Recently I bought Ryan a Kindle for his birthday, and to keep me from playing with his, he bought me one.  We enjoy them, and, while I hope they’ll never replace real books, they definitely have their uses.  If you need instant access for a particular text and don’t have a week to wait to have the book shipped to you, or if you’re stuck in a hotel or airport miles away from a decent bookstore and need something to read, or if you’re like us and have a tiny house and not nearly enough room for every book you might want to read….the list goes on and on.

So, while we’ll never stop printing real, honest-to-goodness, hold them in your hands, read them in the bathtub, display them on your shelf-type books, we’re going to start making most of our books available on Kindle.  Almost all books will cost $9.99 each, a substantial discount, especially for some of the hardcover titles that retail normally at $50-$60 each.  Thus, in addition to providing instant gratification for those who can’t wait to get their hands on one of our titles, this new project will help make these books even more accessible to everyone, including those whose budgets may not allow them to purchase some of our more expensive titles.

But, with the Kindle editions comes a trade-off.  Publishing on the Kindle is an absolute nightmare, as each book has to be individually coded in HTML using special proprietary formatting required by Amazon, which is difficult and time-consuming.  This is particularly true with regard to formatting of footnotes, endnotes, illustrations, and the like.   Therefore, most of our Kindle books will feature only the unabridged first edition text of the novel, specially formatted to be optimally viewed on the Kindle; most will not include introductions, notes, or other materials.  For those who are interested in the bonus goodies that come in most of our titles, they will still need to refer to the old-fashioned books.

Today we published Eleanor Sleath’s Pyrenean Banditti and Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine for Kindle.  Check them out, and let us know what you think!

Well, Happy New Year everyone!  We’re looking forward to another great year here at Valancourt Books.

Our first order of business is to get caught up on all the manuscripts that have been sitting here seemingly forever, waiting to be published.  So in the first quarter of 2011, expect to see, finally, Karen Morton’s scholarly work on Eliza Parsons and Sarah Maier’s edition of Bram Stoker’s Lady of the Shroud (1909).

Also coming soon will be Francis Lathom’s very rare 1807 historical Gothic novel The Fatal Vow, or, St. Michael’s Monastery, with an introduction and notes by Max Fincher and new editions of Thomas De Quincey’s Klosterheim, or, The Masque (1832) and Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal.

Further down the road for 2011, we have all kinds of exciting books under contract.  For Gothic fans, there’s a new edition of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and the rare Vaults of Lepanto by T. R. Tuckett, as well as the brilliant parody The Hero, or Adventures of a Night, translated by Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s sister, and edited by Natalie Neill, who previously edited Love and Horror for Valancourt Books.

And a New Year’s resolution: we’ll try to post more than one blog entry this year!  But if you want to keep up with our daily nefarious doings, check us out on Facebook, which is updated much more frequently!

In January, we released John Trevena’s Furze the Cruel (1907), edited by Gerald Monsman, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Eugene Aram (1832) in a scholarly edition by Ann-Barbara Graff, Eliza Lynn Linton’s social novel Realities (1851), edited by Deb Meem, and last but not least, Henry de Vere Stacpoole’s 1908 bestseller The Blue Lagoon, edited by Adrienne E. Gavin.  All four are up for order as we speak; all four are 10% off at Barnes and Noble’s site (http://www.bn.com) and some may be discounted at Amazon too.

So far February has seen release of Mrs. Smith’s The Caledonian Bandit, or, The Heir of Duncaethal (1811) with an introduction and notes by Carol Margaret Davison.  It’s our first rare Gothic to see the light of day since 2008′s Martyn of Fenrose; or, The Wizard and the Sword.  Martyn sold dismally, which was one reason we held off on releasing any more obscure Gothics for a while, but we hope people will pick up Caledonian Bandit, which is quite a fun read, actually, and features a very good intro by Prof. Davison focusing on Gothic Scotland.  Interestingly, Caledonian is by the same author as Barozzi, which I previously edited for the press.  So why is Barozzi credited on its cover to Catherine Smith while Caledonian is ascribed to “Mrs.” Smith?  The “Catherine Smith” attribution was taken from Devendra Varma (who has to be one of the worst scholars ever, incidentally), who does not cite any source for the author’s name being Catherine, and after extensive research I could not confirm it, so we stuck with Mrs. for this one.  The “Catherine” name appears to come from an earlier work by a “Miss Smith”, in which the authoress signed her preface “Caterina”.  It seems exceedingly unlikely that Miss and Mrs. Smith are the same person, and we were unwilling to maintain Varma’s error (and mine in relying on him) and therefore took the course just described.  If anyone out there has evidence of this author’s identity, please contact me, as I’d be curious to know.

But I digress.  We have a number of projects in the works at the moment.  Most imminent (and eminent) perhaps is an illustrated edition of one of our most popular books, Baron de la Motte Fouque’s The Magic Ring.  Like our 2006 softcover version, this edition will include an introduction by fantasy literature scholar Amy H. Sturgis; however, the new hardcover edition will feature a full-color cover and numerous internal illustrations by noted fantasy artist Jef Murray.  It’s going to be amazing, so if you enjoyed our earlier edition and want a hardcover edition for your library, or if you’ve never read the tale at all, you won’t want to miss it.  At present, I’m reproofreading the entire text, as, like many of our very earliest publications, a handful of typos crept in.

Also in February and March, expect to see Karen Morton’s impressive monograph on Eliza Parsons’ life and works, a scholarly edition of Eaton Stannard Barrett’s absolutely brilliant comic novel The Heroine, and James Wurtz’s fine edition of Sheridan Le Fanu’s first novel, The Cock and Anchor.  As to the latter, while its title isn’t the best, and while it’s historical fiction, which can sometimes be rather dull, don’t let it scare you off — the novel is right up there with any of Le Fanu’s other suspense novels and features some really dastardly villains and some very Gothic subplots.

On another note, 2010 will mark personal and professional chronological milestones for myself and Valancourt Books: in mid-March, the press will celebrate its 5th anniversary; in June, I’ll be lamenting my 30th.  In looking back over our last 5 years and thinking about where the press is headed in the future, I’ve decided there will be some changes on the horizon.  When we started the press, we focused on bringing out inexpensive editions of rare novels more or less on the Penguin model, with short introductions and limited notes, with no scholarly apparatus.  At some point, we began to diverge from this model, bringing out editions with tons of notes and appendices (which resulted in higher page counts and higher prices) and bringing out editions that really didn’t fit with the types of books we originally set out to publish.  While I’m very proud of all our editions and think our editors have done fantastic work on them, in the future, we will be transitioning back to the types of books we started with.  Additionally, at some point we began publishing 30-35 books per year; that, too, will change.  Our goal in upcoming years will be to put out 12-18 or so quality books per year.  Why?  Simply because I’ve spent the better part of my twenties in front of a computer proofreading books.  Scaling back our ambitious publication schedule will facilitate a better life/work balance. 

2010 is shaping up to be an exciting Valancourt year.  In addition to the releases described above, we’ll be putting out Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud, an incredible two-volume anthology of gay (Uranian) writing edited by Michael Matthew Kaylor, and the long awaited first volume of The Mysteries of London.  As always, thank you to everyone for your support over the last five years, and here’s to five more!

It’s been a busy December so far.  We sent William Beckford’s Azemia to press earlier this month and it is now available for order.  It’s an amazing scholarly edition with a great introduction and notes by Robert J. Gemmett, a recognized Beckford expert.  Last month was productive, too, with a new edition of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron and the first-ever scholarly edition of Richard Marsh’s A Spoiler of Men (1905), quite possibly the first zombie novel in English.

We’re hoping to get two more books to press by the end of the month: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram (1832) in a scholarly edition by Ann-Barbara Graff and featuring the text of the scarce three-volume first edition, and one I’m really enjoying at the moment, John Trevena’s great Furze the Cruel (1908), an amazingly obscure book with little plot to speak of, but which I can’t seem to put down.

As we posted earlier this year, we were greatly disappointed by the California Supreme Court’s decision on Proposition 8, and later disappointed by developments in Maine, New York, and New Jersey, all of which were great setbacks to civil rights.  We promised this summer that we would donate 50% of all profits from our GLBT-related books or books by GLBT authors for the remainder of 2009 to Lambda Legal to help fight for equal rights.  Well, we’re going to do one better: instead of donating half our profits for the second half of 2009, we’re donating half our profits for the entire year.  As such, we’re sending $1,600 to Lambda Legal as our small part towards their efforts to ensure equal rights for all. 

And since it’s the holiday season and we’re in the giving mood, Valancourt Books is contributing to three animal shelters: City of Seattle (where we found Valancourt in 2004), Harmony House for Cats in Chicago (where we rescued Vathek in 2005), and Animal Haven in Kansas City (where we got Baron in 2008).   So if you purchase a Valancourt book for a gift (or for yourself!) this holiday season, know that the proceeds are not only going to pay the mortgage and utility bills on Valancourt Castle, but are also going to help animals in need.

2010 is already shaping up to be a busy year as well — stay tuned for further updates on new releases and exciting new developments from the press in the coming new year!  

Seasons Greetings to all during this holiday season and best wishes for the New Year!

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!

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!

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!

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

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!