Policy questions about collections and omnibuses

[Christopher Hapka]

I've been researching the stories of Sheridan Le Fanu; he's on the wanted list as:

Short stories and novellas by Sheridan Le Fanu (To be compiled in an omnibus “Short Fiction”)

My spreadsheet (still in progress) is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O1a33gw9qJ74NWj-YMBxPJ6Vany3hhGxIRRTqjJmVLw/edit?usp=sharing

Le Fanu published two or three major collections in his lifetime, all consisting mostly of previously published stories. One of these, "In a Glass Darkly" is already in the corpus. About half of the stories weren't collected in his lifetime, and there are at least eight that don't appear to have any public domain text available. 

I've tried to see if I can produce these for Distributed Proofreaders but for policy reasons they won't work with a short story published in a public domain magazine unless the whole magazine issue and maybe the whole volume (900+ pages) is also proofed, so if we wanted to publish these it'd mean a very slow process at PGDP or a lot of transcribing for the editor.

My questions are:

1. Is the goal to have, eventually:

   (a) one omnibus with all of the stories, including "In a Glass Darkly," and to delete the separate publication of "In a Glass Darkly," 

   (b) Separate publications of "In a Glass Darkly" and the other collections, plus a "Short Fiction" volume of the uncollected stories, or 

   (c) An omnibus with all the stories but leave "In a Glass Darkly" published as well, duplicating some of the stories?

2. I'm willing to work on transcribing the untranscribed stories, and have or can probably find image sources for all of them, but it's going to be a bit of a long-term project. Would it be better to:

   (a) produce the other standard collection ("The Purcell Papers") now, or

   (b) wait until the other stories are ready and just do the omnibus.

3. Did this situation just happen because "In a Glass Darkly" was published back before this editorial policy was nailed down, or is there a case to be made for publishing one book of stories by an author today? I thought the policy was that if there would be anything "uncollected" an omnibus was strongly preferred--or is that just for poetry?

[Vince]

Last question first: In a Glass Darkly was done at the end of 2017, which is also about when I started contributing, and things were still in quite a bit of flux then. My first production was of a Father Brown volume, of which one was already in the corpus, and we (Alex) went back and forth two or three times before we settled on making it a separate volume instead of a complete omnibus. I don’t believe the “official" position was made official until a year or two later.

That position, as I understand it, is that if the stories/short plays/poems don’t overlap volumes (published in more than one), and that all the stories/plays/poems are published, then they can be published in individual volumes. (This is why, e.g., we have four Father Brown productions.) If either of those two things aren’t true, i.e. either some stories/short plays/poems are published in multiple volumes, or there are stories/short plays/poems that weren’t published in any volume, then we do an omnibus. (Hence Chekhov, O. Henry, etc.)

By that policy and what you’ve said (which would need to be confirmed with the spreadsheet), I would think we would want a single Short Fiction omnibus, which would subsume the stories in In a Glass Darkly. (That’s happened before; we had a long essay of Thoreau published when I did an omnibus of his Essays, and we rolled that existing production into the omnibus.)

But, obviously, that is Alex’s call.

We don’t publish things that are PD piece-meal; IOW, if 75 stories are PD today, then we would want all 75 published at the same time. If some aren’t PD, then obviously we would wait until they’re PD to add them to the existing collection, which we do with several of our short story collections already.

[Alex Cabal]

That's all correct. First step is a spreadsheet of his short fiction
bibliography, then we can roll In A Glass Darkly into an omnibus if
necessary.

On 12/22/23 6:09 AM, Vince wrote:
> Last question first: /In a Glass Darkly/ was done at the end of 2017,

> which is also about when I started contributing, and things were still
> in quite a bit of flux then. My first production was of a Father Brown
> volume, of which one was already in the corpus, and we (Alex) went back
> and forth two or three times before we settled on making it a separate
> volume instead of a complete omnibus. I don’t believe the “official"
> position was made official until a year or two later.
>
> That position, as I understand it, is that if the stories/short
> plays/poems don’t overlap volumes (published in more than one), and that
> all the stories/plays/poems are published, then they can be published in
> individual volumes. (This is why, e.g., we have four Father Brown
> productions.) If either of those two things aren’t true, i.e. either
> some stories/short plays/poems are published in multiple volumes, or
> there are stories/short plays/poems that weren’t published in any
> volume, then we do an omnibus. (Hence Chekhov, O. Henry, etc.)
>
> By that policy and what you’ve said (which would need to be confirmed
> with the spreadsheet), I would think we would want a single Short

> Fiction omnibus, which would subsume the stories in /In a Glass Darkly/.

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[Christopher Hapka]

I was at the library earlier and took the opportunity to do some research on Le Fanu's short fiction, from the wanted list, and update my spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O1a33gw9qJ74NWj-YMBxPJ6Vany3hhGxIRRTqjJmVLw/

There are five stories by my count that will need OCR/transcription. These are all from magazines, which means running them through PGDP isn't practical (they won't do a single story from a public domain magazine).

There are a couple of other outstanding issues:

1. Le Fanu published most of his stories anonymously in magazines, and there isn't a consensus on which stories he actually wrote. The most definitive source seems to be Gary Crawford's "Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography," in which Crawford lists all stories that have been attributed to Le Fanu, says who by, and evaluates them with terms like "undoubtedly," "very likely," "possibly," "doubtful," etc. I've included all the stories and novels that Crawford ranks better than "possibly" by Le Fanu, plus the "possible" stories with attribution by M.R. James. The rest are on a "doubtful/spurious" page on the spreadsheet.

2. The normal cutoff for a short is 40,000 words, which "typically includes novellas." Le Fanu's novellas tend to be in the 40,000-60,000 word range. The existing collection in the corpus also includes one novella that's about 45,000 by my count. I think sticking to 40,000 in this case makes sense and will keep the shorts collection manageable (and avoid the need to transcribe several long novellas). This means when the shorts are being prepared we'll also need to prepare a separate release for the one long story in the current release (The Room in the Dragon Volant).

If someone else is eager to pick this up I'm happy to answer any questions about the spreadsheet; otherwise I'll probably pick it up after I finish my current long term project, the Yeats poetry omnibus.

[Alex Cabal]

Sounds good. We already have an MR James collection so make sure we
don't duplicate stories in there.

For anything less than "possibly" were the published anonymously, or
under someone else's name?

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[Christopher Hapka]

Almost all of his stories were published anonymously in the magazine he edited, so really most of them are guesswork. The difference is between stories most people agree are his and those where there's one guy with a theory.