[First Project] Oliver Onions, Widdershins

[Raymond Brunell]

Hello,

I'd like to produce Oliver Onions's Widdershins (1911) as my first Standard
Ebooks production. It's a collection of nine weird/ghost tales—straightforward
prose, well under 100,000 words, with no complex formatting—so it should fit
the first-production guidelines.

The text is in the U.S. public domain (first published 1911), and the catalog
currently holds only Onions's Poor Man's Tapestry, so his weird fiction—including "The Beckoning Fair One"—isn't yet represented.

One scope question before I start: would you prefer just Widdershins, or a
fuller Oliver Onions short-fiction collection? His later ghost-story collections
Ghosts in Daylight (1924) and The Painted Face (1929) are also public domain and
could round out a complete weird-fiction volume.

I plan to base the text on an existing transcription where available and
proofread it against first-edition scans on the Internet Archive, following the
Manual of Style. I've reviewed the collections policy and the step-by-step guide.

Could you confirm this works and that it isn't already in progress? Happy to
adjust the scope to whatever suits the collection.

Thanks,
Raymond Brunell

[Alex Cabal]

Hi Raymond, yes, we prefer to do omnibuses so this kind of situation
requires a research spreadsheet before we begin:
https://standardebooks.org/contribute/spreadsheets#creating-a-new-spreadsheet

Basically, we need a complete survey of his corpus to see if any short
stories are uncollected, and to get an idea of what his body of work
looks like so we can organize it into omnibuses.

This requires going beyond what's in PG and carefully researching.

Then, there's the possibility that we would require a larger omnibus
that is more advanced than a first production.

So you could work on that research if you like, but keep in mind the
answer could be that you'd have to put it aside until later if the
omnibus turns out to be very long.

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[Raymond Brunell]

Thanks Alex—that makes sense, and I've gone ahead and built the corpus survey.

It maps his full short fiction (collected and uncollected) alongside every novel and omnibus, with first-publication details, public-domain status, and the available transcriptions and scans for each. A few things it turned up that bear on omnibus planning:

• The public-domain line falls neatly at The Open Secret (1930); everything from A Certain Man (1931) onward is still in copyright.
• Widdershins's 1911 first printing carries nine stories, including "The Rocker," which the later reprints drop.
• I chased down the three early books whose contents weren't documented anywhere. Tales from a Far Riding (1902) is a genuine five-story collection — but Admiral Eddy (1907) and Pedlar's Pack (1908) turn out to be novels, not collections (the library cataloguing settles it, and the "five pieces" contents list floating around for Admiral Eddy is spurious). That matters for planning: it means the uncollected magazine stories really are uncollected — there's no hidden early collection they belong to.

So a complete "Onions—Short Fiction" is a sizable, multi-collection omnibus—one I'd be glad to take on, and the survey already maps how it breaks down. The scale itself isn't a concern on my end; version control and a careful, verify-as-you-go workflow are familiar ground for me. It's really a staging question more than anything else.

If it's useful, the cleanest way to stage it is to let me produce Widdershins first—a self-contained volume that ships as a finished piece and puts your house style in my hands, with the remaining collections folding into the omnibus from there. The groundwork's done either way, so the omnibus is ready whenever it makes sense to build.

Glad to follow your lead on how you'd like to stage it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s41b6rauJf5cxCej0tdzMRGL6J-PM7yiQci-yLDrLdk/edit?usp=sharing