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Getting "Lost" Books Published - Dibell, Martin, Haldeman, Panshin, ?

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Joe Bernstein

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Jul 19, 2005, 1:25:25 AM7/19/05
to
So. Recently I've been re-reading in the Ansen Dibell (Nancy Dibble)
Kantmorie series and so I got the idea to check and see whether the
fourth and fifth books, out in Dutch and French these twenty years,
had been published in English yet.

Which they haven't, apparently, but along the way I found an old
post of mine, in which I commented on how Lori Martin's sequel to
<The Darkling Hills>, which apparently ends on a cliffhanger, is
available only in German, and said Something Should Be Done. I
also referred to Linda Haldeman's unpublished novels, though in
that case there's the possibility that her heirs no longer have
copies. (At worst, even if Dibble and Martin have died - of which
I've seen no report - but even so, one could back-translate; in the
Kantmorie books' case there are even two translations to work from.)

So OK. It's been a year or two, and I'm thinking, What Is the Deal
Here? Wikipedia is going great guns, Webscriptions and the Baen
Free Library are getting *imitated*, over on soc.history.ancient
of all places an entire *chronicle* has been *translated from the
Latin* by net volunteers, Print On Demand is supposedly reviving the
midlist, there's <The Spriggan Mirror> right here ... in this context
of information flowing madly every which way, it boggles my mind that
ALL these books that *already exist in English* remain unavailable!

Problem is, I'm unclear on how to change that.

Step one would seem to be, establishing that they really do still
exist in English, and that their owners would be willing to see them
published under some sort of terms.

Step two would then be finding someone willing to meet those terms,
given certain conditions.

I'm being vague about "terms" because I'm thinking, I don't know
whether royalties would be involved. I do assume nobody's sitting
on twenty-year-old manuscripts thinking they're going to get rich
off them, and I further assume nobody will need an advance to
write them. But for Dibble and Martin, there are already-printed
books that the "lost" ones are sequels to, that would presumably
need to be made available also. And I personally think if these
writers (or Haldeman's heirs) want royalties, they should have 'em.
What I'm interested in is these books becoming *available*, not
necessarily in having them be *free*, and this is why I'm not *just*
writing directly to Eric Flint.

(There also might be the issue of Dibble wanting her real name used
this time...)

Anyway, step three would be meeting those conditions, and there,
again, I get vague on purpose. Obviously, computer-readable copy is
a Big Help, and this is where volunteer effort could reasonably
Make A Difference. (It seems safe to bet that Dibble's books aren't
in computer-readable form; Martin's probably isn't, but who knows?;
I'd be stunned to learn that Haldeman ever used a computer.) I've
webbed one book already on a page-a-day regimen, so I'm not *just*
talking through my hat here.

So. I could just go out tomorrow and look up postal addresses
for Dibble at least, arguably also Martin - finding Haldeman's
heirs seems likely to be tougher - but it occurred to me that
people who do this kind of thing for a living do read this group,
so it was worth posting first; and if volunteer effort winds up
being needed, why should I be greedy? ;-)

Anyway, there are probably other books out there of interest -
off the top of my head, it sounds from another post I found while
digging into Kantmorie posts like Alexei Panshin has unpublished
work, and possibly an end to the Anthony Villiers series; I've
never read these (and unlike the other three authors, haven't
checked whether they're still unavailable), but others care. So
I'm wondering whether some sort of institutional effort to bring
middling-old lost works into the Print On Demand world already
exists, somewhere within fandom; or if not, whether it should.
The small presses have been doing this sort of thing diligently
for works from sf's Golden Age, but outside of horror, and Baen, I
don't see so much of it for things written since I was born.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt

Charlie Stross

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Jul 19, 2005, 7:01:22 AM7/19/05
to
Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
as <j...@sfbooks.com> declared:

> I'm being vague about "terms" because I'm thinking, I don't know
> whether royalties would be involved. I do assume nobody's sitting
> on twenty-year-old manuscripts thinking they're going to get rich
> off them, and I further assume nobody will need an advance to
> write them. But for Dibble and Martin, there are already-printed
> books that the "lost" ones are sequels to, that would presumably
> need to be made available also. And I personally think if these
> writers (or Haldeman's heirs) want royalties, they should have 'em.
> What I'm interested in is these books becoming *available*, not
> necessarily in having them be *free*, and this is why I'm not *just*
> writing directly to Eric Flint.

There's your first mistake; write to Eric, right now.

Thing is, Eric's jumped through all the hoops already. He'll
be able to suggest ways and means of tracking down the
author's estates, which is the most important thing you can
do at this point in time. The longer you leave it, the
greater the risk of MSs getting lost in one house move too
many, or the immediate heirs dying and leaving everything to
their first cousin's grandchildren, who don't know or care
what this box full of papers might be.

Your immediate task is to track down the current owners of
the MSs and ensure they know that *somebody* is interested,
however tenuous the connection. Everything else comes after
that.

> Anyway, step three would be meeting those conditions, and there,
> again, I get vague on purpose. Obviously, computer-readable copy is
> a Big Help, and this is where volunteer effort could reasonably
> Make A Difference. (It seems safe to bet that Dibble's books aren't
> in computer-readable form; Martin's probably isn't, but who knows?;
> I'd be stunned to learn that Haldeman ever used a computer.) I've
> webbed one book already on a page-a-day regimen, so I'm not *just*
> talking through my hat here.

I suspect Distributed Proofreaders might be willing to help
with such a project if (a) there was some committment to
release the works via Gutenberg when the copyrights expire,
and (b) some sort of donation to help pay for bandwidth/costs.

Given that the authors you're talking about are obscure
(I've never heard of any of them), you might want to go
straight to a print on demand press that's already buying up
the works of dead authors and getting them available --
Wildside springs to mind. (Have you asked John Betancourt?
That's basically the business model he's been pursuing since
the late 90s.) You may be able to do better on your own,
though.

> Anyway, there are probably other books out there of interest -
> off the top of my head, it sounds from another post I found while
> digging into Kantmorie posts like Alexei Panshin has unpublished
> work, and possibly an end to the Anthony Villiers series; I've
> never read these (and unlike the other three authors, haven't
> checked whether they're still unavailable), but others care. So
> I'm wondering whether some sort of institutional effort to bring
> middling-old lost works into the Print On Demand world already
> exists, somewhere within fandom; or if not, whether it should.

See Wildside Press.

> The small presses have been doing this sort of thing diligently
> for works from sf's Golden Age, but outside of horror, and Baen, I
> don't see so much of it for things written since I was born.

One of the big obstacles is that if the works in question
are sequels, earlier books may still be encumbered by rights
sold to some publisher who's gone bust/been taken over,
without a reversion clause. You need to get the whole series
into print, even if only in POD, to ensure the works don't
die -- and badly-drafted contracts can be a royal pain in
the ass.

Another problem can be simply tracking down the heirs to the
estate. As I said, the sooner you do it the greater the
chance of the original MSs of unpublished work still being
available.

Finally, I think the figure is that roughly 95% of writers
go out of print for good(!) within four years' of the
author's death. Getting them back into print is ... well,
it's a lot of work, for little reward, but if you can manage
it, I salute you.

-- Charlie

John Pelan

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Jul 19, 2005, 10:25:42 AM7/19/05
to


Charlie's pretty much right on all counts. While I have no real
interest in these particular works (due to an overwhelming schedule,
not to lack of quality in these cases), I can certainly help with some
guidance on jumping through the aforementioned hoops. Start the
detective work, once you've locate authors or heirs; e-mail me at
jpe...@qwest.net and I'll suggest the next course of action.

A sad word of warning, be prepared for the worst case scenarios:

a.) Author doesn't want work reprinted
b.) Heirs have inflated sense of the value of said work
c.) Heirs cannot be located. (This is a heartbreaker, but it happens,
I've been trying to find the estate for Richard Wilson and coming up
empty. I know there was a brother, and that he was also in the NY-NJ
region, but do you have any idea how many Wilsons there are in that
area.)

;-(

Cheers,


John Pelan
www.darksidepress.com

MJ Stoddard

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Jul 19, 2005, 1:10:37 PM7/19/05
to
On Tue, 19 Jul 2005 05:25:25 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>So. Recently I've been re-reading in the Ansen Dibell (Nancy Dibble)
>Kantmorie series and so I got the idea to check and see whether the
>fourth and fifth books, out in Dutch and French these twenty years,
>had been published in English yet.

Some other places to check for legally published works in electronic
format:

SFWA - http://sfwa.org/Fiction/index.htm

Fictionwise http://www.fictionwise.com/
- Panshin has published 5 works: search by author.

Embiid http://www.embiid.net/books/index.asp
Selina Rosen, J. Calvin Pierce (Ambermere), Leigh Brackett, Sharon Lee
and Steve Miller (Liaden)


Michael J. Cross

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Jul 19, 2005, 1:29:10 PM7/19/05
to
In article <dbi2s5$abu$1...@reader2.panix.com>
j...@sfbooks.com "Joe Bernstein" writes:

Thanks for posting this. I too would be very interested in reading
the 2 'lost' Dibell books in English.


> Anyway, there are probably other books out there of interest -

One author who has taken steps himself to make unpublished work
available is Michael G. Coney:

>From http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/pallahaxi.htm:

I Remember Pallahaxi
a novel
by Michael Coney

Author of many novels and short stories, Michael Coney won the British
Science Fiction Award in 1977, was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1995,
and has been nominated for the Aurora Award five times. Landmark books,
including The Girl with a Symphony in Her Fingers, Hello Summer, Goodbye,
and Brontomek! mark him out as one of the key British SF authors of his
generation.

Since Michael's diagnosis with terminal cancer early in 2005 he has tidied
up his writing affairs, making several novels available for free on his
website. He regards I Remember Pallahaxi as the most important of these
because of the amount of fan mail asking when it's coming out, ever since
he first mentioned its existence.

An extract is available below, and the complete novel is available for
download as a PDF file, either from infinity plus or from Michael's site.


A Message from the Author

One morning long ago, at a time when I had about seven novels under my
belt, I awakened from a vivid dream. I'd been standing on the quayside
at Brixham in South Devon and the lines mooring a nearby fish boat to
the quay were hanging just clear of the water. But the water that dripped
from these ropes was no ordinary water. It was thick and slow-dripping
like a heavy motor oil. And I knew, in my dream, that this was a seasonal
phenomenon. Instead of tides ebbing and flowing, in my dream the sea
alternated between thick and thin.

The book took me three weeks to write, which was quick by my standards.
I have a poor memory and am apt to forget what happened three chapters
back, so I like to hurry things along. Hello Summer, Goodbye was born,
known in the US as Rax and in Canada as Pallahaxi Tide. The book did
well by my modest standards and appeared in a number of languages. Over
the years it also generated a surprising amount of fan mail, and if I am
to believe what I read on http//www.bsfa.co.uk/bestbrit.htm, it was the
best British book of the 70's. Needless to say, I'm tempted to assume
that the Internet never lies.

I had no thought of writing a sequel because I thought I'd said all
there was to say about the heroes, Drove and Browneyes. But a common
thread running through the fan mail was just such a request, so many
years later I wrote it. It has never been published, partly because it
was written long after I'd retired from novel writing and publishers
didn't want to re-launch me and partly, I suspect, because my writing
was never in the mainstream of popularity in any case. Even Hello Summer,
Goodbye was never reprinted.

So here is I Remember Pallahaxi, free to download. I hope you enjoy it,
I really do.

Michael Coney

--- End of quote ---


Michael G. Coney's site is at http://members.shaw.ca/mconey/

all the best,
--
Michael J. Cross Visit http://www.mjckeh.demon.co.uk for
BSFA Magazine Index, Hull SF Group, J Cipollina & M Kurihara Discographies
New, improved BSFA Index at http://www.santaroga.uklinux.net

Joe Bernstein

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Jul 19, 2005, 1:49:30 PM7/19/05
to
In article <lg2vq2-...@antipope.org>, Charlie Stross
<cha...@antipope.org> wrote:

> Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
> as <j...@sfbooks.com> declared:

> > What I'm interested in is these books becoming *available*, not
> > necessarily in having them be *free*, and this is why I'm not *just*
> > writing directly to Eric Flint.

> There's your first mistake; write to Eric, right now.
>
> Thing is, Eric's jumped through all the hoops already. He'll
> be able to suggest ways and means of tracking down the
> author's estates, which is the most important thing you can
> do at this point in time. The longer you leave it, the
> greater the risk of MSs getting lost in one house move too
> many, or the immediate heirs dying and leaving everything to
> their first cousin's grandchildren, who don't know or care
> what this box full of papers might be.

True enough.

My first response to reading your post was to go stalking Nancy
Dibble, and it turns out she's all over the net as a Buffyverse
fanfic writer. In the process of digging for verification that
she really is the *same* Nancy Dibble, I found some indications
that she went through a major financial crisis last year. I tend
to take for granted that writers will keep all their MSs, because
after all *I* would ... but that's dumb of me.

Also found that Alexei Panshin is already well set up in e-publishing,
and the e-publisher in question is asserting that the fourth Anthony
Villiers book doesn't exist. So it seems a safe bet that it, well,
*doesn't*, after all.

Anyway, this now leaves me with three authors:

1) Dibble. Books I want to read. Probable author found, simply
need to establish identity, which is doubtless a hoop Eric Flint
is familiar with, yes.
(Oh, and her fanfic does *not* ensure that she'd happily GPL the
Kantmorie books, either. She muses on her Live Journal that what
she really needs is to get back into pro writing. Clarissimo, she
is *not* a candidate for mass Gutenberg-ing, though I could see
<Pursuit of the Screamer> in the Free Library if Baen were to
pick up the whole series.)

2) Martin. Along for the ride. No visible net presence and name as
common as can be. I'm tentatively assuming she's *not* the computer
consultant or the contributor to a book hyped on Amazon by its
contributors and their families. :-( Though those two may be the
same person. My copy of <The Darkling Hills> is not handy to see
if it contains useful info like a middle initial or place of
residence, and she's not in the EoF. Writing the publishers seems to
be the next step, but again, this is doubtless something Eric Flint
could advise on.

3) Haldeman. Books I want to read. In this case I *know* she
died seventeen years ago, leaving husband and kids, who are I'm
guessing now in their late 20s or 30s. She was born in 1935; even
odds on whether her husband still lives. Not sure how to proceed
further - her <Locus> obituary would indicate where they lived
when she died, and I'd *think* I could go look up the probate
records, but John Pelan's post suggests this may not be much help.
(And no, I'm not assuming it *would* be; in fact, have recently
been digging up my father's [medical] MSs, nearly thirty years after
his death, and I'm not the obvious candidate based on Mom's will,
so...) So this seems a rather more generic issue of tracking someone
down, but yes, Eric Flint could have pointers.

> Your immediate task is to track down the current owners of
> the MSs and ensure they know that *somebody* is interested,
> however tenuous the connection. Everything else comes after
> that.

Yeah.



> > Anyway, step three would be meeting those conditions, and there,
> > again, I get vague on purpose. Obviously, computer-readable copy is
> > a Big Help, and this is where volunteer effort could reasonably
> > Make A Difference. (It seems safe to bet that Dibble's books aren't
> > in computer-readable form; Martin's probably isn't, but who knows?;
> > I'd be stunned to learn that Haldeman ever used a computer.) I've
> > webbed one book already on a page-a-day regimen, so I'm not *just*
> > talking through my hat here.

> I suspect Distributed Proofreaders might be willing to help
> with such a project if (a) there was some committment to
> release the works via Gutenberg when the copyrights expire,
> and (b) some sort of donation to help pay for bandwidth/costs.

Well, talking about "when the copyrights expire" wrt to living
authors is rather blue-sky, and at least in principle rude. ;-)

When Stars reprinted Barry Hughart's books some years back, it was
done by scanner + proofing. Well, I now *have* a scanner, so I
could do similar, but to be honest, given my experience of both
approaches, typing appeals more. ;-) It's slow, and that could be
decisive if I spend next year in school; but if not, many are the
possibilities.

I haven't proofed my own typing, though - shameful but true! and
the book I've webbed already was in French yet! So unless I
wanted to ask Ms. Dibble to proof it, this could require further
help, yes.

> Given that the authors you're talking about are obscure
> (I've never heard of any of them), you might want to go
> straight to a print on demand press that's already buying up
> the works of dead authors and getting them available --
> Wildside springs to mind. (Have you asked John Betancourt?
> That's basically the business model he's been pursuing since
> the late 90s.) You may be able to do better on your own,
> though.

Um.

My concern in this is *basically*, I want to read these books. So
"do better on your own" makes no real sense to me.

On reconsideration, I'm thinking that basically what I'm trying to
do is volunteer to be these authors' agent, yes? In which case,
agreed, I have a fiduciary role and your phrasing makes sense.
But I don't know *anything* about agenting!

Sigh.

> One of the big obstacles is that if the works in question
> are sequels, earlier books may still be encumbered by rights
> sold to some publisher who's gone bust/been taken over,
> without a reversion clause. You need to get the whole series
> into print, even if only in POD, to ensure the works don't
> die -- and badly-drafted contracts can be a royal pain in
> the ass.

The Kantmorie books were DAW, which should in principle not be too
eager to stand in the way, but who knows; I don't really remember
about Martin's, but an unreliable hint of memory says "Berkley",
in which case it's a Big Corporation Unmediated.

In principle, Haldeman could have done a sequel of some kind and I
wouldn't know, but I'd be pretty surprised if she had. So reprinting
her other books would be nice (I could finally own <Star of the Sea>!
Yay!) and would help with marketing (some people have actually *heard*
of <The Lastborn of Elvinwood>, and maybe even of <Esbae>), but is
not strictly essential. Those are all Avon, again, Big Corporation
Unmediated.



> Finally, I think the figure is that roughly 95% of writers
> go out of print for good(!) within four years' of the
> author's death. Getting them back into print is ... well,
> it's a lot of work, for little reward, but if you can manage
> it, I salute you.

Just to clarify, I'm *not* talking here about books that have already
been printed. I sympathise with people who want books returned to
print, and occasionally feel the same way myself (e.g. Midori Snyder's
Queen's Quarter Knot books, where the first book was rendered rare by
the publisher who then dropped the sequels, so the recent reprinting
is the first uniform edition and the first to have all three
available at once). But I'm very comfortable in the used book market,
and have no real driving fire to make it work differently.

What gets to me is books that *have never been printed*. The Dibell
and Martin books appeared only in translations; the Haldeman books
were rejected altogether. (Heck, for all I *know*, they're really
bad - I'd still be interested because Haldeman interests me in
general, but that's no help with getting them into print. It's just
that Haldeman was non-commercial enough that I can see plenty of ways
they could be not-bad and still rejected.)

So my internal criteria for this are:

1) Book written in English.
2) Book never printed in English.
3) Book of interest to at least one someone, say, on rasfw. Obviously,
if I'm the only one doing the work, preferably of interest to me.
(Sorry, Ms. Martin.)

Maybe the books I've named are basically *it* for the generation
in question, to fit these criteria. (All are from the 1980s, save
possibly Haldeman's.) Which would explain why there's no real general
urgency to dealing with them. Dibell has a small but persistent group
of admirers; but the only record I've seen of the Haldeman books is
in her obituary, and anyway the few people who read her seem to
overlap Dibell's fans in, well, me.

But I posted partly from the suspicion that the category is larger
than so far named in this thread, in which case it seems realistic to
see if others are interested.

Michael S. Schiffer

unread,
Jul 19, 2005, 4:30:57 PM7/19/05
to
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in
news:dbi2s5$abu$1...@reader2.panix.com:
>...

> Anyway, there are probably other books out there of interest -
> off the top of my head, it sounds from another post I found
> while digging into Kantmorie posts like Alexei Panshin has
> unpublished work, and possibly an end to the Anthony Villiers
> series; I've never read these (and unlike the other three
> authors, haven't checked whether they're still unavailable)
>...

The Villiers books are available as an e-book from Fictionwise,
<http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook1884.htm>, so arranging a PoD
publication with him or his agent seems likely to be possible for
someone up to doing the legwork.

Mike

--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu

rms

unread,
Jul 19, 2005, 8:12:38 PM7/19/05
to
> a.) Author doesn't want work reprinted
> b.) Heirs have inflated sense of the value of said work

E.g., Dame Doyle apparently has been a 'hard-ass' on Sherlock Holmes
copyright, so the later stories are *still* under copyright, as far as I
know. Also as far as Gutenberg goes, they will want you to submit xeroxes
of original book copies that show copyright dates older than whatever the
current law allows, so picking up a reprint from the library and scanning it
is not acceptable for copyright verification.

rms


Johan Larson

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Jul 19, 2005, 9:57:02 PM7/19/05
to

"John Pelan" <jpe...@qwest.net> wrote in message
news:pv2qd19e5n98ibp1f...@4ax.com...

> A sad word of warning, be prepared for the worst case scenarios:
>
> a.) Author doesn't want work reprinted
> b.) Heirs have inflated sense of the value of said work
> c.) Heirs cannot be located. (This is a heartbreaker, but it happens,
> I've been trying to find the estate for Richard Wilson and coming up
> empty. I know there was a brother, and that he was also in the NY-NJ
> region, but do you have any idea how many Wilsons there are in that
> area.)

Have you consulted an attorney about this? Surely there is a legal algorithm
that given a well-identified deceased person determines his or her legal
heir in all but the most bizarre circumstances.

Failing that, it sounds reasonable to me to document your unsuccessful
search, set aside royalties at a defensibly standard rate, and go ahead and
publish the books. If an heir then turns out, offer him the set-aside
royalties. He'd probably go for it, and if not, and the books have indeed
been out of print for decades, that sounds like a defensible position in
court.

Or did I just suggest a way to get gang-banged by the local bar association?

Johan Larson


Hebdomeros

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Jul 20, 2005, 8:44:56 AM7/20/05
to

I don't know how helpful it will be, but The Collins Library, an
imprint of McSweeney's, has had some success reprinting (and in some
cases publishing for the first time) forgotten works.

I heard editor Paul Collins speak recently, and he talked a little
about the difficulties of getting the rights to works when no one seems
to know who actually owns the work, even if under normal circumstances
they should have slipped into the public domain by now. I don't know
what the laws in other countries are, but apparently there are
currently no laws/guidelines to address this unique issue. Their
website www.collinslibrary.com has some interviews where he talks a
little about the issues, as well as contact info for the editor. He
may or may not be receptive to giving out advice.

Good luck.

--
http://hebdomeros.blogspot.com

Mike Schilling

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Jul 20, 2005, 12:46:39 PM7/20/05
to

"Johan Larson" <johan0larson8comcast0net> wrote in message
news:9sCdnQEli__...@comcast.com...


I've seen something like this once. It was an anthology of short-short
stories, and the copyright page listed one of the stories as "Copyright
holder could not be located. If you are the holder, please contact the
publisher."


wth...@godzilla.acpub.duke.edu

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Jul 20, 2005, 12:52:17 PM7/20/05
to
"Mike Schilling" <mscotts...@hotmail.com> writes:


>
> I've seen something like this once. It was an anthology of short-short
> stories, and the copyright page listed one of the stories as "Copyright
> holder could not be located. If you are the holder, please contact the
> publisher."

Doesn't the introduction to the (first?) Ballantine printing
of "Lud in the Mist" say something like this? IIRC they
were not even sure if the author was alive.

--
William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University

jpe...@qwest.net

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Jul 20, 2005, 5:50:30 PM7/20/05
to
Hi Johan:

No, what you outlined is actually a course of action I've had to take a
time or two, though with someone as recently deceased as Wilson, I
don't really feel I've exhausted all the possibilities. For example, I
could still make an effort to obtain the obit in the local paper and
try and run a trace from there... There's also other public records.

I did do exactly as you suggest in the case of one author, (and one for
whom no renewal of copyright could be found). Amusingly enough, the
author turned out to be alive (most researchers thought he died forty
years ago) and he was absolutely delighted to see his book back in
print. Led to a very nice correspondence and an interview which will
appear in Allen Kozowski's magazine INHUMAN (which everyone that loves
the good old stuff should subscribe to).

Cheers,

John

Robert A. Woodward

unread,
Jul 21, 2005, 2:01:49 AM7/21/05
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In article <yv7z64v5...@godzilla.acpub.duke.edu>,
wth...@godzilla.acpub.duke.edu wrote:

Yes - Lin Carter: "Hope Mirrlees is (or was, since our efforts to
trace this lady have so far been unsuccessful) ..."

--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw>

Joe Bernstein

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Sep 1, 2015, 11:12:28 PM9/1/15
to
Ten years ago in this thread, I wrote about getting books printed that
were known to exist but not to have been published, or anyone not in
English: the fourth and fifth books of Nancy Dibble's (Ansen Dibell's)
Kantmorie series; the sequel to Lori Martin's <The Darkling Hills>; the
unpublished novels of Linda Haldeman; and perhaps some books by Alexei
Panshin.

The Panshin books were reported in that thread as already published, or
on their way, or something. The Martin - well, the ISFDB knows nothing
about her as a person, but it knows of a 2014 edition of the sequel from
Createspace. So the living (um, I assume, re Martin) authors are just
fine. Unfortunately, these are also the authors I had no personal
interest in.

The ISFDB reports (and the SFE and Wikipedia agree) that Dibble died the
year after I posted, and since I was financially insecure at the time,
and have been increasingly so ever since, I never went ahead and
contacted her then, found out about her death until tonight, or did any
investigation re her heirs. The ISFDB still knows of no English version
of either of the books. However, now that I've started looking, a few
minutes' work turns up an obituary page posted by her funeral home. The
obituary itself lists only her brother as a survivor, which bodes really
really ill for tracing copyright ownership; but in the comments another
Kantmorie fan mentions *having* written to her, *getting* an e-copy of
book 5, and, get this, *the typescript* of book 4. Wow. Not only that,
but less than a minute more of searching and I'm pretty sure I found him.
Now only the hard parts are left.
<http://www.gilliganfuneralhomes.com/obituary/Nancy-Nan-A.-Dibble/Cincinnati-OH/294442>

(Anyone unfamiliar with me should note that I'm homeless. I do have a
storage locker, but as it happens, am about to be locked out of it for
non-payment of rent, which is a roughly annual thing for me, since the
only work I've been able to get for years is as a tax preparer. So I'd
be a really bad choice to entrust with that typescript, even though I'm
a fast and accurate typist, unless the entrusting were limited to the
month or two right after April 15.)

Haldeman, who died way back in 1988, seems to remain untouched. Her
children must be well on into adulthood by now. Earlier this year the
unpublished work was discussed in the context of a YASID that might've
been (but wasn't) her <The Lastborn of Elvinwood>, on abebooks of all
places, and someone posted there about living near where she did, who
could theoretically be of help. But that's it.

I don't expect anything to come of this, while my life remains as it is,
but at least *next* time I start wondering about these things I'll know
what I found *this* time. If Google doesn't lose the post, that is. [1]
If anyone reading this *does* feel moved to do something, I'll be happy
to help as best I can.

Joe Bernstein

[1] Both my "Novels of Kay Kenyon" post and a post with a footnote
amounting to a "Novels of Anne Logston" post are now absent from Google
Groups. My plan, for the past five years of my posts that I've made
through this site since my Panix account died, was to recover every-
thing once my life was stabler. It hadn't occurred to me that that
would prove impossible because Google itself is unstable. Oops.

--
Joe Bernstein, writer and tax preparer <j...@sfbooks.com>

Brian M. Scott

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Sep 2, 2015, 12:45:50 AM9/2/15
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On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 20:12:23 -0700 (PDT), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote
in<news:4ae929cc-c013-41cc...@googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.written:

> Ten years ago in this thread, I wrote about getting books
> printed that were known to exist but not to have been
> published, or anyone not in English: the fourth and
> fifth books of Nancy Dibble's (Ansen Dibell's) Kantmorie
> series; the sequel to Lori Martin's <The Darkling
> Hills>; the unpublished novels of Linda Haldeman; and
> perhaps some books by Alexei Panshin.

> The Panshin books were reported in that thread as already
> published, or on their way, or something. The Martin -
> well, the ISFDB knows nothing about her as a person, but
> it knows of a 2014 edition of the sequel from
> Createspace.

For anyone interested, both of the Martin books are
available for Kindle for $2.99, or free with Kindle
Unlimited. Paperback can be had from Amazon or B&N for
$15.99.

[...]

Brian
--
It was the neap tide, when the baga venture out of their
holes to root for sandtatties. The waves whispered
rhythmically over the packed sand: haggisss, haggisss,
haggisss.

Ahasuerus

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Sep 2, 2015, 12:39:52 PM9/2/15
to
On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 11:12:28 PM UTC-4, Joe Bernstein wrote:
> Ten years ago in this thread, I wrote about getting books printed that
> were known to exist but not to have been published, or anyone not in
> English: the fourth and fifth books of Nancy Dibble's (Ansen Dibell's)
> Kantmorie series; the sequel to Lori Martin's <The Darkling Hills>; the
> unpublished novels of Linda Haldeman; and perhaps some books by Alexei
> Panshin.
>
> The Panshin books were reported in that thread as already published,
> or on their way, or something. [snip]

The last official update that I am aware of is Panshin's comment
posted here in 2001:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/rec.arts.sf.written/ACo4xa2rg-A/1pTo0JHWDv0J :

"I'm working on each of these as circumstances permit. ... My aim,
if it is any consolation, is to finish _all_ the work that I have
on my work sheet before I die. ... What I can tell you is that I'm
workin' on it."

Here is a more recent (2013) comment by Tom Whitmore (#309 on
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/014855.html#1263516):

"there is a ms for "The Universal Pantograph", which a couple of editors
I've talked with have read (I have not read it myself). The universal
reaction among the editors is that it's dreadful, and depressing.
Panshin should probably be allowed the right to say that he's no longer
that person, and that he's not able to finish the series. These are
editors whose taste I trust. The existence of a plan for the seven
volumes was mentioned in a review (of "Masque World") in a fanzine in
the early 70s which I was just reading (page 36 of SFR 35, by Alexis
Gilliland, if you want to look it up)."

William Hyde

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Sep 5, 2015, 4:33:41 PM9/5/15
to
On Tuesday, July 19, 2005 at 7:01:22 AM UTC-4, Charlie Stross wrote:
> Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
> as <j...@sfbooks.com> declared:
>
> > I'm being vague about "terms" because I'm thinking, I don't know
> > whether royalties would be involved. I do assume nobody's sitting
> > on twenty-year-old manuscripts thinking they're going to get rich
> > off them, and I further assume nobody will need an advance to
> > write them. But for Dibble and Martin, there are already-printed
> > books that the "lost" ones are sequels to, that would presumably
> > need to be made available also. And I personally think if these
> > writers (or Haldeman's heirs) want royalties, they should have 'em.
> > What I'm interested in is these books becoming *available*, not
> > necessarily in having them be *free*, and this is why I'm not *just*
> > writing directly to Eric Flint.
>
> There's your first mistake; write to Eric, right now.
>
> Thing is, Eric's jumped through all the hoops already. He'll
> be able to suggest ways and means of tracking down the
> author's estates, which is the most important thing you can
> do at this point in time. The longer you leave it, the
> greater the risk of MSs getting lost in one house move too
> many, or the immediate heirs dying and leaving everything to
> their first cousin's grandchildren, who don't know or care
> what this box full of papers might be.
>
Since this was written, ten years ago, I've read Aubrey's "Brief Lives". A recurring lament in these brief biographies of sixteenth and seventeenth century figures is that they left behind manuscripts, on mathematics, folk customs, history, and the like, which have "Since been used to wrap herring", or "Kindled many a fire", but in any event no longer existed. So this is not a new problem.

William Hyde
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