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!

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