Back from the dead!

Wow, has it really been since June when we last posted?!?

It’s busy and eventful times around here at Valancourt Books.  Recently we sent Hall Caine’s 1894 masterpiece The Manxman to press and it is now available for order.  The official publication date is January 2010, but you can get your hands on one now via Amazon.  The edition is published with the financial assistance of the Manx Heritage Foundation, and we are certainly grateful for their aid in helping us bring this lost masterpiece back to print.

Yesterday we sent our edition of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) to press.  I know, I know.  You’re thinking, “Why in the world do we need another edition of The Old English Baron?”  It’s true that Oxford World Classics has an edition in print, but that edition: (1) is from 1967; (2) has the ugliest cover we have ever seen; and (3) contains the least generous margins and smallest font imaginable, along with really lousy quality paper.  Our edition, by contrast: (1) features a new introduction, which serves as an introduction to both this novel and the Gothic genre as a whole; (2) reproduces the original frontispiece and title page from the 1778 edition, including using the frontispiece for a cover graphic; (3) is newly typeset in a generous 12 pt. font with 15 pt. leading and wide margins, making this perhaps the easiest-to-read edition of the novel since the 18th century; and (4) perhaps most interestingly, our edition includes the complete unaltered text of the 1799 dramatic adaptation of the novel, Edmond, Orphan of the Castle by John Broster, republished here for the first time!  So it’s definitely not one to miss.  We hope you’ll love it.

Also, we were sad to do it, but given all that has been going on around here and given the really poor sales of last year’s Halloween special, we did not print a 2009 Halloween special.  But not to fear: if you missed 2007 and 2008’s specials, we’ve made them newly available through Amazon.  And we’re hoping to do one for 2010.

We have three other titles we are trying desperately to get out by the end of 2009.  First is Karen Morton’s original book on Eliza Parsons, author of our bestselling Castle of Wolfenbach.  We also have on the agenda a new edition of William Beckford’s extremely rare satirical novel Azemia, edited by Beckford scholar Robert J. Gemmett and the first volume of our amazing two-volume edition of The Mysteries of London by George W.M. Reynolds.  This will be the first unabridged republication of the novel in almost 150 years, and features a new biographical introduction by Dick Collins and a new foreword by legendary Victorian scholar Louis James.  In case you haven’t heard of The Mysteries of London, don’t worry: you’re probably not alone.  Scholars have been studiously trying to write it out of literary history for decades.  But, nonetheless, it was the best-selling work of fiction in Victorian England, outselling anything that Dickens or Trollope or anybody else wrote.  And it is one amazing read, definitely not to be missed!

As always, thank you for all your support for our little press!  And if you’ve enjoyed what we’ve done the past four years, just wait till 2010 . . . you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

New books

I hope everyone has gotten the chance to poke around the main page of our site and check out all the new books we have put out of late.  The Blood of the Vampire, Both Sides of the Veil, and Ziska are all available, and all are fantastic reads.

We have a lot of other great titles in the works as well, which we hope to have out soon.  The catch is, in order to keep publishing new ones, we kind of need people to buy the ones that we’re putting out now.  If there’s one you’ve had your eye on for yourself or one you think would make a great gift, please consider ordering it.  As always, thank you to all of you for your continued support for the efforts of our little press!

Better news (for a change)

Susan III (2005-2009), the Toshiba laptop that has created and published all 80 of our titles, met an ignominious end yesterday when she had a Big Gulp of Diet Coke poured on her.  Requiescat in pacem, Susan III.  She will be interred in the local electronics recycling plant.

Fortunately, Susan’s death was not entirely in vain.  As the phosphoric acid gushed through her veins, we hurriedly extracted her hard drive and were able to have all the data recovered from it.  Susan IV is now semi-operational, and will be fully operational when her CS4 software arrives in the mail from Adobe.  We expect about a 2-4 week delay on pending projects owing to this mishap; however, no books will be cancelled, and the press will live on.

Thank you to all of you for your continued support!

More bad news

All forthcoming books will be delayed indefinitely after the Valancourt computer had a 44 oz. big gulp poured on it.  We are going to try to recover the hard drive, but I am not hopeful.

Valancourt News (June 4, 2009)

Hi, all!  Sorry for the long delay since I last updated.

Sadly, I have to include some bad news in this blog entry, so I might as well get it out of the way.  As of May 30, 2009, many of our titles in the U.S. and nearly all of them in the U.K. saw price increases.  With regard to the U.K. prices, these were mostly set when the U.K. pound was worth 2 dollars or more; now that the exchange rates have fallen substantially, we had an awkward scenario where it was substantially cheaper for American buyers to order the books from the U.K. than purchase them here at home.   We have always been, and we continue to be, sensitive to book prices and desirous of keeping them as low as possible.  However, to sell a book like Martyn of Fenrose; or, The Wizard and the Sword or The Castle of Ollada, which may only have survived in 2 or 3 copies worldwide, for $14.95, the same price as many mass-produced best-sellers at chain bookstores, simply did not make sense.  In order to ensure our continued survival, we had to rethink our pricing structure.

Pshew.  Bad news out of the way.  Now for the good.  Today we sent Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) to the printers.  Marryat is a really interesting figure.  She published very prolifically starting in the mid-Victorian period and continuing right up to her death in 1899, often releasing several titles per year.  If she is remembered at all today, it is for her Spiritualist works, such as There is No Death, which affirm her belief in ghosts and the occult and recount her experiences with séances and mediums and the like.  The Blood of the Vampire, though, despite some occult content, is not an overtly supernatural novel.  It is, however, a great deal of fun, with its sensational plot and bizarre characters such as the unforgettable Baroness Gobelli.  It is also strangely and shockingly racist — a word of warning to those easily offended.

Before the end of the month, we expect several other titles to see the light of day, including a new edition of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, which reprints, for the first time ever, John Broster’s dramatic adaptation of the play from 1799, Edmond; The Orphan of the Castle, and in an entirely different vein, a new edition of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s The Intruder (1898).  D’Annunzio is an interesting figure.  Although often criticized during his career for the supposed immorality of his works, he was nonetheless recognized as a writer of great genius; however, his reputation was decimated following his support for Mussolini during World War II.  It is to be hoped that with this new edition, this important writer will once again resume his place in the literary canon.

Also very soon to appear are Baron Corvo’s Hubert’s Arthur and the joint Stoker/Doyle edition of The Watter’s Mou’ and The Parasite.

Finally, be sure to check out our press release on the site regarding Proposition 8 and marriage equality and how we’re doing our little part in this important cause.   We realize that this is a highly significant issue with highly charged viewpoints on both sides and recognize the likelihood of losing some customers because of our position.  However, that is a risk we are willing to take.

Keep reading, and enjoy your summer!

- Jay

Valancourt News

Later this week, our latest release, Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1897), will be available for order.  Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan has surprised us by being perennially among our best sellers, and we hope that you will enjoy this one as well.  This edition features the unabridged text of the 1897 first edition, along with an introduction by Curt Herr, and a fairly striking cover with Theda Bara in Egyptian costume from Cleopatra (1917).  Unlike many of our editions, which feature very scholarly introductions, this one’s intro by Professor Herr is very accessible to general readers and does a great job of showing how Corelli and Ziska were important in their time as well as relevant to our own.  Also worthy of note is that Ziska was released in that great year for horror literature, 1897, which also spawned Dracula and The Beetle.  Something must have been in the British water supply that year….

Other projects we’re working on finishing up include a long overdue (both in the sense that it hasn’t been in print since 1935 and in the sense that we should have had it published long ago) edition of Baron Corvo’s strange novel Hubert’s Arthur.  Hubert’s Arthur is a fascinating alternate history tale, which takes as its premise that much of what we know of medieval England comes from Matthew Paris, a foreign monk far removed from the day-to-day unfolding of history, and thus is unreliable.  Instead, Rolfe presents what he claims is a translation of a “true” history of England by Sir Hubert de Burgh, a notable 13th century nobleman.  In Hubert’s history, Richard the Lionheart has died and his brother John and his nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, contest succession to the throne.  In the generally accepted history, as given to us by Matthew Paris and Shakespeare, among others, young Duke Arthur disappears and is presumed murdered by John, who becomes king.  But in Rolfe’s rollicking account, Arthur survives and after many battles and adventures becomes King of England.  The novel did not find a publisher in Rolfe’s lifetime, due to its strangeness (for example, Rolfe uses a lot of vocabulary and grammatical structures not seen since Elizabethan times, or earlier) and appeared in a limited edition in 1935.  Since then, it has been out of print, owing perhaps to its fervent anti-Semitism, homoerotic content, extreme violence, and curiously anti-democratic viewpoint.  Now readers can rediscover what is perhaps not the greatest of 20th century English novels but is certainly one of the strangest and most remarkable, in a new edition, introduced and thoroughly annotated by Corvo scholar Kristin Mahoney.

A third project nearing completion promises to be very interesting indeed.  In 1894, publisher Archibald Constable inaugurated a new literary series called the Acme Library. The series featured short novels (around 150 pages or so) by notable authors at very inexpensive prices. For whatever reason, it was very short-lived, and most of the novels in the series are very difficult to obtain today. This new volume from Valancourt Books features the first two entries in the Acme Library series, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (1894) and Bram Stoker’s The Watter’s Mou’ (1895).  In Doyle’s tale, a sceptical scientist’s experiments with mesmerism go awry when he falls under the control of the deformed psychic vampire Miss Penelosa.  In Stoker’s novella, love and duty come into conflict when Willy Barrow, a Scottish coastguard, learns his fiancée’s father is involved in smuggling…and a violent storm among the rocky crags of the Scottish coast will lead to tragedy.  Catherine Wynne contributes a solid introduction exploring the often intersecting careers of Doyle and Stoker, and the appendix features one additional story by each author: Doyle’s “John Barrington Cowles” and Stoker’s “The Coming of Abel Behenna”, along with a rare and fascinating magazine article by Stoker recounting an interview of Doyle that Stoker conducted.

As you can see, we’re hard at work here at Valancourt Books and are striving to get all these great titles and many more out this summer for your reading enjoyment!  Thank you as always for your support for our little press!

Welcome to the new Valancourt Books blog!

Howdy all, and welcome to our new blog!  Although we love the Discussion Board section of our site, we feel that adding a blog will be an additional way of communicating all the exciting things that are going on here at Valancourt Books.  We hope you enjoy it!

Richard Marsh’s Both Sides of the Veil (1901)

It’s been a while since we’ve put out a Richard Marsh title, and I know many of our fans love him, so we’re putting together an edition of his rare short story collection Both Sides of the Veil (1901).  I think fans of other Marsh titles are going to particularly love this one.  It features his characteristic mix of crime, supernatural, and dark humor.  Here’s a brief look at some of the great stories in this collection:

In perhaps my favorite of the stories, “The Ring”, Marsh’s great characters Pugh and Tress reprise their roles from his previous book, Curios (1898).  Once again, Pugh and Tress are vying for possession of a deadly curio, in this case, Lucrezia Borgia’s ring, a poisoned contraption that can kill whoever places it on his finger.  This story features the same great humor as the stories in Curios and will be welcomed by the large number of our readers who picked up that earlier volume.

In “Staunton’s Dinner,” well-known socialite Vane Staunton has disappeared. Every year, though, mysteriously, a note shows up in his handwriting with the two words, “Je suis.”  Finally, years later, Staunton reappears and invites his former friends to a dinner.  But they find that he has changed greatly — now emaciated, bald, and wearing strange clothes, and apparently with wondrous powers.  He can now light a candle with the touch of his finger, create food out of mid-air, and apparently even kill a man with the power of his thought alone!

In “A Knight of the Road,” set in 17th-century England, some friends play a game of cards, and one of them loses a fortune.  Shortly thereafter, the winners are robbed on the highway, and they suspect their fellow card-player of having reclaimed his money by robbery.  When they go to accuse him of the theft, he denies it and challenges them to a duel.  But a mysterious stranger arrives out of nowhere to serve as his second in the duel, a stranger who just may be the devil himself!  (This story also features one of the most blatant and unexpected scenes of homoeroticism in the literature of the period, when the robber and the demon rather explicitly kiss!)

In “Mrs. Macrecham’s Disappearance,” Mr. Waller has purchased an old book of spells for fourpence as a curiosity, but in reciting one of the spells, believes he may have turned his landlady into a cat.  He enlists the aid of his friend Durrant, who suspects he is mad.  Is he?  And when the book says that the way to turn Mrs. Macrecham back into a human is to slit the cat’s throat, will he (and should he) do it?

Other great stories round out the volume, including “The Mignonette“, a tale of a holiday aboard a houseboat gone horribly awry and “A Set of Chessmen,” in which an insane chess player appears to be controlling the movements of his chessmen from beyond the grave.

Look for this volume to be out in the coming months, along with a lot of other great releases, which we’ll highlighting here from time to time.