H. P. LOVECRAFT:

The first two volumes (Amateur Journalism and Literary Criticism) of Lovecraft's Collected Essays are now available from Hippocampus Press. The next two volumes (Science and Travel) will be issued in 2005. I have completed the annotations for Science, and David E. Schultz and others are preparing the illustrations (mostly star-charts drawn by Lovecraft to accompany some of his early astronomical columns) that will make this volume distinctive. Volumes 5 (Philosophy; Autobiography and Miscellany) will appear in 2006, and little work has been done on it aside from assembly and proofreading of the texts.

The next volume of Lovecraft letters assembled by David E. Schultz and myself, Letters from New York, will appear from Night Shade Books in November. Schultz and I are working on an edition of Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner for publication in 2005 by Hippocampus Press. We are anxious to proceed on more annotated editions of letters, especially those to August Derleth, Robert E. Howard (a joint correspondence), E. Hoffmann Price, and James F. Morton.

My third volume of annotated Lovecraft tales from Penguin, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, should appear this summer, at which time Penguin may send me on a book tour to promote the book, as they recently did with my selection of tales by Lord Dunsany (In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales). Whether I do any more Lovecraft volumes for Penguin remains to be seen; these three books contain all the major fiction (with the exception of "In the Walls of Eryx"), so I would have to make a case for the inclusion of other bodies of work-essays, poetry, letters, etc.

Necronomicon Press will soon reprint H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. It has just brought out new issues of my two magazines, Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction. The former is a double issue and is published as a paperback book. I am hopeful that both these magazines can resume their normal half-yearly publication, and urge potential contributors to query me regarding submission of articles.

LORD DUNSANY:

The first volume of The Collected Jorkens has now appeared from Night Shade Books. I have read proofs of the second volume, and it should appear in the fall of 2004. I have sent the texts of Volume 3 to Night Shade Books, and imagine it will appear in the spring of 2005.

Working with the Dunsany Estate, I hope one day to prepare a CD-ROM-or, more likely, a series of CD-ROMs-containing the entirety of Dunsany's work: novels, short stories, plays, essays, and poems. So far as I know, very little of Dunsany's work is available electronically.

There is enough uncollected Dunsany material (stories, plays, essays) to compile two substantial volumes of this work. One volume (which will reproduce the contents of a short story collection that Dunsany prepared in 1956 but did not get published at the time) will appear from Wildside Press under the editorship of Darrell Schweitzer, while another volume, under my editorship and tentatively entitled A Walk in the Wastes of Time: Uncollected Works by Lord Dunsany, may appear from Hippocampus Press.

AMBROSE BIERCE:

The edition of Bierce's collected fiction, edited by Lawrence I. Berkove, David E. Schultz, and myself, has now been completed and sent to the University of Tennessee Press. It will appear in 3 volumes, perhaps in 2005 or 2006. It contains more than 200 items, or more than 80 more than were included in Ernest Jerome Hopkins' Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (1970). The edition will be thoroughly annotated, with selected textual variants.

I have prepared transcripts of nearly all existing letters by Bierce (amounting to nearly 500,000 words), and hope some day to prepare an annotated edition of them (probably extending to 4 volumes). The volume of selected letters that appeared in 2003 was somewhat unsatisfactory, as the publisher made us cut the volume down in size more than we would have liked, resulting in the omission of many important letters. At least one batch of Bierce letters (those written to his niece, Lora) remains in private hands, and I have not obtained copies or transcripts of these.

H. L. MENCKEN:

My long-range project of transcribing all the published work of Mencken is progressing, and I am currently tackling the newspaper work, chiefly from the Baltimore Evening Sun. Virtually all of Mencken's major books (with the exception of Supplement II of The American Language) and most of his magazine work (including all his writings for the Smart Set and American Mercury) have already been transcribed. My current plan (assuming I can secure the permission of the Mencken Estate) is to issue a CD-ROM containing all this material, probably in conjunction with the Mencken Society.

I have completed my transcription of the entirety of Mencken's "Free Lance" column (1911-15), conisting of more than 1200 columns, each of about 1000 or more words. A hefty selection of these columns is under way, and my proposal for the volume is currently under consideration by a leading university press.

I have already completed the assembly of a volume entitled H. L. Mencken on British Literature, a companion volume to H. L. Mencken on American Literature (2002), and may begin shopping it around presently.

At a rudimentary stage is a volume entitled Mencken on Mencken: Uncollected Autobiographical Writings, chiefly consisting of several autobiographical essays that appeared in magazines in the 1940s but were not included in his three autobiographies of that period (Happy Days [1940], Newspaper Days [1941], and Heathen Days [1943]), along with other autobiographical writings from the entire length of Mencken's career. A tentative selection of about 80,000 words has been made.

MISCELLANEOUS:

I am pleased to announce that a three-volume edition of the collected poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by David E. Schultz and myself, is now scheduled to be published by Hippocampus Press. The first volume will appear in 2006 and the next two in 2007. The edition will include not only all the poems published in books and magazines but also unpublished poems (most of the manuscripts of these are in the Clark Ashton Smith Papers at the John Hay Library of Brown University) and translations, including all of Smith's translations of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. We have already transcribed most of the poems, and our chief concerns are now with arrangement and annotation.

Schultz and I are also considering the assembly of the collected poetry (including verse dramas) of George Sterling. We have already transcribed a large proportion of Sterling's published work, collected and uncollected. On a recent trip to the Bancroft Library (the rare book library of the University of California at Berkeley), I examined their bountiful holdings of Sterling poetry manuscripts and ascertained how many unpublished poems I still need to transcribe. Sterling manuscripts in other repositories around the country also need to be checked for uncollected or unpublished poetry. Given Sterling's current lack of recognition, it is not entirely clear whether a publisher could be found to issue three or more large volumes of Sterling's poetry, but we remain devoted to the project.

Schultz and I have long contemplated a volume of Sterling's selected letters, given that he corresponded with many leading literary figures of the time-H. L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Sara Teasdale, Clark Ashton Smith, and many others. Sterling was a gifted and engaging letter writer, and such a volume may assist in the resurrection of his reputation. We are, in fact, actively engaged in the preparation of an annotated volume of the joint Smith-Sterling correspondence, for publication in 2005 by Hippocampus Press; and an analogous volume of the Bierce-Sterling correspondence is being considered.

A third volume of weird tales by Arthur Machen, entitled The Terror and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Chaosium. This volume, a companion to The Three Impostors (2001) and The White People (2003), will constitute nearly the entirety of Machen's weird fiction, although some lesser tales have been dropped. I am still attempting to persuade Penguin to let me edit a volume of Machen's selected tales for the Penguin Classics.

The immense Encyclopedia of Supernatural Literature approaches completion. So far, nearly 500,000 words (out of an estimated 600,000) have been turned in by nearly 50 different contributors, along with the editors, Stefan Dziemianowicz and myself. This three-volume compilation will, however, probably not appear from Greenwood Press until 2006.