two volumes of autobiography, he was the kind of

man who made friends with other people's children, who took up stamp

collecting so that he might more easily approach small boys and engage

them in philatelic chat. Though Reid's biographer, Brian Taylor, insists

that "if there can be such a thing as a puritanical pederast, Forrest

Reid was that person", Reid's career was marred by inappropriate

attachments, by whispers of scandal, by intimations of thwarted desire.

The Garden God concerns the doomed friendship between two schoolboys -

the languid Graham Iddesleigh whose sole gift is a "capacity for

sitting in the sun" and the lissom Harold Brocklehurst, whose "eyes were blue

and dark and clear, his nose straight, his mouth extraordinarily fine,

delicate; his dark hair, soft and silky, falling in a single great

wave over his shapely forehead". On their first meeting, Iddesleigh feels

"an ecstasy of happiness . . . as if the summer were quite suddenly and

unexpectedly come; as if the whole world were full of happiness and

sunshine", and swiftly finds himself desiring that the other boy's hands

should be "laid softly upon his own forehead, or over his mouth and

eyes".

This new edition from the American small press Valancourt Books is

scholarly, meticulous and comprehensive, with an introduction by its editor

Michael Matthew Kaylor, in which the case for Reid's literary

rehabilitation and canonicity is energetically rehearsed. Nonetheless, it is

not difficult to understand Henry James's reaction. The Garden God still

feels dangerously overheated, its prose filled with the quality of

overripe fruit - sensual and sweet, but with the promise of corruption

underneath.

Busy, busy, busy here at Valancourt.

Yesterday, we submitted our special book to the printers and will have order information up for it soon.  It will be priced at $10 US, and although it's fairly short, I think everyone'll agree it's worth the ten bucks.

We have myriad books on the verge of going to the printers, notably Glenarvon and H. Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily.  I am also proofreading GWM Reynolds' The Necromancer and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan.  And, getting back to our roots, I've resumed (after a long hiatus), typing T. J. Horsley Curties's Ethelwina (1799), which is a fantastic Gothic novel.

Manfroné is done and as soon as Amazon lists it, we'll post a link to purchase it.  The cover is great, you'll love it!

Valancourt Books readers and fans: please do us a favour!  If you've enjoyed our books, PLEASE take a moment or two to post a short review on Amazon.com of your favourite titles, or else mention us on your blog, or LiveJournal, or MySpace, etc. 

For the types of books we publish, we depend on word of mouth advertising to spread the word, so please help us out and share the news of our existence with a few of your friends (real, online, imaginary, etc.) 

Thank you!

Well, so much for my idea of taking a month off from publishing.  No rest for the wicked.  Manfroné is headed to the printers tomorrow, and Glenarvon will be joining it by the end of the month (it's waiting on its cover). 

We're also hard at work on Sheridan Le Fanu's The Rose and the Key, which should appear early in October.  This will be quite an important edition for a number of reasons: first, it will feature a new & substantial introduction dealing with the political situation at the time between England and Ireland and how it relates to the novel; and second, it will follow the original serialized version of the novel as published in Charles Dickens' All the Year Round, rather than the later (different) one-volume edition reprinted by Dover in the 1980s. 

On a different note, last week I discovered a wonderful British vampire novel from the 1960s which is now out of print, and have written to the author's agent about the possibility of reprinting it.  Hopefully more on this to come.

And finally, I discovered a rare 1822 Gothic story that for reasons which will soon be evident is near and dear to my heart.  I'm formatting it at the moment and we will be issuing it in a small paperback edition.  But because this story is different and special, we're going to do something different and special with it.  We're going to print a limited number of them, and they will NOT be available through Amazon or anywhere else.  We'll be making them available to our longtime readers, who have been supporting us from the beginning.  If anyone reading this is a longtime fan of Valancourt Books but has primarily ordered through Amazon or other sites rather than from us (so that we don't know who you are), drop us a line so we know you're checking out our site, and we'll see about getting you some info about this fun little book.

More anon....

Apparently Amazon is having issues with Round the Red Lamp, telling people it won't ship till January.  So if you want to cancel your orders with them and order it directly from us, please feel free.  We have copies in stock now.  I've added two buttons -- one for US buyers ($3.95 shipping) and one for UK/EU buyers ($12.95 Airmail shipping).

We FINALLY received copies of Mystery of the Sea and seeing that it came out superlatively, we've added a link to purchase it on Amazon.  If you've never read it, it's wonderful -- give it a shot.

Let's see....all kinds of news to report.

August saw the appearance of our editions of The Garden God and Round the Red Lamp, both of which are up for order on Amazon.  Bram Stoker's Mystery of the Sea is also available for order on Amazon, although you might want to hold off for a bit on placing orders, since due to some kind of irritating delay, Amazon has received their copies before we've seen ours, and we'd like to know that it turned out ok before anyone orders it. 

This weekend is Labor Day Weekend, and I'm strongly considering taking a Labor Month in September.  During August, I proofread three 400 page books (the aforementioned Stoker & Doyle books, along with Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon), and just coming off two other very long books, Demon of Sicily and Magic Goblet, I think I'm about due for a short respite from proofreading & formatting books.  One way or another, Glenarvon is headed to press in September, but don't be surprised if we hold off till October before publishing anything else. 

Other news I thought was really exciting: as Valancourt Books continues to branch out into different areas of unjustly neglected literature, we plan to publish our first novel by a living writer, Francis King's An Air That Kills (1948).  Mr. King's most recent book, The Sunlight on the Garden, was released in the US in April 2007; he has been publishing for more than six decades.  An Air That Kills (the title alludes to a line from Housman) is the poignant and moving story of a man who has just returned home after a stint as an administrator in the British colony in India.  Once a promising writer, his dreams and his idealism have been extinguished, and he returns in ill health and his lust for life rather dampened.  He meets his nephew, Paul, a young man of eighteen and an aspiring writer, and sees in the boy a chance for a sort of redemption.  Taking Paul under his wing and encouraging his writing, he takes the boy to live with him.  But when Paul begins a love affair with one of his uncle's former acquaintances, Anne, things begin to unravel.  As a series of circumstances cause their lives to spin rapidly out of control, Paul and his uncle are forced to consider a question whose answer neither of them is prepared to accept -- what is the man's real interest in his nephew?  Is it vicarious?  paternal?  or something else altogether? 

And on a similar and yet entirely different note, Natalie Schroeder, who has edited Regina Maria Roche's Clermont and Ouida's In Maremma for Valancourt Books, will be writing an introduction for a new edition of Roche's The Children of the Abbey (1796). One of the most popular and bestselling novels of all time, Children of the Abbey was continuously in print in England and the United States from the late 18th century through the early 20th, and was beloved by many generations of readers.  The Valancourt Books edition will follow the first edition text of 1796, thus making it the first edition in 200 years to follow faithfully the original text.

Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp and Stoker's Mystery of the Sea are now done and should be available for ordering soon. 

I added some cheap copies of Terrific Tales to the special offers page, so make sure to check that out, if you don't have a copy yet.

If there's anyone out there who's capable of making our website look decent and would like to do so in exchange for some free books (or a cat, or whatever else around here we have to barter with), please email us at gothic @ valancourtbooks.com.

Our scholarly edition of Forrest Reid's The Garden God is now available for order.  It's a little different from our other books, but it's wonderful nonetheless.  I'm hoping to have Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp and other Medical Writings off to the printers today.  In addition to medical stories, it contains some wonderfully weird tales, such as "Lot No. 249" which involves a reanimated mummy that stalks an Oxford student and "The Los Amigos Fiasco", in which misconceptions about the effects of electricity lead to bizarre results at an execution.  Then there's "The Case of Lady Sannox" and "The Retirement of Signor Lambert", both of which are wonderfully graphic and ghastly tales of revenge involving surgical mutilations.

We're kind of swamped with manuscripts at the moment -- I'm working on proofing Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon, Bram Stoker's Mystery of the Sea, and Shelley's The Cenci right now.  Expect to see all those appear by the end of the summer or early autumn.

Updating last night's post -- the sales ranking is now at #9,155.  Amazing!  Keep the orders coming, and maybe we can put Richard Marsh back on the bestseller list for the first time in a century!

WOW!  Thank you to all of you who have already purchased our new edition of Richard Marsh's Curios.  As of this evening, our Amazon sales rank was #27,258, which might not sound impressive, but when you think of all the tens of millions of books out there, it's absolutely amazing!  We have a ways to go to challenge the 8.3 million Harry Potters sold, but still, this kind of ranking for an obscure 110 year old book is totally fantastic! 

We've received the editor's manuscript for Bram Stoker's wonderful Mystery of the Sea (1902), which we hope to have published by next month.  Having read most of Stoker's novels, I think I can say pretty confidently that this is his second-best, after only Dracula.  If you haven't read it before, prepare yourself for a real treat.

I'm hiding in terror, avoiding all contact with the outside world, whether TV news, online blogs, etc., lest I come across some spoilers for the new Harry Potter.  I was going to go tomorrow at midnight to the main Barnes & Noble here to buy the book, but I'm paranoid that the person in front of me in line will get his book, open it to the last page, and blurt out the ending.  So I've found a remote Wal-Mart where I think I can get the book without incident.  It's located in an area of town where it's unlikely that anyone can either read a book or use a computer, so I think I am fairly safe.

But why I really signed on to post -- Ben Thomas, editor of the new Willows Magazine, sent me a copy of his publication, and I heartily recommend it to Valancourt readers.  The newest issue runs about 90 pages, but it's double-column, so it's the equivalent of 180 pages.  And it's only $3.50.  I don't think you can even buy a TV Guide for $3.50 nowadays. The Willows features mostly short stories and a few poems, written in the style of turn-of-the-century weird tales.  The magazine is named after an Algernon Blackwood story, which I have not read, but having read the first three stories in this magazine, I can attest to the fact that they would not be at all out of place in an 1890s popular fiction magazine.  Everyone who knows me knows how rarely I praise anything -- and no, they're not paying me! -- so, it says something when I say it's well worth the very reasonable $17.50 annual subscription fee for the magazine.  Check out their site: http://www.thewillowsmagazine.com/index.htm.

Only one more day until the biggest release of the summer!  And, no, I'm not referring to The Demon of Sicily, but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.  Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions, the Valancourt Books edition of Harry Potter won't be out until approximately 2115.

It's not Harry Potter, but I've added a link to purchase our newest title, Richard Marsh's Curios, which is absolutely brilliant.  I know I brag about all our books, but this one is different.  It's one of the most remarkable examples of humour mixed with horror that I've ever read -- I give my personal guarantee that you won't be able to put it down, and that you'll laugh heartily throughout. 

The Garden God is at the printers, and I've turned my attention to something a little different -- a long-forgotten novel by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.  I keep seeing Le Fanu novels -- even later editions -- selling on eBay for outrageous sums, which signals to me that there are a ton of Le Fanu fans out there who would welcome new editions of his lesser-known novels.  Stay tuned for more information....

All preorders are now in the mail and on their way to you.  They would have been on their way to you last week, except that UPS somehow managed to lose our shipment.  Our sincere apologies!  We hope you'll forgive us when you see how well the books turned out.

Gide once said, speaking, I believe, of Dostoevsky, "I now respect only the books that all but kill their authors."  How about the books that all but kill their editors?  My hair has gone prematurely white dealing with our editions of The Garden God and Round the Red Lamp, which are filled with footnotes, endnotes, footnotes to the endnotes (I kid you not!), appendices, illustrations, etc. etc.  Every time I fix one problem, six more seem to pop up.  I'm wondering if Valancourt Books wouldn't be better off abandoning the whole "scholarly edition" concept and including just a quality introduction and perhaps a few endnotes. 

And speaking of painful ordeals, it appears that -- God willing -- we may finally get our Valancourt Books catalogues today, after weeks of struggle.  The first place we went printed them all on the wrong quality paper, smeared the cover graphic, and then tried to charge us nearly double what we were quoted.  More mishaps ensued, and finally today one printer tried to charge us $8 per brochure (it's only 8 pages, black & white).  Finally, beaten and broken, and ready to pay anything or do anything simply to get my catalogues, I limped into Kinko's and placed the order there.  On the bright side, they'll fold and staple them for me for free, saving me paper cuts and frustration.

We hope everyone out there had a wonderful day yesterday, especially those of our comrades in the US of A, where we celebrated our 231st (or somethingth) anniversary of our independence from the evil British Empire.  I was actually thinking about this yesterday, and I sometimes wonder if this whole independence thing was such a great idea.  I mean, have you ever tried reading American literature or looking at American art?  Maybe we'd have been better off British.  And we'd still have those great accents.

Back to business -- preorders would have shipped today, except that UPS inexplicably lost our shipment in Kentucky or some place.  They assure us that we'll have them tomorrow.  You should get them soon.  I apologize for the ghastly delay.

In other news, I have long been excited about the North American Victorian Studies Ass'n conference, which will be held in Victoria in October (I bet someone thought they were really clever with that one).  Today they told me they wanted $350 for a table at their giant conference of (maybe) 300 participants, not to mention the $750 to fly from Kansas City to Victoria, plus hotel, etc.  Then I found out that the Midwest ASECS conference is being held the same weekend, about a mile from my house, and where the book display costs nothing.  Guess which one we'll be attending. 

Finally, I sat down and studied our sales reports, and interestingly, we can't seem to give away copies of some of our Gothic titles; meanwhile, our Richard Marsh titles are flying off the proverbial shelves.  And so, since quite a few other people out there seem to love Marsh as much as I do, we're doing the only sensible thing, by releasing another Marsh title, which will be heading to the printers tomorrow.  This book, Curios (1898), despite its innocuous title, is absolutely amazing.  The whole book is told from the point of view of two bachelors, rival curio collectors.  As they try to outrival each other in their pursuit of rare and curious items, they encounter a variety of bizarre objects, including a severed hand that kills people, a poisoned pipe that comes to life when smoked, and a phonograph record on which a murdered woman accuses her murderer from beyond the grave.

First of all, thank you to all of you who preordered our new titles!  We will have them out to you very shortly.  The culprit for the delay is Demon of Sicily -- I got the proof back, flipped through it to admire the lovely illustration, and then....spotted a really ghastly typo.  So to make sure that typo didn't have any comrades (or spawn) lurking elsewhere in the book, I had to subject it to another minute examination.  And let me tell you -- although I love our illustrated edition and although the book certainly has some wonderful moments, it is not a book that I would normally want to read four times in one month, which is what I ended up doing.

Other news.  July is set to be busy.  We will be publishing Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp, Forrest Reid's The Garden God, and Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon.  Also, I plundered my alma mater's library and found first editions of Bram Stoker's Miss Betty and Richard Marsh's Curios, so you may well see one or the other of those as well.

Finally, a one of a kind, limited time special offer.  In our shipment of copies of Rust of Gold (one of my favourites), four of the copies had their covers cut off-center to the point where we can't sell them for their $19.95 retail price.  So we're giving them away.  However, there are a few catches:

1.  The copies will go to the first four people who email us saying they want one.

2.  We can only send these to the US and Canada, because this book is not copyright-cleared for the UK & Europe.

3.  The book is free, but shipping costs have skyrocketed and we can't afford to eat them, so you'll have to pay $4 in the US or $7 in Canada to cover shipping (Paypal or check).

4.  You have to promise to read it -- it's a great book and we'd be sad to have them end up gathering dust on someone's shelf or in a box somewhere.

The Times Literary Supplement on June 1 ran a very positive review of our edition of Gaston de Blondeville.  Here's an excerpt for everyone who didn't see it:

"A scholarly edition with a selection of contemporary reviews and extracts from various key reformist players, Gaston de Blondeville supports the recent opinion that Radcliffe’s narrative politics are more radical than has previously been considered....[Frances Chiu] effectively contextualizes the novel’s theme of ‘wronged innocence’ in the light of the post-revolutionary politics of the 1790s."

In other news, we FINALLY got the proof copy of The Demon of Sicily, which turned out absolutely brilliantly (you'll love the lurid illustrations!), but unfortunately contains one really glaring and bizarre error which we have to fix this week before printing and sending out preordered copies.  Don't worry, you'll have them soon!

And in bad news, it's my birthday on Thursday...I'll be 27.  (**plays mournful funeral dirge**)

The Datchet Diamonds is now available, and The Demon of Sicily, The Midnight Bell, and The Magic Goblet are all in the all-powerful hands of the Printers.  Expect all three to be available by the end of the month.

In our spare time, we're working on opening a retail storefront for Valancourt Books, which will specialize in used, out of print, and rare books, along with a full line of our own titles (of course!)  Anyone out there with quality literature, fiction, literary criticism, or horror books you'd like to donate to the cause, let us know at gothic @ valancourtbooks.com.  We'll gladly set you up with discounts or free copies of our books in return!

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer!

It's been a busy week!  The King's Assegai has been published and is now available for order.  It's a little different from most of the stuff we usually publish, but still a lot of fun. 

This week we also sent a revised Castle of Wolfenbach to the printers to correct some rather embarrassing footnote problems in the first printing.  That, too, is now available for order.

We're getting very close to getting Demon of Sicily and The Magic Goblet to the printers.  Look for those in the first half of June.  In the second half of June, expect to see us continue branching out in new directions with Conan Doyle's somewhat Gothic medical stories Round the Red Lamp and Forrest Reid's brilliant The Garden God.

It's shaping up to be a very busy and productive summer.  We'll keep cranking out the books so everyone will have plenty of great summer reading!

We're back after an absolutely amazing day at the Kansas City Literary Festival, where we sold almost as many books in six hours as we did in three days at the ASECS conference in Atlanta in March.

Highlights included meeting a former editor for Penguin Books and Grove Press in the 1950s and 60s and a UMKC professor who specializes in bodysnatching and who asked us, "Do any of your books feature bodysnatching?", which, after racking my brain, I exclaimed, "Yes!" (Italian Mysteries by Francis Lathom).

Other fun moments included the woman who came up and scrutinised our "Valancourt Books" sign, and finally asked, puzzled, "What's a 'Valachee'?"  I have no idea what she was talking about. 

By far the funniest moment was when a woman praised our covers and I pointed to Ryan and said "He does them", implying that he designed them.  She thought I meant that he painted them all (amazing that he could master every style from Waterhouse to Bouguereau to 17th century Flemish painting), and she bought a book, insisting that he autograph it.  He was understandably embarrassed, to which she said, "You shouldn't be so modest!  You're a very talented artist!"

Frankly, I was surprised (and experienced a fair amount of hometown pride) when several people who came up had read Mysteries of Udolpho and Melmoth the Wanderer, and one person even asked me about Veit Weber's The Sorcerer (1795), an incredibly obscure book that I wouldn't have thought anyone in Kansas City would have heard of.

News, news, and more news.

We're here and established in Kansas City.  The postal service managed to lose the shipment of our books coming from Chicago to Kansas City, which kind of sucks, and our computer quit working the day we arrived (hence the lack of posts recently), but otherwise we got here unscathed.

We have a new book available on Amazon, Francis Prevost's Rust of Gold (1895).  It's totally obscure and a little pricey, but I hope people will give it a shot.  It contains one fabulous ghost story, "A Ghost of the Sea", along with eight other decadent stories, sketches, and vignettes.  It's kind of a hidden gem and one of my personal favourites, and I hope our readers will enjoy it too.

As for upcoming releases -- our third Bertram Mitford novel, the amazing The King's Assegai (1894) is headed to the printers any day now.  In his introduction, Gerald Monsman makes the case for this novel being ranked alongside Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as one of the most important novels ever to come out of Africa.  And it's a fun read -- I read it from beginning to end in one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Also, Demon of Sicily (the 200th anniversary edition) will be off to the printers shortly.  The novel and its preface are ready to go, but we're working to find the perfect cover illustration, which might take us a few days.  Ditto for Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp. 

We also have the completed manuscripts for The Midnight Bell and The Magic Goblet, both of which will be published within the next 4-6 weeks.

And in other news, we'll be exhibiting at the Kansas City Literary Festival this weekend, on the Country Club Plaza.  Stop by and see us and buy a book!

As always, a big thank you to our readers, who make Valancourt Books possible!  (And now that I've quit my job and my PhD program, the money you spend on books goes directly to a good cause -- helping me afford rent and food!)

<singing>

Yes, the Valancourt Books media conglomerate/publishing empire is relocating to my hometown of Kansas City, certainly within the next two months, and maybe within the next two weeks, depending on how long it takes us to find a suitable residence.  Moving the Valancourt Library is taking a lot of boxes and a lot of money, and I therefore encourage all of you out there never to buy any books under any circumstances whatsoever.  Unless you plan never to move.  [By the way, lest anyone pity us for moving from Chicago to lowly Kansas City, I'll point out that KC has the second most boulevards in the world after Paris and the second most fountains after Rome. So there.]

So we're busy moving and therefore probably not too great about updating the site and answering emails.  Please excuse us! 

But...our publishing has not slowed down.  No, sirree, not one whit.  So far this month, we have sent The Castle of Berry Pomeroy, The Weird of Deadly Hollow, and The Seen and the Unseen to the printers, and all three will be available on Amazon in the upcoming days. 

We've received the introduction for The Midnight Bell, and so you should expect to see it, the fourth in our Northanger Novels set, to appear by June.  We also have the preface to Demon of Sicily and should be getting that one out this summer too...

Oh dear -- apparently our April Fool's posting has created a good deal of confusion.  As far as I know, Penguin is actually not planning on buying us out, although please tell them we're for sale.  And as wonderful as I think our books are, objectively I'd have to admit that they're not worth $2 million.

On a serious note, Renshaw Fanning's Quest is published and should be showing up on Amazon any time now.  The Castle of Berry Pomeroy is headed to the printers most likely tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.

Busy and productive times here at Valancourt Books...

It is with both sadness and excitement that we announce that Valancourt Books as we know it will soon cease to exist.  We received today a $2 million buyout offer from Penguin USA, and while our books will continue to appear, they'll do so under the new "Penguin/Valancourt" label, under the editorship of a panel in New York and London. 

On the bright side, with Penguin's increased buying power, future titles will be even more affordable, and will see increased distribution.  And, with our newfound windfall, we're going to take a few months off to tour the world.  Expect a downturn in our publications this summer, as we explore Malta, Brazil, and Thailand.

We thank you all for your support over the last couple years and we look forward to an even brighter future under the Penguin umbrella.

After a relentless, Sherman-esque march to Atlanta (with considerably less destruction and decimation), I made it to the ASECS conference down here.  After three grueling days of working the Valancourt table, I'm on the verge of heading back to Chicago.  This trip was productive, though, as I was able to get Renshaw Fanning's Quest off to the printers and redo much of the website. 

This trip was also memorable for finally giving me the chance to meet Allen Grove, who has edited three books for Valancourt and will be doing The Monk for us this summer.  We went to check out the dismal Atlanta art museum, which was having a "Louvre" exhibition, which consisted approximately of a couple photographs of the Louvre, Louis XVI's chamberpot, a couple of wax dummies of 18th century French people, and a few forks and spoons from Louis XIV or somebody.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:  Published This Day

Messrs. Jenkins, Cagle, Valancourt, and Vathek announce publication of the following work:

The New Monk: A Romance.  Three Volumes in One.  By R. S. Esq.  Edited with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Andrews.  Paperback.  Price: 5 guineas.

May be had of Messrs. Barnes & Noble, New-York, Messrs. Amazon & Co., Seattle, and all Fine Book-sellers throughout the Realm.

I'm back after a fun trip to Winnipeg.  Every trip up to Canada ends with me wanting to move there.  And although it probably wasn't my most incredible find ever, the $3 CDN ($2.50 USD) copy of Richard Marsh's The Death Whistle from 1913 that I found in a used bookstore there was certainly a surprise.  And it made for great reading on the flight home.

The proof copy of The New Monk arrived today and it looks hot!  The cover graphic, a Hogarth engraving of a fat monk holding a giant piece of roast beef, is classic, and our change to white paper rather than "natural" paper makes the book look even better than our others.  We think you'll all love this book!

Wednesday it's off to Atlanta for the huge ASECS conference.  It should be fun -- no speeches, no panels, no papers, just selling books and having fun in "Hot-lanta".

Today is a day of milestones -- our 2nd anniversary, and we just published our 25th book, The New Monk.  It's being printed now, and copies should be available for order within 10-14 days.

This is shaping up to be a busy month, with The New Monk on the verge of going to the printers, along with Renshaw Fanning's Quest, and, quite possibly, Bram Stoker's Shoulder of Shasta and A Glimpse of America, which we've decided to issue together in one volume, rather than separately.  All in the interest of saving you money.

Friday I'm off to Winnepeg, Manitoba to give a talk on the press and on editing Gothic novels.  I don't know much about Manitoba, but I hope they have moose.  Or elk.  (What's with these horned animals having irregular plurals?)

Speaking of The New Monk, its title page attributes it to "R.S., Esq."  Montague Summers, in true Montague Summers style, figured "R.S." must be Richard Sickelmore, which, if you've ever read any of Richard Sickelmore's books, you'd agree the idea is absurd.  So who is this R.S.?  I hate anonymous authors, pseudonyms, and other literary mysteries, and I've been puzzling over this one for the last couple weeks.

First of all, it does not appear that R.S. ever wrote another book before or after this one, and indeed from hints within the text it seems unlikely that he was a literary man at all.  His writing and grammar are atrocious, even for a popular novelist, and nearly all his literary allusions are either from The Monk or Shakespeare, suggesting he was not particularly well-read in literature.  A clue as to his true profession may be found in the text, in the form of repeated and very specific legal references.  He cites specific legal doctrines at length, describes Joshua's trial and the courtroom in detail, and even refers to one real-life contemporary judge by name.  So I got to thinking, maybe R.S., Esq. (the Esq. didn't have the significance of "attorney" then as it does now in the U.S.) was a lawyer.  Consulting the Law List for 1798, I found some eight or nine men with the initials "R.S.", and among them, found one intriguing name, that of Robert Spottiswoode.  Spottiswoode was the nephew of the important London printer Andrew Strahan and would later take over his printing business around 1820.  Could Spottiswoode's uncle's connections in the London publishing and bookselling trade helped him get his book published?  Of course, this is all wild speculation, but it's nonetheless interesting to think about.

Back to work....

I'm so excited about a couple of our upcoming releases that I couldn't resist signing on here to brag about them. 

We have an amazing Arthur Conan Doyle edition coming out in the next month or so, which will feature the complete text of the medical short story collection Round the Red Lamp (1894), together with three other uncollected medical-themed stories, as well as a number of Conan Doyle's nonfiction medical articles and letters.  To top it all off, the edition features a great introduction and  pithy notes by noted medical historian Robert Darby, whose recent book A Surgical Temptation, on the history of circumcision, is absolutely fascinating reading.

And, by a weird coincidence, the manuscript for another book from 1894, Bertram Mitford's Renshaw Fanning's Quest, just arrived in the mail yesterday and should be out in April.  The novel is a colonial adventure story involving a quest for a giant diamond in South Africa, reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, and features an outstanding introduction by Gerald Monsman, who previously edited Haggard's novel for Broadview.

And I have long been remiss in announcing that we are launching ANOTHER line of books.  These books will be printed in French under the imprint Éditions Valancourt.  (Valancourt is truly an all-purpose name).  We will be reprinting rare French gothic novels  (romans noirs), many of which will be edited by Caspar Wintermans, a scholar in The Hague (ou La Haye, si vous êtes français; of Den Haag, als u Nederlander bent).  Mr Wintermans is also hard at work on a book on the French decadent writer Jacques d'Adelsward Fersen for this new series.

Well I'm back from a fairly uneventful trip to Tulsa.  My paper on T. J. Horsley Curties was met with a few bemused chuckles from the audience of about seven, and I sold a handful of books.  At least the Gilcrease Museum and the Woolaroc ranch were interesting tourist attractions.  At Woolaroc, I was only a couple feet away from a big herd of buffalo...

February was a slow month for publishing, with only The Necromancer being released.  March should see more activity, with The New Monk headed to the printers this week, and Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp and Other Medical Writings soon to follow.  Bram Stoker's The Shoulder of Shasta will likely also see the light of day this month.

On a more personal note, March 14 is Valancourt Books's birthday -- the two year anniversary of the publication of our first titles, The Animated Skeleton and The Castle of Ollada.  So, yeah, send us presents!  For our part, we'll be wearing those paper hats and hanging up party streamers as we celebrate our birthday and St. Paddy's Day.

Wow!  We have been extremely productive lately! 

In January, we released FOUR new books: Joanna Baillie's Six Gothic Dramas, Richard Marsh's The Joss, Bram Stoker's Lady Athlyne, and Francis Lathom's The Mysterious Freebooter.

February is shaping up to be similarly productive, with The Necromancer headed to the printers tonight and The New Monk in proofreading.

We're also going to be busy in the upcoming months with travelling to conferences.  This month we'll be in Tulsa, and next month in Winnipeg and Atlanta. 

We hope you like all the new books! :)

Happy New Year to all! 

With a new year invariably come resolutions and changes, and here's a glimpse of what to expect from Valancourt Books in 2007.

First of all, it is with mixed sadness and ambivalence that we announce the end of our ill-fated Irish Classics series.  We have been somewhat surprised and dismayed to find little scholarly interest in a series of Irish-themed reprints, and have frequently puzzled ourselves over whether a particular book should be filed under Valancourt Classics or Irish Classics.

But while we'll be axing Irish Classics, we'll be launching a new series of reprints, tentatively titled Valancourt Essential Editions, which will be different from our other series in that they will not feature introductions or footnotes, but just an accurate first edition text of rare novels.  We will be reissuing The Snake's Pass in this series, along with a number of novels by Richard Marsh and others.

We're also contemplating what I think will be a very interesting new set of 19th century boys' novels by George Manville Fenn, G. A. Henty, Bernard Heldmann, and others.

On a different note, our volume of Six Gothic Dramas by Joanna Baillie (four of which have not appeared in print since 1851), has been submitted to the printers and will be available for order next week.

We've abandoned our plan to release The Mysterious Freebooter as a 200th anniversary edition, but will be releasing it soon as a regular edition. We are also proofreading The New Monk (1798) and The Necromancer (1794), both of which will be available by late February.

Greetings from the MLA Convention in Philadelphia!  I've never been to anything quite like this -- there's something like 2,000 people presenting papers, not to mention thousands more job seekers, interviewers, observers, scholars, publishers, vendors, you name it!

The book exhibit is a thing to behold: a huge exhibit hall, filled with booths representing every major publisher in the world: Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, not to mention all the university presses and scholarly presses like Ashgate, Routledge, Palgrave, Broadview, and so many more!   (The best part is all the free books!  I have a whole bag full of books, many of which won't even be released for a couple more months.  Just pretend like you're an important English professor, and they heap them on you!)

We've been productive here as well, meeting several editors and three potential distributors -- all of which were interested in the possibility of getting our books into bookstores like Barnes & Noble, rather than just online.

Visiting the MLA as an observer is the best way to go -- most of the people here are stressed out of their minds, dressed in suits, sweating job interviews or presentations to packed rooms.  Then there's the publishers, who have to pay $1500 just for a small square space in the exhibit hall, PLUS $700 for a table and chairs, $90 for a trash can, and I didn't ask what the couches cost. 

Tomorrow it's to the Philadelphia City Archives to try to dredge up something on Francis Lathom, who was here in 1822 and 1828 (or, perhaps, from 1822 till 1828?)  A long shot, but hey, you never know!

Happy holidays from all of us here at Valancourt Books (well, both of us, and the cats).  We hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas! 

Thanks to the timely proofreading assistance of one of our readers, The Mysterious Freebooter is on schedule to be published by December 31, meaning we'll get in just under the 200th anniversary wire.  For next year's 200th anniversary offering, The Demon of Sicily, we promise not to cut it so close.

We're off tomorrow to our nation's original capital, Philadelphia, to see the Midnight, er, Liberty Bell, and attend the MLA convention.  We won't be presenting, we won't be selling, we'll just be...circulating.  If you see us, say hi!

In other news, well...there is no other news!  Enjoy your holidays and expect a bevy of new releases from us in early 2007!

The Impenetrable Secret, Find it Out! is now available for order on Amazon.com.  Those of you who preordered copies, you'll have them shortly.

We've finished the typesetting of the 200th anniversary edition of The Mysterious Freebooter -- now it's just a question of whether we can proofread the 550 page novel in time to get it out by the end of the year. 

We've also received manuscripts for The New Monk (1798) and Joanna Baillie's Gothic plays, so look for those to be released sometime next month.

Finally, remember, it's not too late to pick up some Valancourt books to give as holiday presents.  There's nothing like the gift of a great, obscure, and fun novel!

As many of you know, we here at Valancourt books love rescuing old Gothic novels not only by republishing them, but also by collecting them.  We picked up a copy of volume 1 of Charles Maturin's The Albigenses (1824) on eBay, and when it arrived today, I was so amused by the previous owner's inscription that I thought I'd share:

"Moses Whitney Jr., 1824.  Won of Benj. Davenport by a bet that Lafayette would arrive in Boston during August, 1824."

I didn't know this until I looked it up, but Lafayette, a French general and hero of the American Revolution, made a triumphal return to the United States on the 50th anniversary of the Revolution and toured the country.  Apparently he made it to Boston by August and poor Ben Davenport lost his book.

More importantly, The Impenetrable Secret is done -- we're going to redo the cover this weekend and send it off to the printers.  So those of you who preordered should be seeing it soon.  The 200th anniversary edition of Mysterious Freebooter is keeping us very busy as well, as it's about 600 pages and we're trying to get it done by the end of December to meet the 200th anniversary deadline ("201st Anniversary Edition" doesn't sound as good).

And in some other assorted exciting news, we'd like to thank (for the first of many times to come) the Manx Heritage Foundation for their VERY generous financial support of our forthcoming edition of Hall Caine's The Manxman, and we're also terribly excited that the Times Literary Supplement wrote to us asking for a review copy of Gaston de Blondeville.  Who'd have ever thought our humble books would make it into the pages of that hallowed publication?


More soon... in the meantime, keep reading those Gothic novels!

Happy Halloween!!!!  As you can imagine from the books we publish, it's our favourite holiday. 

An update: The Veiled Picture is done and we'll be receiving copies tomorrow.  It should show up on Amazon within the next week or two.  If you want a copy sooner than that, email us and we'll send you a Paypal invoice to purchase a copy from us. 

An announcement: We previously announced a 200th anniversary edition of The Demon of Sicily (1807) to be published next year.  Well, now, we're trying our hardest to get out a 200th anniversary edition of Francis Lathom's The Mysterious Freebooter (1806) by the end of the year.  The book will be hardcover and sumptuously designed.

And this seems like the appropriate time for a huge "THANK YOU" to all of you out there who are supporting our efforts and purchasing our books.  We love you all!   Valancourt books also make great holiday gifts -- and a portion of the proceeds goes to a good cause: feeding Valancourt, who is always hungry!

Greetings from freezing Minneapolis!  We're up here at the Midwest American Society for 18th Century Studies.  Response to our books has been overwhelming, and we were glad to meet Janina Nordius from the University of Goteburg, Sweden, who will be editing the elusive Swedish Mysteries (1801) for us next year.

A rather surprising event also happened.  At a bookstore two blocks from the conference, I discovered in a box of clutter on the floor the Gothic novel Cordelia, or, A Romance of Real Life by Sophia King (Charlotte Dacre's sister), published in 1800.  It cost $25, and I was extremely excited to find that not a single library in the world has a copy of this edition.  Michael Sadleir would have been proud.

In Valancourt Books news, Ouida's In Maremma is now available.  The Impenetrable Secret and The Veiled Picture are headed off to the printers any day now.

Wow, we're getting famous!  Check out what the critics have to say about one of our latest releases, The Magic Ring.

"Reaching back to 1825, this is the original English translation of La Motte-Fouqué's Magic Ring trilogy, here presented in a single volume. This version was edited by Tolkien scholar Amy H. Sturgis, who makes a case that this story was a dominant influence on Tolkien's own ring writings."  -- Library Journal, Oct. 1, 2006

"[A] work of fantasy that has truly endured the test of time...A must-have for readers of classic fantasy." -- Midwest Book Review, October 2006

"The Magic Ring remains a very readable and entertaining novel, with numerous twists and turns, mysteries and secrets revealed...This...is why it deserves a reading after over a century in obscurity." -- SFSite.com, October 2006

And, about our books in general, Gothic Studies had this to say:

"The aesthetic beauty of the Valancourt editions should be noted.  The Valancourt releases demonstrate sheer marketing genius by updating the mass appeal of these works to appeal to the modern consciousness.  The interplay of the dominant black and red accents, with the suitably horrifying cover graphic...bring[s] [the books] mass appeal in the new century." -- Gothic Studies, May 2006.

The Castle of Wolfenbach is out.  Terrific Tales is out.  In Maremma is going to the printers tomorrow.  The Impenetrable Secret is next.  Busy and productive times here at Valancourt Books.  Plus after a long day of vicious haggling, we're excited to annouce the acquisition of the new Valancourt Booksmobile.

Meanwhile, we're busy preparing for our next two big conferences -- Minneapolis in October and sunny Tempe in November (who picks these places?)  For more info, check out the Tour page, and come visit our table.

We're back from the NASSR/NAVSA conference at Purdue, and it was a huge success!  We met a lot of great representatives from the larger publishing companies, and they were all really amazed at the quality of our books.  We also met some new editors for future Valancourt books, and there was quite a bit of interest among conference participants in our new titles, The Italian and The Castle of Wolfenbach. 

It's been a long time since we've updated this blog!  Rest assured, it's because we've been too busy getting new books ready to have time to work on the website.

The Italian is being printed as we speak and is available for order on Amazon.com.  Preordered copies will ship the instant we receive them from the printers, which should be within the next few days.

We're tremendously excited about The Castle of Wolfenbach and The Impenetrable Secret.  Both are headed off to the printers on Monday and preorder options are posted on the main page.  Don't miss these two great novels!  A preorder option (saving 10%) is available for Terrific Tales, which is due out in September as well.

Finally, a series of supernatural and mystery novels from the 1890s is in the early stages of preparation.  Expect to see works by Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, Ernest G. Henham, Francis Prevost, Bertram Mitford, and others!  The series title is still under consideration, although we're indebted to our friend Joe for his clever suggestion "Fiends de Siècle"....

We'd like to welcome Bernard McKenna of the University of Delaware, who will be editing Forrest Reid's Following Darkness (1912) for Valancourt Books.  Reid, although nearly forgotten today, is still regarded as the finest novelist ever to emerge from Ulster (the counties that constitute Northern Ireland).  Following Darkness is the story of an adolescent boy in Belfast, and  helped to inspire James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), which followed an adolescent in Dublin.

But for the Gothic afficionados out there, don't worry -- we haven't forgotten you!  On the main page, you'll see an image of our forthcoming hardcover volume Terrific Tales (1804) by Isabella Lewis, along with a book description.  We also added a page for The Italian.

We just added a "Buy Now" link on the main page to preorder The Italian for only $12.95.  This wonderful new edition contains the first edition text as well as a variety of other Gothic short stories, fragments, and essays -- 480 pages total!  Preorder now and receive a copy as soon as it's available next month.

We are excited to announce that Edmund Miller, Professor of English at Long Island University and published poet and novelist, will be providing an introduction to our forthcoming edition of Baron Corvo's Stories Toto Told Me (1898).  Stories Toto Told Me, a collection of six tales about boy saints and martyrs related to Corvo (pseudonym for Frederick Rolfe) by an Italian peasant, was Corvo's first published book and the only one of his works to achieve great popular and critical success in his lifetime.  This important and charming work has been out of print since 1969; the Valancourt Classics edition will help restore it to its proper place as a work of literary importance.

Updating the previous item, Carol Senf, author of Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker's Fiction, will be editing Stoker's Mystery of the Sea (1902) for Valancourt Books.  We're very excited to be republishing this wonderful novel, one of Stoker's most popular, after Dracula (1897).

We are planning on débuting two new titles (Ouida's In Maremma and Baillie's Gothic Dramas) at the NASSR/NAVSA conference at Purdue in early September...if you'll be there, come check out our table!

I can't remember which new title announcements I've already posted, so here goes, in no particular order:  Christine Colon will be editing a volume of nine gothic plays by Joanna Baillie, Emma McEvoy will be editing Charlotte Dacre's Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1798), Angela Wright will be editing one of the Northanger Novels, Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan of the Rhine (1798), and Jack G. Voller (proprietor of the Literary Gothic website) will be editing the chapbook adaptation of Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, The Veiled Picture (1802).

We're also in discussions with one of the world's foremost Bram Stoker scholars, and we're hoping to announce soon that she'll be editing a volume for us in the near future.

This summer, we will be releasing the following titles: Astonishment!!! (1802) by Francis Lathom, Nine Gothic Dramas by Joanna Baillie, The Italian (1797) by Ann Radcliffe, and In Maremma (1882) by Ouida.  More title announcements to come....

Happy Independence Day to all our fellow Americans.  And to you non-Americans, we wish you a happy day as well.  We're back after our hugely successful world launch event for The Magic Ring in Toronto.  We've posted a few pics here: Toronto Conference Photos.  Check it out!

For those of you out there who wear clothes (you know who you are!), you'll want to check out Valancourt Books' new Summer Fashion Catalogue.  This is still very much in development, but within the next week or two we will be adding additional clothing designs, as well as other really cool Valancourt Books merchandise, such as journals, magnets and stickers.  The Valancourt Books boxer shorts and thong are a little more questionable, but if anyone out there is interested, let us know, and we'll design them for you!  Comments and suggestions welcome!

Also, as previously announced, we'll be headed to Toronto Thursday June 29 thru Monday July 3 for the Gathering of the Fellowship conference to offer a sneak peak at our new book, The Magic Ring.  We'll try to keep up on our correspondence while we're gone, but I can't promise anything, since the Valancourt Books computer, Susan (more commonly referred to around here by a series of unrepeatable epithets), will be vacationing in sunny China getting her motherboard replaced while we're gone.

If you look around the site, you'll notice that we made some slight changes.  We've replaced our old Paypal "Add to Cart" buttons with Amazon links that'll let you purchase our books at the best possible price at Amazon.com with free shipping on orders over $25.  As much as we loved fulfilling all our customers' orders personally, packaging the books and standing in line at the post office was keeping us from having as much time to devote to publishing new books.  Those of you who have preordered books pending or who have set up a subscription plan with us in the past -- don't worry!  Nothing will change -- we simply are turning over the day-to-day bookselling to Amazon.

If you have any questions or concerns, never hesitate to contact us!

We are very excited to announce that Dr. Emma McEvoy of the University of Westminster will be editing Charlotte Dacre's Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer for Valancourt Books.  Dr. McEvoy has previously edited The Monk for Oxford University Press and is co-author of the forthcoming Beginning Gothic and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to the Gothic.

Well we just got the proof for our first hardcover, The Forest of Valancourt,  and let me tell you, it looks hot!  I think it's definitely safe to say we'll be doing more hardcovers in the near future.

And I should also mention that the proof for The Magic Ring arrived yesterday and it looks amazing as well!  Everyone who's been waiting so patiently for these two books will agree when they see them that they're definitely worth the wait!

Back from a frantic trip to Minneapolis, but a fruitful one.  I met with the manager of DreamHaven books, one of the largest SciFi/horror bookstores in the country and showed her our books and convinced her to carry them.  So if you live in the Twin Cities, go check it out!

And, I thought this was really cool -- updating a previously announced item, our 200th Anniversary edition of The Demon of Sicily! (due out next year) will feature a new preface from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jo Beverley.  Ms. Beverley is the author of a number of popular romances and is a five-time Rita award winner.  Plus, she's probably the only normal person who's ever heard of The Demon of Sicily, having mentioned it in her novel An Arranged Romance (1999).  Needless to say, we couldn't be more excited!

After many hours of wrangling with the Valancourt Books computer, we've got it working again.  For those of you who preordered The Forest of Valancourt, it is at the printers, and we will have copies to ship in a couple weeks.

In other news, I'm extremely excited to announce that we will be publishing a new edition of J.-K. Huysmans's Becalmed (En rade), in a translation by Terry Hale.  Becalmed was the novel published between Huysmans's two most famous works, Against the Grain and Là-Bas, and draws heavily on the gothic tradition while mixing in wonderful dark humour and incredible some incredibly surreal dream sequences.  Dr. Hale first translated the novel in 1992 for Atlas Books.  That edition has been long out of print and nearly unavailable; for the new edition, Dr. Hale will be revising his translation and adding an expanded introduction.

And another great new title announcement: Natalie Schroeder, who previously edited the acclaimed Valancourt Books edition of Clermont, will be editing Ouida's In Maremma (1882) for Valancourt Books in the autumn.  One of Ouida's minor masterpieces, In Maremma has been out of print for more than a century, and this new edition will certainly be welcomed by Ouida fans and Victorian women's literature scholars.

We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the Valancourt Books computer (mostly caused by operator error) which are delaying the release of The Forest of Valancourt.  Rest assured that we are spending hours every day working to get the book out.  The Magic Ring has already been submitted to the printers and its release date will not be affected.

A big announcement -- Valancourt Books will be offering a teaching edition of Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents edited by Allen Grove!  Prof. Grove's edition, which is already completed and in the final stages of production, will include tons of special features, such as a number of rare Gothic short stories, reproductions of art works that influenced Radcliffe, the text of contemporary reviews, and much more (not to mention, of course, an excellent new introduction). 

Packed with supplemental materials to enhance readers' enjoyment of the novel, we have no doubt that the Valancourt Books edition will quickly become the definitive edition for students and casual readers alike.  More details to come, including the release date, which will be before the end of 2006.

We submitted Witch of Ravensworth to the printers tonight, after long delays which were not altogether our fault.  We'll be shipping preorders by the end of the week.  Thanks to everyone for your patience! 

The difficulties with Witch and Gaston have been corrected, and preorders of Forest of Valancourt and The Magic Ring will ship on schedule.

Exciting news!  Prof. Robert Miles of the University of Victoria will be editing Harriet Lee's neglected classic, Kruitzner; or, The German's Tale (1797) for Valancourt Books in 2007.  Prof. Miles has previously edited Ann Radcliffe's The Italian for Penguin Books and is the author of Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress and Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy.

Thank you to everyone who preordered Gaston de Blondeville -- those books were shipped Wednesday and you should be receiving them any time now, if you haven't already.

We've worked really hard on redesigning the website, and we hope you enjoy the look and feel of it.  Any comments or questions?  Let us know! 

An exciting forthcoming title announcement -- David Towsey of Oxford University will be editing Charles Robert Maturin's classic The Albigenses (1824) for Valancourt Books in 2007.  The Albigenses was selected in March 2006 for inclusion in the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and it is Valancourt Books' sincere pleasure to bring this lost classic into print, thus giving the world at long last the opportunity, having read it, to die in peace.

At long last, Gaston de Blondeville is on the verge of going off to the printers.  We apologize for the delays, which were due in part to waiting on cataloging data from the Library of Congress, and also our desire to proofread the long novel repeatedly to ensure a high quality edition.

I'm personally at work on about 20 titles all at the same time right now, which is keeping me quite busy.  I'm working on introductions to the chapbook adaptation of The Mysteries of Udolpho, called The Veiled Picture, as well as two Francis Lathom books, Astonishment!!! (1802) and The One-Pound Note (1820).  We've also started typesetting Demon of Sicily (1807) and Forest of Valancourt (1813) and hope to release all these titles this summer!

Thanks again to all of you who have been preordering The Magic Ring -- the initial response has been fantabulous, with preorders coming in from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and even Brazil!  If you haven't yet preordered, make sure you do, so you get your copy by July 1!

We're excited to announce that Prof. Jeffrey Cass of Texas A&M International University will be editing The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest for Valancourt Books' Northanger Novels collection later this year.

We are also excited to announce that Prof. Christine Colon of Wheaton College will be editing a collection of Joanna Baillie's plays for Valancourt Books.

Finally, thank you to all of you who have been preordering The Magic Ring -- and for those of you who haven't preordered yet, don't miss out!  It's very likely the best book you'll read all year!

Wow -- it's been a long time since we've updated this.  Lots of news to share!

Gaston de Blondeville is in its final stages of preproduction.  As soon as we have the cataloging data from the Library of Congress, it's off to the printers.  Books should ship in early April.

Our sincere apologies to all who have preordered The Witch of Ravensworth -- we are still awaiting the manuscript from the editor and expect to have it any time now.  We hope to ship the book in early to mid-April.

A big announcement: Valancourt Books will holding a world launch event for The Magic Ring at the Gathering of the Fellowship 2006 Conference in Toronto on Saturday, July 1, 2006.  We will be there in person with the first copies of the books for sale, and editor Amy Sturgis will be on hand to sign them!  Directions and information about the conference can be found at http://gatheringofthefellowship.org/convention/index.html.  For those of you who can't make it to Toronto, but want to be sure you get a copy on the release date, visit the Magic Ring preorder page and preorder by April 31, 2006.

And a huge announcement: Kenneth Graham, one of the world's foremost Beckfordian scholars and editor and translator for Broadview's edition of The Episodes of Vathek has agreed to allow Valancourt Books to publish his new translation of William Beckford's masterpiece Vathek.  Look for more information in the months to come.

We've added new preorder options on the "Catalogue" page for The Snake's Pass, Gaston de Blondeville, and The Witch of Ravensworth.  Snake's Pass (or "Snakey Poo", as I've taken to calling it around the office) should ship in approximately two weeks.  Gaston should be available in three to four weeks. 

We're excited to announce another couple additions to our 2006-07 lineup: Carol Davison of the University of Windsor, an expert on Scottish Gothic, will be editing Peter Middleton Darling's The Forest of Valancourt and Francis Lathom's The Romance of the Hebrides, while Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik have kindly agreed to edit Eaton Stannard Barrett's The Heroine, a long lost Gothic satire. 

In the 1816 Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain, The Heroine was described as "not inferior in wit and humour to Tristram Shandy, and in point of plot and interest infinitely beyond Don Quixote," while Jane Austen wrote, "I finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused by it It diverted me exceedingly I have torn through the third volume I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque particularly on the Radcliffe style."

Welcome to the latest incarnation of the Valancourt Books website!  We

hope you find it better than the old version.

The new edition of The Castle of Ollada is now available and looks great!

Happy New Year to everyone!  An update on our activities -- Barozzi; or The

Venetian Sorceress is now available and it came out very well!

We expect to have Witch of Ravensworth and the revised Castle of Ollada to

the printers this month as well.

Also, in an unexpected development, we are launching a new series to parallel

Gothic Classics.  Our new Irish Classics (Clasaiceacha Éireannacha) series will

reprint great 18th and 19th century Irish novels by Charles Robert Maturin,

Regina Maria Roche, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, and others.  The first

volume will be Bram Stoker's first novel, The Snake's Pass (1890), which was

Stoker's only novel to be set in Ireland, and the predecessor to Dracula (1897).

After more than 700 miles and 11 hours of driving, Valancourt Books is pleased

to announce that we have obtained a copy of Edward Montague's rare The

Demon of Sicily! (1807), which we will be reprinting soon.

Clermont turned out great and is now available, with Barozzi to follow next

week.

We wish everyone out there a happy New Year!